A customer’s subscription utopia

From a customer’s point of view, that perfect world can and should exist. The average consumer subscribes to 4 subscriptions, ranging from pet items, to pantry refills, to health and wellness, to kids boxes. They tend to cover the rooms of their house in products delivered right to their door via a subscription service. 

As a result, customers want a lot out of today’s subscription services. Let me give you a real-world example: I’m a self-proclaimed “needy customer”. If my freezer is full of coffee beans, I want to be able to pull my phone out of the back pocket of my jeans when I’m pre-grinding the next morning’s coffee, and delay the next arrival of more dark-roast. Then, I don’t want to think about it again until it shows up on my doorstep, right before I need it and exactly when I want it. 

Creating the perfect world for your customers via RechargeSMS

As customers want more and more personalization and customizability with their subscription products, merchants need to find ways to, in a way, read their minds. Take my example above. I was able to text my coffee store to delay my shipment so I didn’t wind up with excess and eventually needing to cancel. My coffee merchant was able to keep me as a customer, because they flexed with what I needed at the right time. What’s more, I didn’t even have to try to remember my log in details for their website or call or email someone to shift my delivery. A simple text was all it took for me to engage with my subscriptions.

Products that fill a need in a customer’s life, whether it be part of a daily ritual like morning coffee or restocking the kids’ coloring craft set, become the expectation and set new lifestyle norms. Customers gravitate toward these products due to the convenience factor, but what are some ways to make that even more of a stellar experience?

Making subscription management that much easier

RechargeSMS just makes it simpler for subscribers to manage the subscriptions they want, when they want them. Subscribers have a lot on their plates and are juggling busy lives, so why not give them the option to make subscribing easier?

Recharge offers a way to meet your customers where they are without having to add extra support hours. In fact, all of our customers using RechargeSMS have decreased their time spent in support. GEM, a daily vitamin brand, for example, saved $60,000 last year this way, just by creating a more streamlined process using transactional SMS.

Your subscribers could benefit from transactional SMS in a few ways:

• Sending a simple text to manage their orders
• Updating the shipping date
• Changing addresses
• Swapping out an item
• Not having to remember log-in details to the customer portal

In fact, according to a study by Twilio, 9/10 customers are already asking to do all these things via text. RechargeSMS allows your customers to engage with you where they spend the majority of their screen time.

RechargeSMS details

So what are the specific capabilities of RechargeSMS? First of all, RechargeSMS is free for all Recharge merchants. Yes, all merchants who use Recharge. All you need to do is install the RechargeSMS app, and you’re good to go!

If you’re unsure if your brand is ready for RechargeSMS, we created this Transactional SMS Readiness Checklist to help get you started.

In a nutshell, texting customers falls into one of two categories: Transactional SMS and Promotional SMS (think marketing texts alerting subscribers to current sales). Transactional texts are what RechargeSMS is all about. These are the texts that have a real customer-order related reason to be sent, ie: a notification that their order will ship in 3 days. 

By allowing a subscriber to interact with their order in this way, we are seeing 15 – 30% increases in customer lifetime value.

Enable RechargeSMS today and start letting this be your subscribers’ experience too.

The post Simplify the subscriber experience with RechargeSMS appeared first on Recharge.

RechargeSMS is a transactional SMS tool that lets your customers manage their subscriptions by text right from their messages app. By leveraging RechargeSMS for your subscription management, you give your customers the flexibility they need and meet them right where they are. The barriers of remembering log-ins to portals or dealing with a flooded email inbox are minimized by incorporating transactional SMS into your overall multi-touchpoint strategy.

With a phone number specific to your business, you can reach out via text to notify customers before their order ships, giving them options to swap, delay, add a one-time product, or even change their shipping address—all without them having to log in to their customer portal. 

Let’s take a look at the stats of using RechargeSMS transactional messaging:

• 1.4% text opt-out rate (as opposed to double-digit unsubscribe rates with email)
• 40% customer engagement (that’s 13x the engagement rate of email)
• 97% of customers want shipping updates via text 

In fact, according to a Twilio survey of more than 6,000 consumers across 3 continents, 9 out of 10 subscribers are waiting for you to text them about their subscriptions.

So your customers are asking for transactional SMS to manage their subscriptions, but what are the other ways in which you can use this tool?

RechargeSMS Features

Communication is a two-way street, and RechargeSMS is the same way. This isn’t just about letting your customers know their order will be processed in three days—RechargeSMS lets subscribers interact with your brand via text message to make changes to their order. Here are a few other options our merchants are already providing their customers with through RechargeSMS:

• Real-time product swaps
• Seamless order skipping
• One-time product add-ons
• Shipping and order date changes
• Address changes

Sounds pretty good, right? But what’s a real life application, you ask? 

Picture this: A subscriber gets back from vacation and realizes their cabinet is still full of coffee beans, even though the next shipment is coming in a few days. With RechargeSMS, all they have to do is pull their phone out while they’re grinding that morning’s coffee, and delay the next arrival of more dark roast.

With a simple text, their account updates without them ever having to log in to their customer portal. And then, they don’t have to think about their order again until it shows up on their doorstep—right before they need it, and exactly when they want it. This illustrates that utilizing RechargeSMS isn’t only for reactive updates on a customer’s order. It allows for customers to take the lead and proactively reach out if they want something to change.

This scenario has lasting benefits that transcend the ease of use for subscribers. Because RechargeSMS makes it easier to manage subscriptions, customers stay with brands for longer. In fact, customers that interact with their subscription through RechargeSMS increase their customer lifetime value (LTV) between 15%–30%.

We’re also seeing increasing average order value with the use of one-time product add-ons and as subscribers increase the amount of product in their regular shipment.

Why RechargeSMS increases LTV

Letting customers manage their subscriptions easily keeps things stress-free. Erica Berthold, Head of Marketing at Prepare Your Mind, shares their approach to this. 

“PYM believes in being proactive with your mental health, and it’s important to our brand to make the subscription experience as stress-free as possible for our customers,” says Erica. “RechargeSMS allows us to give our customers the most direct control of their subscriptions. Modifying orders through a simple text empowers our customers to use our mood chews in the way that is best for them.” 

RechargeSMS also integrates with best-in-class help desk solutions to automatically create a ticket anytime two or more messages come through that are not understood. Combined with the drop in Support messages received over forgotten passwords, this saves merchants time and money usually spent on Support.

GEM saved over $130,000 in Support by syncing their help desk with RechargeSMS. GEM Founder Sara Cullen says, “We’ve saved countless hours automating most of our customer requests by using RechargeSMS. We have automation at our fingertips, so we can focus on more of what really matters.”

Not only does simplifying your communication strategy get your relationship out of the inbox competition game, it saves your business time and money. 

“The biggest value that SMS brings to subscription businesses is giving customers the ability to modify their subscriptions on the fly, instead of having to log in to their membership portal. We’re talking about cutting a three to four step process down to one swift move. Imagine the cross-sell and upsell opportunities that become more achievable by lowering the barriers in this way.

Your subscribers’ lives are hectic enough—the easier you make it to manage this piece, the happier they’ll be. Additionally, amidst the swirling unending chaos that is most peoples’ email inboxes, giving customers the option to receive order notifications on mobile means they’re less likely to miss important updates such as cut-off times. Set them up for success!”

Grace Everitt, Creative Director, Tako Agency

Real results, from real Recharge merchants

• A Recharge merchant selling a coffee subscription is seeing an increase of over 25% annual customer value with a subscriber taking any action over text via RechargeSMS.

• A Recharge Health & Wellness merchant is seeing a $10 increase in AOV across all subscribers who interact—in any way—with their subscription via RechargeSMS.

Customers want a lot out of today’s subscription services. RechargeSMS makes it that much easier for the brands subscribers rely on to fit seamlessly into the changes of their daily lives. 

So how do you get RechargeSMS, you ask?

Because here at Recharge we believe our merchants deserve access to the best tools that will positively impact your business, we are offering RechargeSMS for free to all our merchants, regardless of which plan you’re on. (That’s right—free. Including no fees for messages sent via RechargeSMS).

Enable RechargeSMS today to your Recharge account.

The post Introducing RechargeSMS: Simplify subscription management & increase customer lifetime value appeared first on Recharge.

LOLA came onto the subscription scene fast in 2015 with the announcement of a personalized subscription service shipping period products right to customers’ doors. Game-changer.

In fact, LOLA’s allure was not just that customers could customize their monthly delivery, but also that all LOLA products are made with high quality, natural ingredients—something their competitors weren’t promising.

“LOLA was founded on ingredient transparency,” says Anna Stearns, Director of Digital Product for LOLA. “We like to say that we were founded by women with sky-high standards—not just in ingredients.”

While LOLA initially set out to make tampons from the safest organic cotton available, the company soon realized they wanted to expand to be a resource for all sorts of reproductive health issues, from period support groups to offering accessible health resources online (including their “Ask an Expert” feature answered by top gynecologists) to tackling legislation that fights for reproductive equity.

More than just a product

This shift to offering more than just a product drove founders Alexandra Friedman and Jordana Kier to ultimately create the first lifelong brand for reproductive health.

With this in mind, they set out to find new ways of supporting their customers along their entire reproductive journey.

“We love our members; they are really at the heart of everything we do here at LOLA. One of the biggest gaps we all realized is that there wasn’t a great place to talk about women’s issues, and moreover, there was still this bit of taboo around it,” says Stearns.

“We work with top-tier gynecologists, health advocates, and educators on our LOLA Collective to help drive our content and answer questions that our customers have about their health through a dedicated “Ask an Expert” space on our blog The Spot, and share information on a myriad of issues that go well beyond the period. In pre-Covid times, we even held an in-person period support group at our offices in NYC!”

The LOLA mission

“This mission to be there, we take quite seriously,” says Stearns. LOLA thinks about this mission across their product, content, and giving program, and it comes to life in a few ways:

1. To provide—and disclose—quality ingredients in every product.
2. To offer trusted and accessible health resources from their collective of experts.
3. To drive access to essential period products through their LOLA Give Back program.

Giving back, the Recharge way

“LOLA fosters an environment of giving,” says Stearns. “Our community really has a “give back” identity that is something we here at LOLA are incredibly proud of.”

That mentality, paired with Recharge’s subscription capabilities, lets LOLA community members add a donation product to their monthly subscription deliveries. Recharge handles the initial checkout and recurring monthly payments, and keeps track of the inventory getting donated.

Since starting checkout donation around the holidays this past year, the LOLA community has fully embraced this extra way to give back. Currently, upwards of 15% of members have opted to add in a monthly donation to their own subscriptions. Since 2016, LOLA has donated over 6 million period products to shelters and communities in need.

Among those communities: LOLA’s longtime nonprofit partner I Support the Girls, an organization that community members now have the opportunity to donate to directly via the partnership with Recharge. The organization seeks to ensure women never have to choose between feeding themselves and purchasing things like basic necessities that impact their personal health.

As founder Dana Marlowe says, “Pandemics don’t stop periods.” In 2020, with the coronavirus, I Support the Girls has seen a 35% uptick in requests for donations, which LOLA and other brands are passionately addressing.

So, what’s next for LOLA?

“I mean, with the power of a strong network of a dedicated community,” says Stearns, “anything is possible.”

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