This guide will introduce you to Recharge tools and resources that can enhance your sales efforts, along with details about Recharge Support’s assistance and troubleshooting coverage during the upcoming holiday season. 

Please note certain support services such as live chat will be temporarily unavailable from November 23rd to November 26th, but will resume on Cyber Monday.

Leverage Recharge tools to boost your holiday sales

Recharge provides a rich array of tools you can use during seasonal sales. Some of these tools may require setup time, participation in one of our Early Adopter Programs (EAPs), or be exclusive to our Custom or Pro plans. It’s essential to meet eligibility criteria and become well-acquainted with these resources before deploying them during a crucial sales period.

• Flows: Create personalized shopper journeys that increase AOV and LTV while reducing churn. With prebuilt templates for common customer experiences, you can quickly set, test, and optimize your programs. Available in our EAP.
• Gifting subscriptions: Enable customers to gift subscriptions while offering recipients a hassle-free way to self-manage their gifted subscriptions. Pro and Custom stores only; in EAP. Sign up using this link.
• Enhanced Analytics: Evaluate the success of your holiday sales with our newly enhanced Analytics suite. No implementation is required. 
• Discount codes: Recharge supports all discount code types offered by Shopify, allowing you to create fixed discounts, offer free shipping, and more. Low-lift implementation. 
• Passwordless login: Enable customers to log into their customer portal using a secure 4-digit code, instead of a password, for fewer password-related support tickets. Low-lift implementation. 
• Product Subscription Plans: Quickly manage products at scale to save time and reduce operational costs.
• Quick Actions: Utilize Quick Actions in your Klaviyo notifications for effective cross-selling or upselling.
• Bundles: Bundles enable you to group items under one SKU for a “build-a-box” experience.

Customization guides

If you’re planning specific campaigns, explore these resources to implement various sales techniques:

• Create a discount code with a minimum purchase amount
• Offer a discount code for free shipping
• Implement buy one, get one discounts on checkout orders (Shopify Checkout on Shopify)
• Apply a discount code to checkout orders automatically (Recharge Checkout on Shopify)
• Create a free trial offer using Workflows 
• Create an abandoned cart email using Klaviyo to send to customers after your sale period ends
• Upsell one-time products to a subscription order while in a customer’s cart
• Promote seasonal subscription offerings on your store’s homepage

Please note that some customizations may require HTML or Javascript. Custom coding is not supported per our Recharge design and integration policy.

Plan ahead for seamless sales

Recharge wants to ensure your holiday sales run smoothly. Here are some additional tips for optimal performance:

Discounts 

• Confirm if your discount codes are set to apply to the correct channels.
• If using the Shopify Checkout Integration (SCI), make sure you have created the discount code in Shopify with identical settings. 

Shipping

• Test shipping prices at checkout and upcoming orders for accuracy.
• Test any workflow, discounts, and shipping flows you are using by running a test checkout on SCI or RCS.

Other settings & tools

• Make any theme changes in advance of the sales period as changing your theme may require the widget to be re-installed. 
• Review upcoming subscriptions using your exports and make any bulk changes at least five days before the holiday sale. For confirmation of dates, see Bulk updates.

Tip: Plan a Recharge refresh training with your Support team to make sure they can answer customer questions quickly and efficiently, creating a better subscriber experience for your new customers and cutting down on support hours.

Support coverage & services

Rest assured, our systems are primed for the holiday season. If there is something you know will require Support assistance, please submit any requests 5-7 business days before Black Friday. 

If you encounter any technical issues during the holiday, our Recharge Support Team is available 24/7 to assist with troubleshooting. For critical issues requiring immediate attention, select “urgent” in the priority drop-down. We prioritize tickets based on priority levels, giving precedence to business-critical issues during high sales periods. 

For instance, issues like broken checkouts or app outages take precedence over incorrectly set discount codes or workflows. To submit a ticket, use the Recharge Support webform.

Priority level definitions

• Live chat coverage: Normally operates Monday to Friday, excluding observed US holidays.
• Most bulk updates can be done easily by your team. Updates that require Recharge Support are indicated in the help document.

Because of reduced holiday customer service hours, we advise merchants to examine their upcoming subscriptions a week before any seasonal sales and to request bulk updates five business days in advance of holidays to provide Recharge support sufficient time to complete them.

FAQ

The following guides are often useful when preparing for holiday sales:

• Applying discount code to checkout automatically
• Bulk upload discount codes
• Can customers use Shopify Gift Cards?
• Can I exclude subscription products from my discount code?
• Can I hide subscriptions from my storefront during a sale?
• Can I use automatic promotions or discounts in Recharge?
• Can I use Shopify Scripts with Recharge?
• Changing the price of subscription products
• Do I need to use a discount code to put my subscription products on sale?
• How can I track the performance of my discount code on Recharge?

Prepping for a successful holiday season 

We know how important holiday sales are for merchants, which is why we’ve created this guide to help you start the season prepared. By prepping your website and customer support teams, plus honing in on the best discount codes and subscription offerings to showcase during the holiday season, your online store will be ready to make the most of this busy sales time. 

The post Holiday guide: Prepare for seasonal success with Recharge appeared first on Recharge.

To provide that visibility, yesterday we held our recurring What’s new with Recharge webinar, where we highlighted new solutions for our merchants and partners to utilize. Not able to attend the webinar? You can view it on demand now, or catch up on the latest news by reviewing the highlights from the webinar below. 

The main takeaways

If you missed the webinar, here are the top pieces of news we shared:

• Subscriptions remain our core: While we’re working to add new offerings for our merchants, we still continue to enhance our subscription offering with new enhancements and features, such as gifting subscriptions and enhanced Klaviyo metrics. 
• Revamped Analytics dashboard: Your all-new view into program and customer data. You can now track the performance of your subscription and retention initiatives, forecast future orders and revenue, and delve into your customers’ journey to improve your retention strategy.
• Iterate and test with Flows: Our newest offering, Flows, helps brands automate, test, and refine crucial touchpoints along the customer journey. Get started with prebuilt templates that help you prevent churn, upsell customers, and more. 
• Get involved and stay in the know with Recharge’s Product Roadmap: Our product team isn’t slowing down, and we’re working to ensure better visibility and access to our launches. Get involved in Early Adopter programs and see what has launched on the Recharge Product Roadmap.  

Enhanced subscription features

Subscriptions remain our core offering at Recharge, and we’re committed to continuing to enhance this product line. During the webinar, we highlighted a number of updates and enhancements to our subscription offering, including: 

• Product Subscription Plans: Quickly manage products at scale, down to the variant level, boosting revenue and reducing operational costs.
• Variant-level pricing and discounting: Enjoy greater flexibility and control over your subscriptions by configuring properties for product variants.
• New metrics, data, and Quick Actions in Klaviyo: Create a more personalized customer experience with Klaviyo’s new metrics, customer properties, and Quick Actions.
• Subscription gifting: Allow your customers to gift subscriptions to their friends and family, plus enable the gift recipient to manage the subscription entirely themselves.

Empowering analytics

Our enhanced Analytics dashboard offers a comprehensive view of key store metrics, right on your merchant portal homepage, allowing you to analyze revenue trends, customer interactions, and key performance indicators with ease.

• Purchase activity: See your gross revenue breakdown day-by-day, encompassing all Recharge-related product purchases, including subscription products bought at checkout, recurring subscription purchases, and add-on items included in recurring subscription orders.
• Subscribers and subscriptions: Understand growth and churn among your subscribers.
• Performance by product: Review the performance of your products at a variant level to understand what’s performing well (or what’s not).
• Customer portal actions: Track actions made by your customers, such as skips, swaps, and discount applications.
• Subscription retention by cohort: Monitor retention per cohort over time to enhance customer engagement.  

Loyalty redefined

With Recharge Loyalty, subscription-first merchants can now incentivize customers with personalized benefits and rewards, without the hassle of point calculations. Loyalty was built with your unique customer journey in mind, focusing on a variety of ways to increase LTV. You can set up just one use case or try them all in tandem—it’s entirely up to you. 

• Subscriber incentives: Offer tailored, subscriber-exclusive benefits and rewards that increase customer value and retention.
• Paid membership programs: Provide customers exclusive access to incentives in exchange for a fee, keeping them engaged and eager to return.
• Cash-back promotions: Encourage repeat purchases and increase satisfaction by offering cash-back incentives instead of discount codes.

Maximizing Flows

Merchants need to be able to quickly automate, iterate, and test programs throughout the customer journey, and Flows is our automation layer to help our merchants do just that. With Flows, merchants can quickly set up A/B tests to see what incentives reduce churn, cross-sell new product lines, and prevent churn with flexible offers based on churn reasons. 

With Flows, you can:

• Deploy a variety of trigger logic to automatically add a customer to a Flow
• Personalize conditions to determine which customers enter each Flow
• Conduct A/B testing to fine-tune your offerings
• Create unique experiences and offers within each Flow
• Access real-time data and insights for performance optimization

We’ve launched three prebuilt Flow templates for common scenarios, such as surprise and delight, targeted upsell, and active churn recovery, and will soon launch passive churn prevention templates. 

Surprise & delight 

Provide proactive incentives (such as free gifts) to your customers to increase retention, and A/B test those incentives to determine which are most effective. You can also test the effectiveness of different incentives at different points during the customer journey, determining which offer is moving the needle to optimize customer retention.

Targeted upsell 

Offer a discounted product to specific customers at targeted points in the customer journey to increase LTV. You can test the engagement of different discounts and products at different points in the customer journey to optimize AOV.

Active churn recovery 

Leverage customer cohort data and order insights to create effective strategies for actively reducing churn. By tailoring win-back solutions to customers on the verge of leaving, you can mitigate churn, increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, and ultimately boost profitability.

All together, Flows allows merchants to move with greater speed and agility to deliver the best shopping experiences for customers. Flows has started rolling out in stores now and will continue to roll out in the coming weeks. 

Get involved

To explore all these offerings in more detail and stay up-to-date on our future plans, visit our Recharge Product Roadmap. Here, you can review everything we’ve launched and join our Early Adopter programs to get early access to new launches before they are generally available. 

Watch the full recording of the webinar on-demand to hear directly from our team and learn about new opportunities to retain your customers and grow your subscriber LTV.

The post What’s new with Recharge: Q3 appeared first on Recharge.

These sessions from industry-leading speakers delve into critical topics such as retention, conversion optimization, growth, and of course, exciting new Recharge features.

Let’s dive in! 

Breakout sessions to enhance your retention strategy

From sign-up to staying power: Strategies for retaining subscribers

Speaker: Chris George, Co-Founder, SubSummit

Now is the time to be proactive with your subscriber retention strategies. Learn valuable tactics—including strategically leveraging partnerships—to keep your recurring customers with your business.

From one-time shoppers to repeat buyers: How to keep your customers coming back

Speakers: Adam Ferris, VP of Revenue, Friendbuy; Jie Charles, SVP of DTC, Blueland; Britanny Carter, Head of Digital Product, Vegamour; Megan Snider, Director of Customer Journey, Open Farm Pet; Chelsea Jones, Co-CEO, Chelsea & Rachel Co.

Over 70% of ecommerce shoppers buy from a brand once, then never buy again. Hear proven tips and tricks for getting your customers to return again and again.

10 steps to building a retention program for your merchants

Speaker: Brandon Amoroso, Founder, Electriq Marketing (a DRINKS company)

Learn about subscriptions, retention, and building the ultimate tech stack to give customers what they need, when they need it.

Is your site foundation optimized for retention?

Speakers: Joelle Goldman, Co-Founder, Churnbuster; Scott Knight, CEO, Alpha Omega; Amer Grozdanic, CEO, Praella; Thomas McCutchen, CEO, Scoutside

Through real-life examples of best-in-class merchants, learn how to assess whether or not your current site foundation will allow you to fully optimize your retention efforts.

Breakout sessions to optimize your shopper journey

Optimizing your shopper journey to boost AOV & LTV

Speakers: Nikki Tooman, Co-Founder, Sticky Digital; Megan Whitman, VP of Growth, Wandering Bear Coffee; Anna Simon, Director of Digital Marketing, Primal Kitchen; Valerie Alderson, Director, Acquisition Marketing, Uqora

How can you maximize the value of your shoppers to offset today’s sky-high acquisition costs? Learn how brands are optimizing their programs to increase AOV and LTV throughout the shopper journey.

The power of personalization: How to make the most of customer data

Speakers: Sergiu Tabaran, COO, Absolute Web; Travis Garcia, Senior Director of Product Management, PrettyLitter; Dan Joo, Director of Ecommerce, Bokksu; James Erck, COO & Co-Founder, Rebuy

Hear from the experts on why a personalized buying experience should be a top priority for your brand and learn how to implement this for your buyers.

Breakout sessions to increase your customer acquisition

Billion-dollar persuasion techniques

Speaker: Sarah Levinger, Director of Growth Marketing, KnoCommerce

Learn how to lower your acquisition costs and attract your ideal customer by leveraging psychology-based advertising and retention.

The next generation of merchant acquisition channels

Speakers: Tushar Ranka, CTO, Hello Bello; Jessica Tennant, SVP of eCommerce

To diversify their marketing channels and combat rising acquisition costs, it’s important for consumer brands to understand the new outlets and tactics that others are leveraging.

Mainstage moments

Recharge keynote presentation

Speakers: Oisin O’Connor, CEO & Co-Founder, Recharge; Erin Carey, Sr. Director of Marketing, Recharge; Jordan Bluhm, Principal Product Manager, Recharge; Wesley Magness, R&D, Flows, Recharge

We’re busy working on tools to help you maximize the value of your shoppers and subscribers. Hear from Recharge leaders on some of the new features and functionalities we’ve recently launched, and where our sights are set for the future.

The CVO revolution

Speakers: Adam Pearce, CEO, Blend Commerce; Peter Gardner, Chief Strategy Officer, Blend Commerce

To provide merchants with strategic guidance beyond just conversion rate optimization, it’s key to focus on growing LTV. In this session, we dive into holistic customer value optimization strategies for agency and tech partners to help your merchants better understand their customers.

Minimizing risk & maximizing return through experimentation

Speakers: Yaseen Shurbaji, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Prismfly; Yusuf Shurbaji, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Prismfly

Explore the what, why, and how of ecommerce experimentation, and walk away with tips and tricks for implementing this for your store.

From innovation to authenticity: How Sahara Lotti Turned Lashify into an international success story

Speakers: Sahara Lotti, CEO & Founder, Lashify; Oisin O’Connor, CEO & Co-Founder, Recharge; Jamie Sutton, Recharge 

Learn how CEO and Founder Sahara Lotti turned Lashify into a household name by maintaining a customer-centric mindset, perfecting her product, embracing transparency, and maximizing a few key failures.

The post Experience ChargeX 2023 with on-demand event content appeared first on Recharge.

Who should attend ChargeX? 

We’re calling all big thinkers who want to increase their ecommerce knowledge and connect with powerful industry leaders. But more specifically, anyone who is part of sourcing, contracting, or managing an ecommerce business would be a great candidate to attend ChargeX. 

We’ll also have relevant content for founders, marketing teams, and anyone interested in connecting with our technical teams—but of course, all are welcome!

Why should you attend ChargeX? 

Built-in networking opportunities in a collaborative environment

Our hope for ChargeX is that you’ll not only be invigorated by our sessions and keynotes speeches, but also by the people around you. That said, we wanted to incorporate built-in networking opportunities for you to connect with the hundreds of ecommerce merchants and partners and countless industry leaders in attendance.

“The networking component is worth its weight in gold.”

As a ChargeX attendee, you can also look forward to an entire morning full of guided roundtable discussions on Friday, April 28, 2023. We’ll cover topics such as winning website strategies, churn mitigation tactics, sustainability best practices, and more.

As an ecommerce expert, you already understand the importance of attracting customers—but how do you convert those customers into subscribers, retain them, and turn them into your biggest advocates to grow your bottom line? 

As a ChargeX attendee, you’ll not only hear from—but network with—a variety of acclaimed speakers and merchants, including Hello Bello, Vegamour, and PrettyLitter, who will dive into each of these topics and more.

“I left feeling informed and inspired.”

For a detailed look at our agenda, check out our event page to explore all that we have on the docket.

Our two keynote speakers: Jonathan Van Ness & Matthew Luhn 

This year, we couldn’t be more excited to bring you two keynote speakers: Jonathan Van Ness and Matthew Luhn. 

Jonathan Van Ness is an Emmy-nominated TV personality, New York Times best-selling author, podcaster, and visionary in the Beauty & Personal Care space. 

At ChargeX23, Jonathan will share his insights on how to inspire and connect with a variety of audiences, weave unique qualities throughout your brand, and build authenticity—a core foundation for any business. 

Matthew Luhn is a Pixar-credited story artist and animator with 25+ years of experience creating and developing stories and characters. His story credits include the the Toy Story films, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, Cars, and Ratatouille. 

At ChargeX23, Matthew will teach you to harness the power of storytelling—the #1 business skill necessary to connect, lead, and drive your brand’s story forward in today’s world.

Gain insight into the latest subscription & ecommerce trends 

Preparing your business for the year ahead in a changing economic environment can be challenging, but Recharge is here to help. During ChargeX, we’ll take a look back at some of the trends we’ve seen in the industry over the last year, and discuss predictions for the future of merchants and shoppers. 

Plus, you’ll hear a pivotal keynote from Recharge’s CEO and Co-Founder Oisin O’Connor, diving into the future of Recharge as we evolve with the industry, and how your business can be at the forefront of this inevitable ecommerce evolution.

“It was helpful to hear from experiences on best practices and changing trends.”

First access to Recharge’s product roadmap

We’re busy working on the tools you need to help maximize the value of your shoppers and subscribers. At ChargeX, you’ll hear from Recharge leaders on some of the new features and functionality we’ve recently launched, where our sights are set for the future, plus gain access to a live Q&A with our product experts. 

Take a trip to Washington, D.C. 

April is peak cherry blossom season in Washington, D.C., making this one of the most popular times to visit the area. Although ChargeX will be jam-packed for three days, we recommend taking advantage of all of the exciting things D.C. has to offer, from cultural events to American history.

Plus, ChargeX attendees will receive a discounted hotel room at the Marriott Marquis Washington D.C.

Connect with industry-leading ecommerce partners 

It can seem daunting to scope, plan, and implement your next project, but it’s a necessary task if you want to improve your business. From a website overhaul to implementing a new component in your tech stack to marketing enhancements, it can be overwhelming to figure out what to focus on and how to start. 

By attending ChargeX, you’ll have access to dozens of industry-leading partners to pick their brain and better understand what to prioritize.

Crucial personal & professional development

ChargeX is the time to raise your hand, ask a question, offer a comment, or tell your story! In-person events can be a great way to help you advance in a wide range of both professional and personal goals. They can help you find new professional connections, mentors or collaborators, broaden your knowledge, and of course, help you develop new skills.

“Found a ton of value meeting other merchants and bouncing ideas off of them.”

Our goal for ChargeX is to create the event of the year. If you’re someone who is looking to enhance your ecommerce knowledge, discover new connections, network with progressive thinkers, or participate in powerful discussions, ChargeX is for you. 

To secure your spot, learn more about our session topics and keynote speakers, and read our event FAQs, please visit our registration page. 

We can’t wait to see you there!

The post ChargeX Beyond: 8 reasons to attend appeared first on Recharge.

To better understand what you’re in for, we asked our agency and technology partners exactly what to expect, regardless of the size of your project. In this blog, we’ll cover how to determine: 

• Which projects deserve your attention
• How to align on budget, scope, and timing 
• The implementation process
• How to measure your project’s success

We’ve formatted this blog as a checklist—making it easy for you to reference later and apply everything you learned today to your next project.   

Project planning checklist

1. Use analytics to help inform which projects deserve your attention

First and foremost, you need to understand which projects deserve your attention. There can be many—and oftentimes conflicting—areas of your business that require a tune-up. So, if you’re torn about where to put your budget and time, always look at your data to help inform your decisions.   

Review data

The first step? Review your data and results from the past year. In fact, our partner Charle mentions it’s best to start by comparing quarter by quarter, and if possible, you should also compare the same periods year by year to identify any trends or areas of improvement. For example, if you’re planning on revamping your website and don’t know which pages require the most attention, compare your website’s pages quarter over quarter, then year over year, to identify trends you want to focus on. 

If you’re looking for broad areas of improvement within your business, like reducing customer churn or increasing your average order value, you can also start with Recharge’s analytics. A great place to start is our Industry Benchmark report, which helps you understand how your business is performing in crucial areas, compared to others in your industry.   

Create an MVT statement 

Once you align on the specific project or area of improvement you want to focus on, ShipBob suggests you create an MVT statement. 

MVT statement = Mission, Vision, Tenets

The mission is what you want to accomplish and why it’s important for your business. The vision is developing a real understanding of what the future will look like, and bringing your vision to life. And finally, tenets are your core values, and how you incorporate them into your project.

2. Align on budget & timing 

Next up, you need to align your budget and timing, both internally and with your potential agency and/or technology partner.

Budget 

When determining your budget it’s important to be flexible, but you should always set a hard limit you will not go over. That said, SeaMonster notes you should always factor in a 10-30% additional budget to handle the unforeseen scope and in-project discoveries. For example, if you want to execute a $100,000 website redesign, you should allocate $110-130,000 to ensure your project budget has the flexibility it needs to change directions if needed. 

Timing 

You should determine the date you need your project “in hand,” and then craft a work-back plan. Remember, you should always allow for more time than initially anticipated, especially if you’re working against a hard deadline. 

For an example of what a website redesign timeline could look like, SEEDCMS suggests 6-12 months out for a bigger project (i.e. complete website redesign) and 2-3 months out for a smaller project (i.e. minor optimizations to a website page). It’s best to plan any smaller projects on a quarterly basis, with weekly and monthly check-ins to confirm that the plan is still relevant. A healthy mix of reactive and proactive changes/improvements will keep the site running smoothly and drive continued growth.

If you’re updating or building out a tech stack, it’s best for merchants to have a roadmap of features they need that spans at least a year. If you’re not already planning out a rough feature list, start!

3. Determine the scope of your project 

Once you develop the budget and timing for your project, you should determine who will support your project both internally and externally, as well as who will support the project through implementation and any stages post-launch. 

A RASCI chart is a great project management tool to help you delegate tasks and authority to the appropriate people. RASCI stands for responsible, accountable, supporting, consulted, and informed.

Internal support 

Don’t be caught off guard by the internal resources you will need to support your project launch. This can range from design guidance and asset provision to content entry and product catalog alterations required to make a feature work. You should plan accordingly to ensure you have proper internal delegation every step of the way. 

Brands should form an internal team dedicated to project dependencies to keep the project moving forward, ensure stakeholder buy-in across the organization, and account for change management activities to enable all parties to operate successfully upon completion. 

–Gorilla Group

Agency support 

When doing research for external agency support, referrals are a great place to start. Here at Recharge, we are happy to help refer you to one of our trusted agency partners to help you complete a project. 

Prepare your request for proposal 

The more information you can provide about your business, project goals, and overall vision, the better. The request for proposal (RFP) process also acts as a great opportunity to ask your potential solution partner to share their expertise and offer ideas you haven’t considered yet.

Great RFPs, according to ShipBob, have a strong mix of clear wants and needs, but also lots of exploratory questions. When creating an RFP, think of what you don’t know, and keep some questions open-ended, such as, “What haven’t I asked that you’d typically tell a brand like mine?”

Once you select the agency for your project, Tidal notes that it’s crucial to ensure your expectations are clear upfront, and to always get your agreements in writing! 

4. Set project goals & KPIs

Once you’ve selected your agency of choice, it’s time to set your project goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). 

According to Gorilla Group, before the first line of code is written or any design created, the project team should define a robust set of KPIs that will be used to measure the project’s success. These include quantitative metrics such as return on investment (ROI), changes in user behavior like conversion rate and average order value (AOV), plus qualitative KPIs that measure improvements in quality and efficiency within the organization. The more granular the KPIs, the deeper project success can be measured.

Subscriber growth, overall revenue, conversion, and click-through rates are all great KPIs to measure for your subscription business. 

–Attentive

As a reminder, it’s important to take baseline measurements. For example, SeaMonster notes if the goal of a project is to increase conversions by 2%, then it’s important to understand the current baseline of conversion and to set goals based on that.  

5. The implementation process 

After your project has kicked off, ensure you work closely with your agency to develop key communication points and timelines to adhere to. According to Avex, project launch dates are most often postponed due to a delay during the feedback process, so prioritizing internal reviews is a great way to keep on schedule.

6. Test, optimize, & improve: Continuously measure against your KPIs  

When the project is complete, your work isn’t done! After implementation, it’s crucial to continue to test and optimize all aspects of your business to ensure you’re giving your customers the best possible experience.

Clients can often think too much about an initial launch, and not enough about long-term plans to test, optimize, and improve. You need to build for change. 

–Klaviyo

As Charle notes, you should view projects as a future-proofing exercise that will provide improvements to business-driving metrics, such as conversion rate, bounce rate, AOV, and more. So, whether you decide to do it yourself or connect with our agencies for help, give yourself a pat on the back for taking a large step toward growing your subscription business.

Plan your next project with confidence

Equipped with our project planning checklist, you’ll be able to confidently tackle all your projects in 2023 and the years to come. Use data to inform your decisions, set accurate and achievable goals, and watch as your campaigns find success out in the world. 

The post Stay on track: Agency tips to help you plan your next project  appeared first on Recharge.

But to quickly capitalize on these business-driving benefits, you need to first ensure your customers are aware of your new subscription offerings. To start, leverage these four proven marketing tactics to announce your new subscription offering and drive early subscription sales.

4 key strategies to announce your subscription program & increase sales

1. Promote your subscription offerings through email

When it comes to a digital marketing strategy, email campaigns should be a primary focus for businesses of any size. Tapping into subscribers’ inboxes can drive traffic to your website, and build your brand’s credibility and recognition. Plus, it can increase your sales, create strong customer relationships, and even re-engage inactive customers. 

Of course, it’s important to leverage this channel strategically and somewhat sparingly, as you don’t want to email your customers too often and risk a high unsubscribe rate. You do, however, want to email your target audience with valuable product announcements, compelling discounts, and big company news—like the fact that you just added subscriptions to your business model. 

Once subscriptions are enabled in your store, it’s the perfect time to send your customers an email letting them know about your new offerings. 

Not sure where to begin? A common tactic used by ecommerce brands is to offer a discount in exchange for signing up for emails. Consider implementing a popup on your homepage to capture emails in exchange for a discount.

Details to include in your first subscription email

The primary focus of your initial email should be outlining the benefits of subscriptions. More specifically, how is signing up for a subscription going to improve your customer’s day-to-day? For example, subscriptions offer your customers convenience and predictability. Who doesn’t want to take ‘order toilet paper’ off their monthly to-do list? 

As a merchant, you may also want to consider offering a slight discount to incentivize your customers to sign up for a subscription. If you take this route, be sure to make this very clear in your email, as seen in the example below. Again, it’s wonderful that you’re now offering subscriptions, but the primary focus of this email should be specifically outlining how these subscriptions will make your customers’ lives better. 

Since the recipients of this email are likely not acquainted with your subscription service, you should also include a high-level overview of your subscription policies to reduce any common misconceptions that could enable a barrier to entry. For example, let your customer know they can easily skip a shipment should they already have enough of your product at home—or tell them that you offer hassle-free returns. Mitigating customer concerns up front is imperative to a strong sales strategy. 

Lastly, be sure there are convenient, direct links for your customers to learn more within your email. If you’re telling your customers about a new product, ensure you drive to that product’s landing page within the email. If you’re talking about your subscription policies, point them to the FAQ section on your website to learn more. 

Making life easier for your customers should be a top priority. If they have to go searching on your website for the product highlighted in the email, you’ve likely already lost their conversion from prospect to subscriber.

2. Boost brand awareness with organic & paid social media campaigns

Social media is undeniably one of the most powerful sources of scalable connection available to us. Although the landscape has drastically changed, the key platforms in the space have maintained a powerful force for ecommerce merchants, quickly surpassing TV, radio, magazines, and other traditional media platforms for engagement. 

With social media, you can spread information about your business in a quick and cost-efficient manner, and potentially reach millions of people with your message. That’s right—the main players, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok, are accessed by more than 4 billion users. This makes it extremely important to strategically leverage these channels to connect with your current customers, broaden your reach, and build strong brand awareness.

Organic vs. paid content

Creating an engaging presence and effectively advertising on social media requires a strategy. To get in front of the right people at the right time, there are two types of content that should be at the forefront of your strategy—organic content and paid content. 

Simply put, organic content is free content you share on social media, including all posts, stories, and videos. This content can be seen by all of your followers, users who follow specific hashtags you use, and the followers of anyone who shares your post. 

Paid content, on the other hand, refers to any social media content that you pay for. This can be a unique post that you create specifically for advertising, or to “boost” to your existing organic content. Paid content is especially important for business pages, and can target audiences outside of your direct following, giving you more reach than simply posting organic content.

Your social media strategy should consist of a combination of organic and paid content. You certainly want to maintain a relationship with your current audience, but with so many brands competing for attention on social media, your organic content may not be enough—even if you have a large following. Paid content gives you the ability to not only tap into potential customers, but also ensure that your current customers are actually seeing what you post. 

Create engaging content for your newly launched subscription program 

First and foremost, you need to hone in on your social media strategy and determine which social media channels you want to emphasize. Sprout Social’s 2022 social demographics study is a great resource to help you understand the ideal customer profile for each channel, as well as for year-over-year platform growth. For example, 25% of those who use TikTok are under 19 years old, so if this is not your target demographic, you should likely leverage different channels.

Once you understand the appropriate channels to use for your audience, you need to understand the best practices for each channel.

Now that you’re selling subscriptions in your store, it’s a great time to not only announce this update with an engaging social media post, but also to put together a social media strategy and posting cadence that will continuously draw new and existing customers to your business.

3. Focus on your SEO, including specific keywords

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s the process of generating organic traffic—via technical SEO or keyword research—from search engine sites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Because succeeding in business is dependent on consumers being able to find your online store, SEO is crucial for any ecommerce business that wants to successfully market its products or services. 

Top keywords to leverage for any subscription business

Most pieces of content for your ecommerce site should start with keyword research. One way to identify the proper keywords is to think about the Google search your customers will make, the questions they have, and what they might search for when looking for your product or services online.

Product pages, blogs, and landing pages can all be optimized to include important keywords, making them more popular on Google. This type of on-page SEO for ecommerce is crucial for getting the search results you want. That said, how do you determine which keywords will warrant the best results for your business? 

Every ecommerce website should utilize tools like Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and Surfer as part of their SEO strategy. However, to help kickstart your SEO journey, we’ve consolidated some top keywords for subscription businesses: 

• (Product type) gift box 
• (Product type) subscription box 
• (Product type) box
• (Product type) subscription

4. Update your website to promote your new subscription option 

Once you successfully drive subscription demand to your website, you need to ensure your website is optimized for converting one-time purchasers into subscribers. To maximize your business benefits, including increased revenue, decreased business expenses, and more seamless revenue prediction, focus on increasing your ratio of subscribers to one-time purchasers. 

So—how can you accomplish this? To start, implement these four simple, yet essential website best practices.

Centralize critical information for your subscription program

Create a dedicated subscription landing page to consolidate information on topics like subscriber perks, cancellation policies, and logistics. Customers can be hesitant to subscribe before they know exactly what they’re committing to, so providing answers to common subscription questions can build trust and confidence with your customers through transparency.

Highlight your subscription offering on your store’s homepage

You can draw attention to your subscription program on your homepage with a simple banner, call-to-action button, or, if resources permit, a landing page redesign. This makes it easy for your customers to discover your subscription program and quickly understand the perks of subscribing. 

Reduce friction from the product page

To build an effective PDP, you should offer both a subscription and a one-time purchase option—making the former the default option, and creating a custom modal to reinforce the value of subscriptions. Additionally, you should always link back to your subscription landing page to maximize the value of your PDP. 

One-click upsell one-time-purchases (OTPs) to a subscription while in cart

A cart upsell modal reminds one-time customers of exactly what they’re missing before they finalize their decision. You can build your own or leverage a paid integration like Rebuy to launch the modal for you.

Develop a strategy for your subscription business 

With so many ways to drive demand for your business, it’s important to stay focused and adhere to your strategy. Before implementing any of the above marketing tactics, be sure to take a step back and develop a solid action plan. This will not only help you target the right customers with relevant content, but it will also define how you, as a brand, present yourself to your customers. 

Whichever strategies you choose to implement, you can rest assured knowing that your subscription offerings will enhance the customer experience, giving your subscribers another reason to remain loyal and become an advocate for your brand.

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