What do you get when you combine the contextual knowledge from our team here at Recharge with 12 of the industry’s best and brightest agency partners? 8 chapters of robust, actionable best-practices around key topics, like:
- The Power of Subscriptions
- Building a Brand Community
- Cross Selling & Upselling
- Customizing the Shopper Experience
- Leveraging the Power of Analytics
- Subscription Marketing & Advertising
- Scaling Your Subscriptions
- The Most Important Metrics
The Powerful & Profitable Playbooks offer insight into the growth strategies our agency partners use with their top clients. Here is a little sneak peek into some of the amazing content you’ll find within each playbook. Visit the Playbooks page here to download each chapter.
Meet the experts
To build the content for this playbook series, we worked closely with 12 of our agency partners. Let’s meet them!
BLEND COMMERCE
Blend Commerce helps Shopify businesses achieve significant and sustainable growth. Adam Pearce, CEO at Blend provided us with so many insights throughout this series. For example, in the chapter, Leveraging the Power of Analytics, Adam discussed the importance of using data behind business decisions rather than just anecdotal assumptions:
“Realistically, using data doesn’t need to be a strenuous or an overly mathematical process. We can actually use some relatively simple data to answer these key questions:
- Where do my visitors come from?
- From each platform, how many of them add to cart?
- From each platform, how many of them purchase?
- When someone lands on my site, which page leads to the most sales?
Ultimately, those 4 questions can give a huge amount of insight and guidance on paid marketing, SEO, and CRO.”
BVA COMMERCE
BVA believes in a brand’s ability to forge human connection through commerce (the act of buying and selling). Sean Glass, Senior Strategist at BVA provided many valuable insights, like this quote on scaling your business strategically:
“Creating a strategic roadmap starts with establishing KPIs and performing monthly analysis of testing ideas. One key element of this process is looking at customer data through a customer segmentation analysis or churn analysis to understand why and when customer churn.”
DOT DASH
Dot Dash builds websites for experience-minded brands and connects a brand vision to a digital strategy. Tate Lucas, CEO at Dot Dash, gave us a ton of great advice, like this bit of wisdom on cross-selling and upselling:
“Cross-selling is when you share a product or service that works in tandem with the product they purchased. e.g. coffee filters with a coffee subscription or dog treats with a dog food subscription. Upsells on the other hand, would be having customers purchase something comparable (but better) than the product they are considering e.g. 24oz bag of coffee instead of 12oz or Extra Premium dog food instead of just Premium. Both methods have advantages and can be deployed on any ecommerce platform (either by a developer or through many available plugins).”
eHOUSE STUDIO
eHouse Studio is all about designing customer-first web experiences to engage them to keep coming back. Aaron Quinn, Founder & CEO of eHouse Studio put it best when it comes to building a brand community:
“Moving beyond a product focus and owning the customer experience from end to end requires thinking about the value and experiences the company brings its customers before, during and after purchase. Telling the brand story and creating community requires meaningful lifestyle content.”
THE LUNAR / SOLAR GROUP
The Lunar / Solar Group is all about solving complex marketing challenges for companies of all sizes. Here’s Pierson Krass, Founder & Managing Partner at Lunar / Solar on innovative Marketing & Advertising strategies:
“Too many brands rely entirely on paid social advertising and influencers to drive their acquisition efforts. What other unique ways can you bring your message to the right audience – grassroots and “guerilla” marketing efforts can always be a fun change of pace or help a new brand really grab someone’s attention.”
MUTESIX
Mutesix focuses on building cross channel strategies with their merchants to create nimble, innovative and potentially unconventional approaches to get in front of their customers. As marketers, Adena Merabi, Strategic Partnerships at MuteSix, said merchants should focus their marketing and advertising here:
“Cutting through the noise can be done in several ways, here are a few easy steps brands can take to get their messages to the right audience: create highly relevant content, write copy that touches on emotions and humanizes a brand, target your audience accurately, and have an amazing customer experience.”
PRAELLA
Crafting experiences through data science and beautiful design, Praella is all about accelerating revenue for Shopify merchants. Co-founder and CEO of Praella, Amer Grozdanic had this to say about brand affinity:
“When a brand is unknown there will be friction for users who do not know much about it or can’t find much information about it. But, if they see a face and an entrepreneur who is working hard and who is transparent with everyone, there will be someone for them to trust. Someone who they will support.”
PRESIDIO CREATIVE
Specializing in CBD, Clean Beauty, and Spirits, Presidio Creative values long-lasting relationships with their merchants, and works to bring their beautiful designs to life. When we caught up with Jonathan Osborne, Partner & Co-founder at Presidio, he had some great insight into cross-selling and upselling for merchants:
“Cross-sells and upsells are an easy win for subscription merchants. At the cart or post-purchase stage, apps and also custom code can be easily leveraged to increase the cart value once the user has already made up their mind to make a purchase. Customers have a different relationship with subscriptions products than one-time purchases. Subscription products are consumed over and over by customers unlike standard product purchases.”
SCOUTSIDE
Scoutside is all about designing straightforward solutions for subscription-first commerce to have a beautiful, high-converting digital experience. Within the playbook series, we spoke with Thomas McCutchen, Founder & CEO at Scoutside. Here is one of his insights around Customizing the Shopper Experience:
“You are an expert in your product category – tell customers when and how often the average person needs the product. If consumption rate varies based on something like the number of people in the household, then make the onboarding experience interactive with questions that lead to the best suggestion.”
SWANKY AGENCY
Swanky Agency is guided by the ambition to build commercially optimized websites that convert. Matt Abbott, Head of Growth at Swanky had a ton of guidance as it relates to The Most Important Metrics to track. Here he is speaking about the importance of average order value (AOV):
“One of the most popular (and most effective) methods of increasing AOV and monthly subscription value is leading your consumers through an upsell/product selection journey. By stepping a consumer through a logic-based upsell journey, you are uncovering their perceived needs, addressing those needs and also gathering the information you need to provide relevant upsells/in-sale validation.”
TAKO AGENCY
Tako Agency (along with their delightful taco logo) commit to 3 key areas to help their merchants succeed — the look, the feel, and the functionality. We caught up with Z, Founder of Tako to hear his tips for merchant success. In the Marketing & Advertising chapter, Z told us:
“The first step is being heard. Don’t be afraid to think creatively when it comes to advertising channels. Traditional Facebook and Instagram ads are all well and good, but those platforms are, themselves, noisy. Maybe you should consider hiring an Instagram influencer to promote your brand instead of opting for in-feed ads. What about strategic partnerships? Or, is it time to invest in better SEO and content marketing?”
ZEHNER
As a full-service digital agency, Zehner crafts commerce experiences and digital products for fashion, lifestyle, and consumer brands. We chatted with Scarlett McCarthy, Content Writer at Zehner, and she gave us some great insights. On The Most Important Metrics, she talked about the benefits of empowering your customers with options to customize their subscription:
“Brands can also increase their LTV by offering users flexibility when pausing their subscriptions or editing their delivery dates. Subscription products can improve their number of active subscriptions by increasing customer touches and features like renewal reminders. Transparency is vital to the subscription experience.”
Get even more insights
These are just a small sampling of the advice and insights in the Powerful & Profitable Playbook Series. Visit our Playbook hub to see each chapter and learn more from these amazing experts.
