Maximize Every Subscriber LIVE from SubSummit

Speaker A: As an industry, the state of checkout is embarrassing. I don't have to buy into a monolith that's built by one company with one ethos and one approach. Entrepreneurship is the greatest vehicle for quality and independence. And whatever your unique definition of success

Speaker B: might be, I think you win in E commerce with people. You can actually have a different checkout experience for different customer groups. Welcome to Own youn Commerce. This is a show focused on what it takes to scale the best e commerce brands in the world. I'm your host, Jay M. Myers, and the show is brought to you by BoldCommerce. All right, well, welcome everyone to Own youn Commerce Live. We are here in Dallas at Sub Summit. There's a little bit of noise in the background because I guess around us right now there's about, well, technically, like 2,000 people, but in this room there's a couple hundred people.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Uh, so it's fine. It gives it a bit of a live feel.

Speaker A: Definitely.

Speaker B: And it's a special day today.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's my birthday.

Speaker B: It's your birthday. So we're so. Yeah. Happy birthday to man. Uh, you're 44. I'm 44. Oh, yeah. We're both bald. Both bald.

Speaker A: Beautiful eyes.

Speaker B: We both love subscriptions.

Speaker A: Both love subscriptions.

Speaker B: All right. Um, and actually we met for the first time at Sub Summit in Orlando. Right. Two years ago. Um, I was reflecting on that before I came here. Uh, I remember you used to always post, like, subscription tips on Twitter. Like it was like a tip of the day. Right. And then I remember we were chatting in Orlando, and then we kind of said, like, hey, this could be a thing.

Speaker A: Yeah, I, like, just launched, like, an ebook, like, trying to put together some product, like some 33 curiously strong subscription tips.

Speaker B: And now you're the subscription document.

Speaker A: Yeah, now.

Speaker B: And his podcast is the subscription prescription.

Speaker A: Yep, that's right.

Speaker B: Tongue twister there. But, um, yeah, so it's. It's been, uh, such a fun joy getting to know you and see this, uh, what. What you're building around subscriptions and the knowledge industry. And thank you so much for joining us, man.

Speaker A: Yeah, it means so much to me coming from you.

Speaker B: So appreciate that. Um, we are, you know, listeners can't see this, but behind us is a big sign that says, maximize every subscriber. Um, so a little bit of context about what we're going to talk about today. So, first of all, my name is Jay. I'm from Bold Commerce. Um, we, uh, have software that allows brands to do subscriptions. Um, why don't you introduce yourself?

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm Matt Holman. Um, as Jay said, I'm the subscription doc. Um, I've come from a strong background on the SaaS side initially on subscriptions. That's where I first started to get a real taste for trying to understand what was actually working. I'm a marketer by trade. Um, and the more and more I worked on the SaaS side I discover I love working with our brands to figure out how to grow subscriptions because subscriptions are often overwhelming. They feel complicated. They're like this big puzzle. And so the subscription doc was born out of this desire to try to help people diagnose what was wrong and fix those things. And so newsletter podcasts, consulting and just trying to help people figure things out because that's what I love doing.

Speaker B: And everyone listening should follow Matthew on Twitter and LinkedIn. I think you're more active on LinkedIn.

Speaker A: It's a pretty balanced now. But yeah, there's weekly newsletter podcasts. You can find me on uh, LinkedIn or Twitter.

Speaker B: He legitimately drops incredible valuable insights on all those channels. So highly recommend uh as a follow

Speaker A: I'm gonna have that as a video

Speaker B: clip on my social unsponsored. Um, so what we want to talk about today is maximizing the value of subscriptions. And this is really important to us at Bold. We recently had uh, a pretty big announcement around from a product standpoint releasing features that allow brands to maximize to sell more subscriptions and sell more to every subscriber. We'll talk a little bit about that today but I want to take it a step back too and talk more like high level. Doesn't matter if you're using our software or a different subscription platform. There is ways to do this. We are building tools specifically for this because we think that when you have a subscriber you have a lead. You don't necessarily have a customer. It's someone who's maybe trying the product. They're not really committed yet. Um, but what you have is someone that can turn into an extremely valuable asset as a company. So um, really quickly the maximizers we announced, I guess it was about two weeks ago was uh a uh, subscription upsell maximizer. So it helps convert more one time buyers to subscribers. When someone's buying something one time it's upsells them to a subscription quite literally uh express add ons which is if you're a subscriber and you're shopping a store and you see a product instead of adding it to cart going through checkout you can just one click add it to your next subscription.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: I love that. Um, and because subscribers are likely to more likely to buy, right, like five times more likely than someone who hasn't

Speaker A: bought from it before.

Speaker B: And so Express Add ons customer portal upsells, uh, which is in the subscriber portal upselling to existing subscribers. And fun fact, 92% of subscribers log into the custom portal at least once. So it's a super valuable piece of real estate on your website. Upcoming subscription order emails, which is not a sexy name but a very sexy tool. Uh, order emails are one of the most opened emails on the Internet. Oh yeah, it's one of the high actually I think between order confirmation emails and order tracking emails, those are the,

Speaker A: yeah, shipping tracking information is number one. And that's.

Speaker B: But most brands just send out a plain order email with this is your order.

Speaker A: One of my pet peeves, Jay, that it's not that much work to actually make that a little bit better.

Speaker B: That's why we launched the ability to one click upsell on a subscription. So hey, your subscription order is about to go up. Add this to your next month. Don't have to go through checkout, uh, and then convertible subscriptions, which is, I think the biggest thing about subscribing to a product is you don't know if you're going to like it. It's why every single software has a trial. It's almost unheard of to install software with no trial. Enterprise software maybe, but like you don't see software that doesn't have a trial. But yet we expect every physical good subscriber to just subscribe with no trial. And so convertible subscriptions. Let brands create a try before you buy. Essentially it can be free, free plus shipping. And then the next month it automatically switches to the full version. So, so those are the maximizers. Um, I'm actually curious because I, I know you watched the video. What was your, what was your thought on, on the announcement?

Speaker A: Yeah, well, I think, I mean first of all I love the idea because I mean we've talked about this a ton. I think one of the issues within subscriptions is that people are often so focused on the people that are leaving. We're like so worried about everybody that's canceling and walking out on us and still instead of focusing on the people that are sticking around and what can we do to improve an experience for a subscriber to get them to want to stay around. And so what I love about this maximizer thing is that you're Actually trying to connect those dots around the customer experience and make it a lot easier and automated. Because for anybody out there who's listening or anybody who's here at this conference, you know, like how difficult it is sometimes even just to set up a simple upcoming order notification inside of Klaviyo that's got dynamic fields from the subscription app that you're using. Right. Ah, let alone using rebuy or some other tool for an upsell. Like, there's often a disconnect between these different texts and these different experiences. So the fact that you're leveraging that as an opportunity to maximize your subscriber acquisition growth and retention, I think is a really, really cool tool. That's why I was excited to see it.

Speaker B: Talk about it. Yeah, well, and customer acquisition cost is 30, 40% more than it was five years ago. It's getting harder to acquire customers. We're still spending so much money to acquire them. We need to maximize. Once you have them in, we need to maximize them. When I say the word maximizing subscribers, that can mean a lot. And I know you have thoughts on this and you've actually been posting about it recently. What does that mean to you?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's important to keep in mind just from a fundamental subscription level, that there's really only three things you can influence. Ultimately, we're talking about creating profitable customers.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: We're trying to drive revenue for our business. But there's only three ways to do that. You can acquire more subscribers. You can make the value of each subscriber bigger, or you can keep a subscriber longer. That's really the only tool or levers that you have available in your business. So when we're looking at, when we're auditing a program or looking at a subscription program, like we're looking for opportunities, uh, to do all three of those things. Some actions can influence all three, but generally speaking, we have to pick areas to focus. Can we get better at acquiring them? Can we get better at onboarding them and upselling them? Can we get better at how we retain them and understanding customer expectations? And so that's why I think that's a great way to like, think of those tools, is like, how is this going to improve my customer experience in such a way that this customer becomes more profitable to my business in time?

Speaker B: Yeah. What do you think is the most overlooked of those three levers?

Speaker A: Yeah, I would say that for me, the biggest thing that I spent a lot of time, like, talking about is again, subscription brands. We're so obsessed with churn that we often forget, like, how we've acquired customers and that we can do a better job of how we acquire customers. So for me, my biggest pet peeve, or I should say, like opportunity is for subscriptions, is to focus on conversion.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Focus on how we bring somebody in the program, what we offer to them up front, what they're buying from us up front. Because that's a directly influence. First of all, would you rather keep 100% of 100 subscribers or would you rather keep 80% of 200 subscribers? Right. Like you create a bigger bucket when you focus on conversion initially and understanding how that influences retention downstream. Because you can also acquire too many people and they churn right away.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So we're trying to find the right balance of a, uh, great offer that people want to keep buying over and over again.

Speaker B: And for me, I think the biggest overlooked is growth growing subscribers personally. And I have seen a lot of subscription brands, they think they get the subscriber. That's the metric they care about. How many new subscribers do they get? My churn. And then they look at. Those are their two key metrics, lifetime value. Um, but I've seen. So there's a data point that every subscription brand should know, and that's net dollar retention. And what that is is it's taking your subscribers plus what they're worth and looking at the total churn of the value. Not just I get 100 subscribers, now I have 90. But if I get 100 subscribers and I, um, upsell 50 of them to become worth double and I lose 10, my, my net dollar retention is actually positive. Some people refer to it as negative churn or it can be like 115% NDR net return. And a lot of brands don't think about this until they're, uh, looking for investment or potentially getting acquired. And it's a key metric for investors, as they say, well, what's your net dollar retention? And they don't know. They think, well, my churn is this. My acquisition is this. But they never think about getting subscribers and making them more valuable. But it's such a key metric. So for me, it's interesting to hear both perspectives.

Speaker A: Well, I think that as you grow and like, I think from at the enterprise level, that's actually where the opportunity is. It's not like they already have so much marketing motion and cancellation flows and all these things set up that it's difficult to like heavily influence the business. So you have to focus on segmenting and maximizing individual subscriber segments through like upsells and those type of like more tailored experiences. But when you're under like 15 or 20 million in revenue, like it's definitely a question of like trying to find a good offer. But then also I think it's a natural way to start thinking of like the example I use is like protein powder as a supplement. Right. Like it's a very universal product that Everybody says can do 50000 different things. Well what type, what do your customers need with that? If it's a weight loss product then you need to pair that with maybe some kind of like you know, um, some other supplements like a sugar free like Crystal Lights or something like that.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: If it's somebody's doing like they're bulking, they're trying to build muscle, then let's get them on creatine or other things. So I think that actually is directly influences the offers understanding like what more value can you can give to your clients, subscribers. I would say to anybody out there is listening. Like if you, if you're worried about upsetting your subscribers so that they'll churn, you're, you're. It's kind of like hey, I've got this really cute girl to go out with me but I'm not going to text her because I don't want her to break up with me. Right. Like that just is not how it works. Right. So we have to think through what can I do that's natural. Yeah. Or improves what they want and that also improves their, their quality of life, their quality use of the product when it happens to make me more money. Right. Yeah.

Speaker B: I have so many thoughts on that.

Speaker A: I love the dating analogies because I got married.

Speaker B: I don't wanna remind her how ugly I am. That's interesting. Okay, so let's dive into the first one. Um, maximizing conversion. What do brands have to do Right. To maximize conversion? So this is acquisition like and actually acquisition and conversion. I see a little bit different. Acquisition is getting customers to your brand conversion. Now they're on your site and maybe let's draw the line there because we're not talking about advertising and influencers. It's like they're on your site, the customer's shopping, your store. What can we do now to improve the conversion that they're going to subscribe versus buy one time or not. So what are some things brands can do to improve conversion?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So there's, there's certainly a lot of things related to design that I think we'd touch on Pretty quickly is I think a lot of websites I see don't do a good enough job of differentiating between if you have a one time or subscribe and save offer, differentiating those things, calling a highlight around price or other value benefits that go with the subscription. Um, I think AVI is a great example of that. Like they use that pink color on their theme really clearly. So if you're, you can see that as part of the price. So there's certainly some design elements around that. But I think the biggest, one of some of the biggest missed opportunities for subscription brands is thinking through an offer. It's thinking why people are buying from you. If you're a single SKU business, this can be a little bit harder. So it would be thinking about like, if I have just a single subscription box, what other items could I give potentially up front? Is it past boxes? Is it past items as a mystery box? Are there other things I could do to enhance that initial purchase as something that's almost not costing me very much instead of discounts? So again, if you think about like if you have $100 average order value, 10% discount is $10, right? A $50 average order value 10% is $5. Could you acquire an item to give as a gift that's less than $5? Absolutely. But that has a perceived value of 20 or $30, definitely. So I think like thinking through ways to be a little bit more creative. If I'm selling protein powder, again, it's not just the fact that it's, you know, creatine or, uh, the way, like all the ways it's harvested and its delivery system, like, that's all great, but what can I do to add more value to that? Can I add creatine or another supplement or something else? Is it access to content, a community or something else? Basically, as I said, the offer.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I mean I always, when I'm shopping, it takes way more for me to convert to a subscription to buy something one time. I'll buy something one time with hardly even knowing the brand. And I've done it before. And actually I one time bought this skincare lotion for my daughter. Uh, this was like years ago, she had dry skin. And so I googled skincare, safe for kids or something. And then, um, a site came up. I found the skin lotion. I ordered it. Two weeks later, it didn't come. And I remember thinking like, oh, shoot, that never came. I got to track it and I was like, who did I order it from? I couldn't even remember the name of the company. I couldn't remember who it was. I went in my email and I tried to search for tracking. I searched like skin lotion, but it didn't come up because it was under skin care. Anyways, you'd never subscribe to a brand and forget who the brand is because it's a deeper relationship, it's a deeper commitment. Um, I think you said it well, conveying the value of the, of the. What the offer is. And the biggest mistake I see brands make is they. I say they slap on a subscribe and save, right. And they think, oh, now I must. Now I'm a subscription brand. And then they don't do well.

Speaker A: They have 5 or 10% if they're lucky, as an option.

Speaker B: Um, and then they say, oh, subscription didn't work. No one buys subscriptions. Right. And so positioning as subscription first, um, having other value in it and the other value I've seen some brands do, really creative. You know, you said something, um, what do you say? Including past boxes, things like that, or also partner products. So like if I sell, I don't know, a whiskey subscription, maybe whiskey people also like cigars or something else. Like, and I can reach out to a cigar company and I can say, would you like to include a sample of your cigar in all of my boxes? They would, but if that box always came with some other products, it's essentially a marketing channel for.

Speaker A: Yeah. A brand I love is X Endurance. I talk about them quite a lot because they have a membership offering and their membership M. It's like an outdoor supplement. Like if you're like CrossFit or endurance athlete kind of thing. And they include as part of their membership like gift cards or discounts to a ton of different partner programs that involve like outdoor activities. So they're regularly like curating different options they can put into.

Speaker B: So.

Speaker A: You're absolutely right. It's just, it's not, it's not rocket science. I know it feels overwhelming, but it's just thinking outside the box, forgive the pun. Just a little bit more about what people might find valuable. And then with. When we're talking maximizers, it's like somebody might see that and they're like, you know what? No, it's okay. And then on the cart fly out, there's that upsell option to the subscription where if you pick something that didn't have a subscription option, being able to easily upsell sell, that is a great way of like just picking up a few more people on the margins.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's. There's a lot going on on a product page. You've got, uh, images, you've got details, you've got bullet points, you've got warranties, you've got return info. There's a lot going on a lot of times and customers are busy. They come to a product, they click add to cart, they buy it one time. They might not know that they're saving 20% if they subscribe or they're getting free shipping or they're getting guaranteed, uh, returns as a member. And that's where like the maximizer subscription upsell, just to remind them, oh, did you know you get these free products and that? Yeah.

Speaker A: You have to make sure it emphasizes the key difference. Like if it's like exclusive access or if it's like a faster shipping time or a discount or a free item and the upsell in that cart fly out. You want to highlight that. Get an additional 20% off when you subscribe. Get free shipping by subscribing. Get a free gift by subscribing. Make sure that is the clear call out because that's the biggest differentiator you have between those two options in such

Speaker B: a small little window. Yeah. And then the other one, convertible, uh, so offering, uh, so what convertible subscriptions are is one product ships the first month, switches to a different product the next month. That can be used for a lot of things. But the trying before you buy is a lot of people subscribe to try a product. I subscribed to athletic greens to try it. I didn't know if I liked it. I ended up actually canceling it because I didn't like the taste. And I went with a different brand later on. But I wasn't subscribing, I was trying. And so I, I ended up paying the $99 and subscribing. But I, I bet a lot of people actually I posted on social media, uh, trying athletic greens and I had like eight people message me like, oh, what did you think? Did it work? Is it health? Is it good? You feel more energy. These are all people that would love to try it, but they don't want to pay the $99 for the first month. I forked out the 99 bucks, but a lot of people don't. But if they would have had a ten, uh, dollars sample size try it, that automatically switched to the $99 a month subscription after their conversion will go through the roof.

Speaker A: And I want to call out how hard that is technically to do that. Like customizing, like a lot of the platforms will allow you to do flows, other things where you can swap products in the back end. But it's, it's somewhat technically, it's a bit of a technical lift. So it's nice that bold is making that like native to what they're doing, I would say also like, it's something to be testing. Like sometimes brands that I've worked with do this try before you buy thing and it doesn't really work. Others have seen it be immensely successful. I actually feel like it's kind of like on the edges of both sides. Like it either doesn't work at all or it's incredibly like great as an acquisition channel for subscribers. So it's definitely something to be tested.

Speaker B: Yeah. You had a newsletter that went out today. Yeah.

Speaker A: Talking about offers. Like, literally that's because I love offers so much and I talk about them all the time. That was today's birthday newsletter.

Speaker B: I went up to my hotel room to grab my laptop. I get a newsletter. The four things to get right to convert more subscribers. And I read it. I always read your newsletters. Uh, it was price, what they get, frequency and why they want it. Talk a little bit about some of these things.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think offer offers, like, so I'm getting a marketing background and initially in B2B, you talk about offers all the time. Like, we need a good offer, we need a good offer within the D2C space. Maybe you don't think about it the same way. So I try to like breaking it down. Where an offer is what somebody's going to get. And that could be just a single item, five items, access to something. Like that's what they get, what they pay for it. It's the cadence that they get it at. If it's access, it's like, is it all the time or is it every week? Is it every month? And then finally it's like, what is the reason why should somebody, I almost said give a care why anybody should care, um, to buy that subscription. And so those are all those different things you can kind of like think about. You can mess with price, you can mess with what goes into it, you can mess with frequency. When I talk about frequency a lot, it's because everybody's. We think of a subscriptions as one month. But a lot of programs I work will sell three month supply at a time. And while that feels like, oh, they're gonna have too much product, in reality, a lot of people like getting three months because they, you can give them a better discount. It's cheaper on shipping. Like they're using it consistently so they're not worried about that and then ultimately like why they buy. So if again, the protein powder is a great example where if you've Talked to a 50 people that use protein powder, you probably got 50 different responses, but for your own brand. Okay, what's the compelling reason? Why do people like this more than I'll, uh, cook competitor or alternative product? We want that to be copied. We want that to be visually shown on our product page to demonstrate why there's value in the offer.

Speaker B: And we actually see that quarterly subscriptions have a much lower churn rate than monthly. So like do everything you can to get your customer on quarterly. Like offer a steeper discount or you know, upsell them to a quarterly subscription. But quarterly subscriptions, and then going one step further, annual subscriptions have even lower churn. The longer the frequency, the lower the churn. Yeah. If you, if you want correlation, if

Speaker A: you're here, you can. I'll show you a product page example that I love where it's showing like one month at 10% off, two months supply at 20% off and three months supply at 30% off. Or sorry, three months and six months. The three month converts better and retains better than the, than the uh, one month option.

Speaker B: That's how much better they know they can give that much more discount because it's, they say around that much longer. Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker A: Well, and people are paying you up front for that. Right. So you're getting more payment up front easier.

Speaker B: What are some big misses before we go on to the next one? What are some of the biggest things you see people do wrong on the off on the product page where they're selling the subscription?

Speaker A: Um, I mean, coming back to design and not spending enough time like putting in effort into showing how the subscription stands out. I think without getting things too fancy, it's just a question of like a slightly different color showing price strikethroughs. But there is a difference between these options because not only does it highlight the offer, but also make sure nobody gets surprised by the fact that they ended up on a subscription, which is incredibly annoying for business. I would say another miss is on the upsell piece. Um, I know like there's a ton of AI out there and I think what AI can enable in many ways is great. But for some of my clients, the simplest thing is like if it's a skincare company, I already know my top three most popular products. Those are my upsells on the car. I don't need an AI tool to figure that out for me. And that's all I'm going to show. Because the reason why those top three are the most popular is people have been using them. Um, they have clear value differentiate. Like there's a reason why they're the three popular. So that's what I'm going to do. Because I hate it when I'm checking out at a brand and I'm saying, like, I'm buying, um, you know, apparel maybe isn't a good example. But if I'm buying a supplement and you're gonna upsell me on a mug or like a drink company upselling you on a mug or their merch, if it's my first time buying, why do I want a T shirt? Like, upsell me something else that you do that's special or different from a product standpoint. That is a pet peeve and a miss for me on a lot of brands.

Speaker B: Yeah. I would say for me, when you feel like you have to opt into the subscription and it's like the product page, the default price is the one timer. So let's say a product's $100.

Speaker A: I know where you're going with this.

Speaker B: I like it. It's like the product price is $100. It's default selected to one time. You have to do multiple things to subscribe. It should be the exact opposite. When you land on the page, the default price should be the subscription price. $78. Whatever the subscription price is, it should default to the subscription option. You should have to opt in to the one time and then when you click one time, change it to the hundred dollars. So you feel that pain of the price going up, not the benefit of the price going down on a discount. Make them feel like pain is a more motivating. Like, you know, they say painkillers sell better than vitamins. Pain is a more motivating reason. People make discipline decisions. Right. And so like just clicking one time and seeing the price go from 70 up to 100. I might go back to the subscription versus a little bit closer. Yeah. So gear everything. So they have to opt into the one time, but by default it goes on. So. I just want to say thank you to all the support everyone has given this show. The feedback and reviews have been amazing. I'm truly humbled and honored that we have a perfect 5.05 star rating in iTunes. If you're one of the people that have left a review, sincerely, thank you. We read every single one. If you haven't left one yet and you're enjoying the Show. Would you consider leaving one right now if you do? Thank you so much. Okay, on with the show. Okay, let's go to the next one, uh, which is maximizing growth. So the subscriber has subscribed now what do you do now? How can we take. What are some tactics, uh, that we don't just say, yeah, I've got a subscriber, life is good. How can we make them more. More valuable?

Speaker A: Yeah, I would say, like, it's really important to keep in mind for a lot of subscribers, as you mentioned that, um, if you can't get an upsell in the cart, it's difficult to get an upsell like month one right away. Like, you should be looking at that first month or two, sometimes even the first three months as an onboarding to the subscription. So making sure that they're using the product like, so if I'm doing emails, I'm educating on the product. I'm trying to, um, you know, promote adoption of the product inserts or anything else in that first month or two needs to be all about making sure they have a special experience right away after that. I'm testing with things with like product inserts as gifts, as upsell opportunities. And I'm using email marketing as part of my upcoming order notifications to upsell into that. But I definitely want to focus on onboarding first. And then on a growth standpoint, once somebody's reached a certain threshold and you again, you can test the cadence or timing of this is. And it's also understanding too what your next popular products are like. Again, I know that like AI and machine learning and all this stuff, but it's like, okay, if I know, If I have six SKUs and I know what's most popular, and then what's two and three and four, I'm upselling in that order, right? If somebody's on two, three or four first, I'm upselling them to number one. If somebody's bought number one, I'm upselling them on number two. And just going through that process and because you have stories and, um, success stories around other customers that have done that. And so you can use that and leverage that as part of the sales process. And so making it easy inside the upcoming order notification email is like, I think is the best way to do that. A pet peeve before you ask, is when somebody just says, hey, your upcoming order's about to process, uh, in two days, click here to cancel or click here to make a change. And I'm thinking, wow, that's another incredible Opportunity to remind somebody why they bought from you. Like a brand that I love is I heart dogs. And they do this amazing thing where they donate a portion of every sale to feed shelter pets. Will they remind somebody in the first line of the email that, hey, by the way, your upcoming Oracle order email is about to, uh. Your upcoming order is going to feed this many shelter pets.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So you're thinking about that before you're thinking about canceling. Right.

Speaker B: Never cancel.

Speaker A: So then it's like getting into that and then explaining to somebody what more they can do with it. Right. Make changes, adjustments. But also hear this extra offer we can give to somebody.

Speaker B: Well, you keep putting down AI, but we just released AI upselling that if you have a huge SKU count and you need to push a button, we

Speaker A: can do that too. I would say yes. I'm not hating on it. I actually use AI all the time. No, I love AI, but I'm just saying everybody out there, it's like, don't worry about overcomplicating. Yes. Just make it a little simpler on yourself.

Speaker B: Yeah. And you know, uh, self promotion promotionally. Um, the two tools that we launched were customer portal upsells and upcoming order email upsells and two important data points on this. 92% of subscribers log into the customer portal at least once. I would say it's maybe the second most valuable page on your website, the homepage. And if you're a subscription company, the customer portal. Probably 90% of the brands that use our subscription app, they just leave the customer portal as it is. And it's good, it works. They can log in and they can modify their subscription subscription, but it's a very valuable piece of real estate. So putting educational content there, putting information about your brand, reinforcing the good you're doing, but also putting offers like you're doing. You're actually, um. A recent survey went out, uh, to subscribers of this one subscription brand asking what they could do better. And 90% of subscribers said they wish there was more opportunity. Opportunity for add ons. So customers want add ons like you're not, you're not annoying them. They want add ons like if I'm subscribed to Skincare and it's summer right now, I want to get offered the UV protection version because I'm out in the sun all summer and maybe I want an extra bottle because I'm in the sun way more in the summer. Like that's what I want. I want that curation and I want that, those offers and that's what will keep me around. So having those offers in the portal and then having them in the email are so important. Um, and both of those are like critical touch points. Critical touch points? Yeah. Um, I think, you know, there's all these. If you Google, like the cost of selling to an existing customer versus a new customer, there's a lot of different numbers out there. Like Harvard Business Review had one that it's. It costs 25 times more more to acquire a new customer than sell to an existing one. An existing customer is five times more likely to buy from you than a new customer. It's like there's all these data points, but what are brands doing with that?

Speaker A: Uh, not a lot, I think. I mean, the idea is you get this argument that it's easier to retain than acquire a new customer, but I would say, like 90% of E commerce teams are focused on acquisition. They're just trying to acquire more and acquire more and acquire more. They're not putting necessarily as many resources onto the retention side of things. I think the mistake there is that a lot of people forget how closely tied those two pieces are. Right. So like, for me, it's a question of it's actually easier to retain the right customer than it is to retain the wrong customer. I think you have to put that qualification onto it. So it should be focusing on, like, for me, on the retention side, I want to do a better job of understanding the people that love my product. I want to talk to the people that have been on it six months or more. I want to figure out more about what they value, what they like, what they want. I want to develop things for them and then I want to take them as case studies and implement that in my marketing strategy.

Speaker B: Yeah, right.

Speaker A: And that's how I'm. Because I'm trying to get more of those people.

Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. So on the growth area, growing your existing subscribers, any big misses, big mistakes brands make.

Speaker A: I mean, we talked about the upcoming order emails, which is pretty much my biggest thing, I would say. The other thing that's maybe a sensitive topic is most brands don't like emailing their subscribers. I mean, even some brands are like not sending order notification emails.

Speaker B: It's like that girlfriend, you don't want to.

Speaker A: Yeah, right. Well, you know, if you're dating her in California, it's now illegal not to text her. So you have to. Yeah. You know, um, so depending on states are rolling out laws where you have to let them know that they have an upcoming order, otherwise you can be in trouble. But I am. Yeah.

Speaker B: That's what I was still on the girlfriend.

Speaker A: Ah, yeah, sorry. Well, I was trying to get fancy with my, my, uh, metaphor. Um, but I would say really, just again, instead of thinking from like a we're scared mentality of losing, what can I do that's going to be a little bit more engaging? So even if it's just making the upcoming order email a little more on brand, if you're a fun coffee brand, you're going to be fun. If you're a gloomy goth brand, you're going to be gloomy and goth.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Uh, just, just invest a little bit of time and effort on the upcoming order email so that people remind you, remind them why they like you. You know, it's like sending that girl a text and it's a funny joke you heard because you know she'll like it.

Speaker B: Yeah. I think here's the bottom line. You will sometimes lose subscribers if you email them. It happened. It happens to us. Like we, we talked about this at Bold. We have hundreds of thousands of stores using our apps and sometimes we send out a mass email with like some update and we get some unsubscribe or not unsubscribed, some uninstalls. It's because, like, you're subscribed to apps on your phone that you haven't used for a while.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And then if they email you, you go, oh, shoot, I actually should uninstall that app. I'm not using it anymore. And that will happen. It's unavoidable. But the benefit, if you can, of, um, growing your customers nurture, educating them, uh, selling them more products, teaching them about the products they have done right far outweighs the ones that you'll lose. And the bottom line is those ones that uninstall, they're gonna uninstall anyway.

Speaker A: Maybe you can do a better job of getting the people that are on the fence to actually start using your product. If you do it the right way.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: That's the opportunity.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I think, like, I just put big misses. I just said simply ignoring, not emailing them. And it is a legitimate concern. Sometimes even for us, we'll send out an email and someone, they won't just unsubscribe, but they'll reply back with some mean email. Like, you emailed me three times in two weeks. I am never using a Bold product again. And I just, I was like, man, they probably were never going to be our customer anyway. Like, but don't let that 1% affect the 99. If you do a good job nurturing, communicating, um, educating your customers, the 99 will stick around and you'll annoy them. Facebook used to say, blow, uh, out the bottom 20. I always remember that years ago. Blow out the bottom 20 means 20% of your list is never going to buy from you anyway. So don't worry about them. Every time you send out an email and you see a couple unsubscribes, don't worry about that. They're never going to buy from you anyway. Okay, uh, the last area, retention. So we talked about maximizing conversion, maximizing growth. How do we maximize retention?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think actually, uh, for me, the funny thing about retention is like often we think about it, it's like, okay, well I gotta do a gift offer. I need to do an a B test at month three to improve retention. But to me that's like several layers deep on how I would start. We've already been talking about it, like if I can create the right type of acquisition strategy around offers, like I really start to know what my customers want from my subscription, that those people are going to retain better. Right. If I can onboard people to my product, my experience, like those people are going to retain better and then ultimately retention is going to be about trying to like also maximizing them from a growth standpoint. If there's a certain segment of my subscribers that are willing to spend more with me, I need to get better at doing that because they're going to stick around better because they're spending more for me. But I think ultimately we need to be looking at cancellation flows. Right? We're looking at within the portal. What do people see when they go to cancel? What does that experience look like? What type of offers are we making to keep people around and if we're collecting data. And then again for me the data piece is always like, I'm trying to take cancellation data and marry that with what's happening at the front end to try to understand where maybe I have some gaps or some misses in my subscription experience.

Speaker B: You've got a really interesting data point we chatted about two nights ago. This is actually the most obscure piece of data you'll know, but has the weirdly most the biggest potential impact.

Speaker A: Tell us the standpoint. So I mentioned being that QPilot was a subscription app. Uh, that was how I actually first got in the subscription space as a marketer, as a co founder there. And we did a one's trying to track people making changes to their frequency. So like how often they get it or changes to their product. And we found, and our customer data set was about 200 customers. So we're, it's pretty decent sized sampling. We found that people that made uh, a change to the schedule or frequency three times had a 200% higher LTV. People that made a change to product three times had a 600% higher LTV. So the idea is you have a lot of people that don't want the subscription and they go to cancel. And then you have a lot of people that are trying to personalize the subscription cadence to them. Case in point, I'm a Dollar Shave Club guy. The first six months to a year I was on Dollar Shave Club, I changed my frequency several times depending on how often I was shaving, trying to get that thing down. Right. So I wouldn't have five sitting in my bathroom drawer. Now that it's on there. I've been on that for seven years. Yeah, because it comes up, I basically never run out and I never have too many. So I'm an ideal cadence in that regard. Other people is like, if you're selling different SKUs and they're trying different things and swapping out other flavors, they like you enough to keep trying and wanting to get into different things. So again, the whole lesson from that is you want to try to enable the right experience for people that are trying to figure out your product. Make the portal easy to navigate. You could put quick actions in your emails to add items to their orders. Like make it easy to make adjustments if they need a delay or something like that. That's okay, right? Uh, and again, those types of customers are just worth a, uh, ridiculously higher amount than those that don't.

Speaker B: It's such a bizarre thing. Like if someone said, how can I increase my retention? Get your customers to modify their subscription. Like it's not something you intuit think. But it makes so much sense because I have been subscribed to a product. Actually this, this happened to me with deodorant. I subscribed to deodorant and uh, I don't know, I guess I some. I bought some deodorant and then the deodorant kept building up because I bought some other ones. Long story short, I forgot my. I had never modified the subscription before, like paused or snoozed or anything. And then I just got frustrated when I had too much and then I just canceled it. I just said, I'll just buy my deodorant at the store when I go shopping it's easier. But Had I gotten emails or had I had like a passwordless login to the customer portal and I just been able to go snooze a month, I probably would still be subscribed.

Speaker A: Well, today I'll tell you, my wife uses, uh, and I'm spacing, forgetting the name of their brand, which maybe is good because they might be here not be happy with this. But it's like this custom shampoo experience where you go create your own formulation around shampoo and you get shampoo and conditioner that's like personalized for your hair and your region and stuff. So she gets it, she loves it, it's amazing. And then she gets a shipment like a couple weeks later and she's like, man, I barely touched this bottle. So she goes in and tries to manage her subscription. And I say tries to because she thought she did, gets another shipment, she's like, what? Like no. Goes back in again, gets a fourth shipment, cancels. That stuff's gonna last for a year and a half. And I'm pretty sure she's never gonna go back. Yeah. Because they couldn't quite get that frequency.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So I would say the advice from that, because if you're on a subscription box or if you're selling like a, a bottle of 30 pills and you're supposed to take a pill a day, it's like you still want to try to educate people on how, how often you're going to go through this kind of stuff.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, you want to make sure people understand that. And then again, when we're talking upcoming order emails, like that's a good place to put, like personalize your own subscription. Like if you need to adjust the first frequency to match your consumption, it's really easy to do that right here. And then when they do do that, they see an upsell offer, they see an easy place to do that. You can make that experience, like really intuitive for people and it will improve retention and the value of that subscriber.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's not something brands typically think about educating subscribers on, but put it in your onboarding email series. Like, this is how you modify your subscription, send it out. That can be just one of the email cadences is like, here's how you log in. Because people probably subscribe, never log in three months later, get frustrated. And there's a, um. Profitwell had a really interesting stat. So this was a few years ago, I was talking to Pat Campbell and he said, um, they were able to reactivate 38% of people. They had this reactivation where people would actually reach out to subscribers or text them and try to reactivate them with an offer. And 38% of people that cancelled the subscription, they were able to reactivate. And when talking with them, he found that it was because they never actually wanted to cancel the subscription. They just didn't want it for now. But they didn't know how to pause and they got too many and they were frustrated so they just clicked cancel. And in their head they're thinking, I'll just reorder it when I need it again. But then most people never forget, they never reorder. So it's counterintuitive, but actually reaching out. Like if you sell coffee after the holidays, suggest a pause for a month because maybe people got gifts. Did you get coffee as a gift for the holidays? Skip this month. Like be proactive, get ahead of that. You know, yes, you'll miss a month on the recurring revenue, but you'll keep that customer for life. Um, two others I wanted to cover on this one that I think are really important that I noted down here. Um, for retention is anything you can do to. Well, we talked about a little bit earlier, but upgrading customers to quarterly or annual. Getting the longer the payment frequency, the better, hands down. Um, so anything you can do to upgrade them there. Um, also you were talking about this with Chris George recently, surveying customers. Customers. Um, and the um, process is send a survey to your customers. I gotta give credit to Chris George on this. Uh, he's working here somewhere. But three faces. One's a happy face, one's a sad face, one's a meh face. And just ask how's the subscription going? And if they click the unhappy face, reach out to them and offer them something. Call them, give them something to.

Speaker A: Because, you know, flag them in your customer support system. And it's the meh or the unhappy. Both Flag. How can we make this better for you? Yeah.

Speaker B: Ah, because it's always people have. If I said to most subscription brands, what segment of your customers right now are potential churn risks? They wouldn't know. Right. So.

Speaker A: And if the happy face is. It's a referral code. Right. You launch a referral code for them to share.

Speaker B: Right. That was the other. Yeah, man, we, we don't want to botch Chris's. He won't invite us back here next year. Uh, that was. I think that some of the key ones I. Yeah. Uh, and then. Okay, so big misses, like what are some of the big things brands do wrong when it comes to retention?

Speaker A: Yeah, not onboarding people to their subscription, assuming that they can figure it out. Even though it feels obvious to you or obvious to people that use the product, there's a lot of people that don't get it or understand it. Especially if your product has uh, a while to see effects, like if it's a supplement or something else that like they need to take consistently, like letting them know how long it takes to see results, I think are a big miss on that. I do think that there's an opportunity. Instead of thinking about subscribers against somebody you're afraid of, think of like, what are some ways I can create engagement that I can make things just a little more valuable to them? Because if again, like again, Dollar Shave Club sends me marketing emails all the time that I never buy. I'm not going to cancel because I got too many emails. I like the product.

Speaker B: Yeah, right.

Speaker A: I'm just not going to buy other like skincare stuff from them. I'm going to buy that from somebody else.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, so just thinking about ways I can get a little more creative, offer a little bit more value. I think that's kind of the biggest thing. Um, and again, don't start with discounts as an option for trying to retain people. Understand more about why people are leaving and what you can fix on the upfront side, how you're explaining the subscription or selling the subscription and how you're onboarding some of these subscription. That to me is one of the biggest missions.

Speaker B: I would just, I want to double down on this onboarding concept because it might just go over the heads. A lot of people. Yeah, we onboard. But there is a. What I call. Actually I got this term from Robbie Baxter. She said this one time and it's stuck with me to this day. There is a half life of excitement.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: From the moment a customer pushes the submit order button. Uh, have you ever done this where you're like buying something big with your wife and you're like got the thousand dollars in your cart and you're like, come here honey, let's push the button together. And it's like you're booking a big trip and it's in the cart and you push submit and it's like, oh, we just ordered it. Oh, we got spend a thousand dollars, we're going to Mexico or something. But it's like. And that it's like it's actually there's a. With everything you buy online, the moment someone places an order, they've done studies on this. The chemical reaction in the. Is the peak of that order. Now M. You've got, like four or five days until they get the first product. If you sent an email right at that moment, like, you should, educating them on the product, telling them about, like, how it's made or how you started the company, you could probably send that customer an email. Three emails in hour intervals for the next three hours. And that customer is not going to get mad because they're so excited. But if you don't email them and then you, a week later start emailing them, they're gonna get annoyed. But, like, right then, that's when I want. Send me five emails, like, I just subscribed to your supplements. I want to know how they're made. I want to know how the formulas, I want to know the stories. I want to see pictures of people that have lost weight because they're using it. I want to see videos. Actually, a really good example I often refer to is Charity Water, which is. It's a charity, but there's a lot of lessons that can be learned from how they run their business. Um, I donate to Charity Water on a monthly subscription. And when I went through the donation process, I went on the website, and Charity Water has wells. They dig wells to provide clean water for people. You go on the website, you learn about all the good they're doing in the world, and millions of people have clean water because of water. And then you say in your head, I want to help this charity, so I'll donate 50 bucks and month. And I go through the checkout and I agree to donating $50 a month. And then on the thank you page is a video from the founder saying, thank you for donating. Your donation helps us dig this year. Uh, 17 wells we're going to dig this year, which means 35,000 people are going to get clean water. And, um, you're like, I know that. I just decided to buy it. I just went on your website and I said, I'm going to make this donation.

Speaker A: Why?

Speaker B: Why is this video here right now? And that's because they know that they have to continually educate me on the value. It's like that dog puppy. They have to conv. Continually educate me on the value of what they're doing. So I stay subscribed and that exact. And they have to turn me into an ambassador. So I say, hey, Matt, you should consider donating to charity one. Right?

Speaker A: Like, check it out.

Speaker B: So they don't just have a subscriber, they have to educate me. So I refer others and that I stay on. And so just remember that half Life of excitement on onboarding. You can get away with so much in that first 24 hours.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'd say most brands don't email enough. You could send seven to 10 emails in this first, like, week, 10 days.

Speaker B: That's when they're.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's when people are most excited about it. And then again, depending on your brand or product, like, I think most products can do some angle of this where you're like, what can you do to foster that? Like unboxing? Like, if you're selling like Matcha tea, one of my customers does that. It's like this very much like, very experience making this first cup of tea. Right. Like, if you're ex Endurance does this challenge where they like, hey, if you're training, like, this is when you should start taking our products. So you make sure that you know that it works. So just trying to set the table for them, I think, goes a long way. Improving, uh, retention.

Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, I want to wrap this up with two questions. Uh, of the five, put your product hat on. Okay, so you're a software developer now. Of the five maximizers that we released, I want to know which one's your favorite, and then I want some advice on which ones we should release next. So I thought you were going to

Speaker A: ask me which two are my favorite.

Speaker B: Which two? You could say two. Okay, so we got subscription upsells.

Speaker A: Yeah, I like subscription upsells and upcoming subscription. Um, email upsells, the order.

Speaker B: Email upsell.

Speaker A: So I like. Because I'm a big proponent of like, using upsell tools as part of the subscriber experience. And so I think that making that really, really easy and native to the subscribers subscription app, I think there's a lot of benefits to doing that. So being able to make it easier to people to upsell within the purchase process. Because again, I'm a big offer guy. I'm a big, like, you want to put more water in your first bucket guy.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And then again, the other part of upselling inside the emails, because again, I know that that can be somewhat. It's not incredibly complex, but a lot of brands struggle to make that happen. So being able to do that, because if I can get 10% of my subscribers each month to just try another product, that again, it m Drastically changes the trajectory of the profitability of a business.

Speaker B: Yeah. What ones should we release next?

Speaker A: What I want to see is when we're talking AI tools, I want to see an AI tool that lets me identify out of my 10,000 subscribers who I don't need to send an AV offer to. To try to get them to renew, because I already know they're going to renew. Like, I want to be able to see more, uh, like, expectation around. People that buy this are most likely to churn at month two or month three, or people that buy from this state. Like, there's, again, there's a lot of ways to enhance that data, but to me, that's where I want AI to step in and say, hey, no, no, no, no. Don't give 20% off this month to this cohort because they're going to stick around no matter what. They love you only give the 20% to these people because they're at risk. They're most likely going to turn this month. Yeah, that's the tool I want to see.

Speaker B: Okay, we'll get on that.

Speaker A: Okay, good.

Speaker B: I like it. I like it. Thank you so much, man.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: This has been, I hope 44 is your best year yet.

Speaker A: It's going to be.

Speaker B: And, uh, thanks. Thanks again.

Speaker A: Appreciate you, man. Thank you.

Speaker B: All right. Have you ever had a great shopping experience in the store, found all the products you wanted, enjoyed the whole experience, but then had a bad interaction with the cashier when you were checking out? Maybe the line took too long, Maybe they were grumpy or rude? The checkout is the handshake between you and your customer. It's a sensitive part of the shopping journey, and it can build trust and strengthen relationships, or it can ruin them. If you're interested in learning how to create amazing handshakes between you and your customers when they're checking out, we'd love to talk. Visit BoldCommerce.com today to learn more.