Any pain points or trends you can identify in the shopping timeline become invaluable insights for your ecommerce business. Once you understand these moments, you can begin to tackle them, smoothing over any bumps in the road to customer loyalty and higher lifetime value.

To operate at scale and serve large, diverse groups of customers, brands must invest in technical tools that help them automate and personalize to their full potential.

That’s why we’re pleased to introduce Flows, Recharge’s new tool specifically designed to enhance the customer journey. We are continually releasing Flows to additional cohorts of stores, and are thrilled with the opportunities it provides merchants and their subscribers.

With powerful no-code implementation, advanced data and analytics, and the ability to provide unique, tailored experiences to customers, Flows is designed to increase LTV by allowing merchants to quickly test and iterate on the tactics that maximize revenue. 

In this post, learn all about how to optimize your business and enhance your subscriber journey with Flows.

Why Flows?

Flows was built to help merchants get the most possible value out of subscriptions through personalization—in the most efficient ways possible. By quickly iterating, testing, and optimizing with Flows, merchants can improve the overall customer experience, build stronger customer relationships, drive retention, and increase LTV.

What you can do with Flows

1. Choose triggers

Choose from many different pre-built triggers to kickstart a Flow—all based around merchant feedback on the priority touchpoints for their customers. These triggers are the starting point to your optimization effort and pull customers into the Flow.

For example, if you find that your customers are typically churning after the fourth order, you may consider setting the trigger for your Flow to be after your customers complete their third order with you to offer a free gift.

2. Set conditions

Next, set endless conditions for your Flow based on your customer, order, or product data. For example, you could apply your Flow to:

• Subscribers of a certain product
• A list of superfans
• Those in a certain country

3. Incentivize your customers

Finally, drive customers to take action by incentivizing them in various ways. In exchange for their action, you can offer them gifts, store credit, or discounts, send an email, and so much more. 

The impact of Flows

Whether you’re creating a custom Flow or leveraging one of our templates for key use cases, Flows can help you get the most possible value out of your subscription business in a multitude of ways.

Increase customer retention

By providing value to your customers in unexpected ways, you can lay the groundwork to true customer loyalty and increased retention. Our Surprise and Delight Flow allows you to A/B test personalized, proactive incentives that help you retain and grow your subscribers.

Increase LTV

Upselling is a proven tactic for increasing customer satisfaction and LTV. With Flows, you can automate your upselling efforts to more easily personalize offers to various customer cohorts.

Strategize for active churn recovery

With our Active Churn Recovery template, you can target different incentives and strategies to specific customer cohorts. From there, you can launch tailored win-back campaigns and incentives to retain customers.

Tackle passive churn (coming soon)

Coming soon, our Passive Churn Prevention template will allow merchants to navigate the unique challenges of passive churn through customized dunning and failed payment recovery sequences and notifications. 

Measure success & continually optimize

Data-driven decision making is key to sustainable business growth. Use Flows’ advanced data and analytics to gain valuable insights that help you optimize your customer journey and increase LTV.

Create personalized shopper journeys that maximize LTV

Flows is continually being released to additional cohorts of merchants. To learn more about implementing Flows, visit our support documentation.

By leveraging Flows, merchants can deliver better shopping experiences for their subscribers at every stage of the customer journey. What’s more, they can do so at scale, delivering high levels of customization for multiple customer groups in a large customer base.

The post Understanding Flows: The complete guide to customer journey enhancements appeared first on Recharge.

This new portal empowers merchants to make no-code customizations, while customers can enjoy a modern and user-friendly interface to effortlessly manage their subscriptions. By implementing this new feature, we aim to make the customer experience seamless and easier for end-users, which will ultimately increase their customer lifetime value for our merchants. 

Save time with no-code customizations

The Affinity customer portal allows you to create a seamless brand experience with powerful customization options. Easily update the look and feel to match any brand using Shopify’s Theme Editor. This means that you can customize the portal without having to write any code, saving you time and hassle. 

Additionally, if you’re on the Pro or Custom plan, you’ll have access to powerful Extensions that broaden the functionality of the customer portal even further. With Extensions, you’ll have access to a world of possibilities:

1. Slots will enable you to add custom content and functionality to different areas of the customer portal like rotating product highlights and educational content targeted to your customers.

2. Events will enable you to take over specific interactions in the customer portal and add value with personalized flows. 

Reduce churn with intuitive order management

The Affinity customer portal’s intuitive design makes it easy for your customers to manage their subscriptions in a single-page view. The emphasis on the order rather than the subscription makes it easier and quicker for your customers to take bulk actions, such as rescheduling, skipping, or swapping. This means that your customers will be less likely to churn, which can help to increase your revenue in the long run.

Increase subscriber retention with a user-friendly interface

With its single-page design, the Affinity customer portal theme is mobile-optimized, which means that your customers can manage their subscriptions on the go, no matter where they are. The mobile-first design of the portal makes it easy for customers to view and manage their subscriptions from their mobile devices.

Our enhanced customer portal allows your customers to experience the portal in a currency and language they are most familiar with, making it easier for you to expand your reach globally. With multi-currency, your customers are able to checkout in their currency and continue to be charged in the same currency after their initial checkout. With advanced language options, the language displayed to your customers will be based on what’s available in your store and their standard language settings. 

By providing your customers with a user-friendly interface that is tailored to their needs, you can increase subscriber retention and build long-term relationships with your customers.

What’s next?

By implementing the Affinity customer portal, you can increase customer satisfaction and retention, ultimately leading to increased sales and improved brand loyalty. The portal’s customization options, mobile-optimization, intuitive order management, multi-currency and multi-language translations are just a few of the many benefits that will make subscription management easier for your customers.

As we move forward, we will continue to optimize the merchant experience, making things simpler and even more intuitive for you in configuring and updating Affinity settings within the merchant portal.

We are committed to providing you with the tools you need to succeed. If you’re interested in activating the Affinity customer portal, check out our guides to get started.

The post Save time, reduce churn & increase retention with the new Affinity customer portal appeared first on Recharge.

The more customers churn, the more you’ll have to work to bring in additional customers. And when customers churn sooner rather than later, you’re less likely to have strong subscriber lifetime value (LTV) metrics to grow your business. 

Types of churn

When looking at churn, it’s important to note that there are actually two types of churn: active churn and passive churn. Both will have different approaches and strategies for mitigation. 

Active churn

Active churn happens when customers voluntarily decide to stop a subscription. To tackle active churn, merchants can visit the Customer Cohort dashboard (available on Pro and Enterprise plans) to see the exact reasons why customers decide to cancel. 

Armed with that information, you can move forward to address these reasons for cancellation. Typically this involves incentivizing the customer to remain on the subscription in some way, either by providing a discount or offering alternatives to canceling—like swapping products or skipping shipments. 

Passive churn 

Passive churn, on the other hand, is typically involuntary and unintentional. It usually happens without the customer even knowing, oftentimes once it is too late and they have churned out of your subscription program. 

There are a few reasons passive churn occurs:

• A credit card expires
• A credit card gets declined enough times 
• Stock and inventory issues
• Product variants customers are subscribed to are removed from the store

Every single store has some level of passive churn since credit cards expire, get canceled, and get declined for various reasons. Many customers have multiple subscriptions going at any given time, that are often associated with different credit cards. With so much going on in their world of subscriptions, it’s easy to miss when one doesn’t show up or gets canceled. 

Recharge has built-in features, called dunning, to help automatically tackle the issue of passive churn. With the dunning features, Recharge will automatically try to prevent passive churn from occurring in order to recover potential lost revenue.

Deploy automatic dunning features to mitigate passive churn

The most important piece to preventing passive churn is to let the customers know that there is an issue in the first place. That way, you can help them fix the issue if it is indeed a mistake and unintentional. 

Make time to frequently review charge errors within the merchant portal so that you can see the most common causes of passive churn and work to clean them up quickly.

From there, it’s up to you as the merchant to make it as simple as possible for customers to make changes. 

Use built-in dunning features to automatically mitigate passive churn

When it comes to mitigating churn, communication is crucial to resolving any issues. 

For example, proactively alerting customers to payment issues allows them to take the right action to try their charge again, or change their credit card on file. 

Recharge has various built-in dunning features that can be set up to automatically deploy to help prevent passive churn: 

• Set Recharge settings to automatically retry orders at an interval of your choosing.
• Automatically email customers if the store has failed to successfully charge a customer’s card on file. These emails are also customizable under Notification Settings. 
• Use RechargeSMS to automatically send an alert text message to your customers if a charge attempt fails.
• Deploy RechargeSMS to automatically create a customer support ticket when dunning occurs, creating the opportunity for a winback.

Alongside every feature, give your customers the transparency and flexibility to modify their own subscriptions. 

Work with 3rd party integrations to prevent churn

Alternatively, merchants also have the option to use Churn Buster, a Recharge partner. Churn Buster optimizes failed payment recovery with a mix of charge reattempts, email campaigns, SMS, and other scheduled actions. 

Track dunning metrics to optimize customer retention

With Recharge Enhanced Analytics, available on both Pro and Enterprise plans, merchants can track various dunning metrics, including:

• The number of those dunning in various cohorts 
• The percentage of customers currently in dunning 
• The percentage of customers who have been through the dunning process and remained active
• The percentage of customers who have been through the dunning process and passively churned

The available metrics come together to comprehensively tell the story of your store’s ability to retain customers. As a merchant, you want to continue to keep the percentage of customers currently in dunning low by actively managing what you can control—like inventory availability and product variant settings. You also want to ensure that optimal dunning processes are in place to see a high percentage of customers remain active after going through the dunning process. 

At the end of the day, it’s important to consistently monitor these metrics alongside dunning processes in order to optimize for better customer retention.

Monitor customer churn & optimize dunning processes 

As a subscription merchant, it is important to always monitor for customer churn. 

To tackle active churn, understand the reasons customers cancel their subscriptions and make moves to address those concerns. Passive churn, on the other hand, is oftentimes involuntary and unintentional, making it more difficult to attend to. Recharge gives you the tools to identify reasons for passive churn as well as automatic dunning features to help you mitigate passive churn. 

By actively focusing on decreasing active and passive churn, you’ll be well on your way to growing your subscriber base and business. 

The post Prevent passive churn with automated Recharge dunning features appeared first on Recharge.

Tip: To never miss a release, be sure to subscribe to updates and get notifications delivered directly to your inbox.

Force Shopify customer account logins

Earlier this month, an enhanced security setting was made generally available for all of our Shopify merchants. The setting can be enabled to force customers to log in to their Shopify customer account prior to accessing any direct links to their subscription customer portal.

By default, our direct customer portal links are live for 24 hours; after that, a customer is prompted to log in. With the Force Shopify customer account logins setting enabled, customers will need to log in regardless of when the customer portal link was generated.

If you enable this feature, it is very important to verify that customer accounts in Shopify are set to optional or required before enabling. This is to ensure that customers aren’t sent through an endless loop of being prompted to log in without the ability to create an account.

Easily search & filter your customer list

The most recent update to the merchant portal means that you can now search your entire customer base by name, email, or phone number and get specific results in seconds. We’ve also added new filter criteria to your list of customers that allows you to narrow down your search results even further.

Cart attributes now supported with Shopify Checkout

All merchants using Recharge with the Shopify Checkout Integration (SCI) now have the ability to capture and manage cart attributes (also referred to as “order attributes”). 

Cart attributes are custom form fields that merchants can use to request a variety of information from customers during checkout. With Recharge, merchants can now view, add, or edit cart attributes in the Recharge merchant portal. These updated attributes will automatically sync with the subscription contract in Shopify and, therefore, with the future recurring orders. 

It’s important to know that to fully utilize this feature with Recharge, merchants must enable cart attributes in their Shopify storefront theme as well. 

Custom shipping rates for the Checkouts API resource

All merchants using the latest version of the Recharge Checkouts API resource now have access to all-new shipping rate capabilities that allow for more flexibility. 

With this update, merchants have the ability to retrieve shipping rates on the initial API request, add a list of custom shipping rates, use available shipping rates, or apply custom shipping rate options without needing to retrieve available rates.

Moreover, developers building custom checkout using the Recharge API can now build custom one-page checkout flows by submitting all the required checkout data in a single request, stack free shipping with another discount, and incorporate custom shipping rates into the checkout flow to increase checkout conversions.

New & improved Scenario Planning dashboard

All Recharge Pro and Enterprise-level merchants now have access to the updated Scenario Planning dashboard. This dashboard shows future projected data and allows merchants to create projection scenarios for both revenue and physical products to be sold. We’ve added new filters, additional metrics, and drilldown options that provide greater insight into processed or unrealized orders.

New tech partner launches

Recover Payments x Recharge

Recover Payments, powered by LTVPlus, helps merchants recover failed payments for subscription businesses. Their platform offers dedicated Failed Payment Recovery Specialists that will reach out to customers who have churned. This integration streamlines the recovery process, allowing merchants to recover up to 50% of monthly lost revenue while improving customer retention and overall customer lifetime value (CLTV).

Ohi x Recharge

Ohi is an instant commerce, fast delivery solution for direct-to-consumer and enterprise ecommerce brands. Using data-driven inventory management technology and a robust microwarehouse platform, Ohi enables instant or scheduled deliveries for their customers. Ohi brand customers typically enjoy increased conversions, repeat purchase rates, and LTV, which can be further enhanced when paired with subscription orders.

Fomo x Recharge 

Fomo is a social proof marketing platform that helps increase conversions by displaying social proof messages via notification boxes or text placed strategically throughout the site. This builds credibility with prospective shoppers by showing off real-time customer activity such as purchases, reviews, signups, subscription creations, active visitors, and more. It creates the online equivalent of a busy restaurant, showing prospective shoppers that other people trust the business.

Recapture x Recharge

Recapture helps stores boost revenue by increasing customer retention and engagement, as well as driving initial and repeat purchases for subscription-based businesses. Recapture’s abandoned cart recovery for Recharge customers allows users to send targeted offers with higher save rates. Segmentation gives users the ability to identify low/high-value customers to offer discounts to maximize recovered cart revenues. Recapture also provides options for winbacks (bringing back subscribers who have left) and upsells through post-purchase emails to encourage customers to upgrade to subscriptions, helping stores obtain recurring revenue.

Govalo x Recharge

Govalo is a digital gifting app that allows Shopify merchants to offer digital gift options for subscriptions. Using the app, merchants can design a gift card experience that delivers personalization for customers. They can also offer giftable products and easily manage a clear store credit program.

Stay tuned  

Be on the lookout for more updates in the Changelog feed. We’re excited to keep sharing all of the great things we have in store!

The post Recharge Changelog recap: June 2022 appeared first on Recharge.

Tip: To never miss a release, be sure to subscribe to updates and get notifications delivered directly to your inbox.

New Subscription Details & Order Details pages

The new Subscription Details page is designed to offer a streamlined experience when editing a customer’s subscription settings in the merchant portal. This update consolidates various sections for clearer visibility, puts the most pertinent recent and upcoming order information at the forefront, and creates secondary menus for a cleaner design.

The new Order Details page offers a more intuitive view of a Recharge order. This update provides a clear and consistent view of any order, in any status, right from the Orders section of the merchant portal. Easily track both charge and order information across all orders and use order management tools all in one place. 

New & improved Revenue KPI dashboard

All Recharge Pro merchants now have access to the updated Revenue KPIs dashboard. This update includes a redesigned dashboard for additional data clarity, adds filters for more granular customer drill downs, and provides detailed insights on one-time products and subscriptions..

Bulk delete products from a collection now available

All Recharge merchants can now bulk delete up to 100 products at a time from a collection!

New tech partner launches

Corso x Recharge

Corso allows customers to offset 100% of the carbon footprint associated with the last mile of their orders, which can help increase LTV up to 18%. Customers can also have a replacement order sent out by Corso in the case of a shipping issue within 24 hours. With Recharge and Corso, merchants can offer Green Shipping Protection at checkout and as an add-on through the customer portal. 

Stay tuned  

Be on the lookout for more updates in the Changelog feed. We’re excited to keep sharing all of the great things we have in store!

The post Recharge Changelog recap: May 2022 appeared first on Recharge.