How leading brands engage, convert, and retain subscribers

I think, other really simple things we're seeing across the border are just simple add ons, simple gifts. We're seeing a big shift away from typical subscribe and save tactics where you're just trying to be aggressive on the discounting piece and starting to see more and more brands starting to add more things to make the the box or the product more valuable. So, like, if you're buying protein powder, you're getting a a free bag of creatine. Right?

Or you're getting some other type of gift if you're taking, like, a health for your pet. Right? You're selling pet food. You're getting chew toys as a gift as well.

So adding more value to the subscription is actually doing two really, really important things. It's driving up conversion rates as well as actually making the brand more profitable because they're not losing as much margin by doing heavy discounting as they would by profitable because they're not losing as much margin by doing heavy discounting as they would by just using products that they have a a simple landed cost to cover for.

I love that. I think there's been a lot of changes to how brands are thinking about loyalty, and I think loyalty and subscriptions go so hand in hand. And Right. There's so many different ways to implement it. So, I love to hear that perspective.

Really And when when we have to turn, right, there's two types of stories.

There's involuntary and voluntary. And the involuntary one is, the most detrimental to brands. Right? Because, for example, I have an eighteen month daughter at home.

So if my Disney plus subscription were to automatically end because my credit card changed and I have the right tool worked out.

It'll be chaos. Right? It'll be a pretty detrimental experience. And then I might not necessarily have time to to resubscribe to it because, you know, you kinda get lost in the base, shuffles. And so having the right tools at the disposal to have the whether it's network tokens that update their card numbers right away, whether they're lost, stolen, expired, etcetera, or have it, like, retry logic to, meet your needs of of customers if they're using debit cards, PayPal bank solutions, etcetera, is instrumental actually keeping both the delightful experiences to your customers and the the revenue flowing for your organization.

These are such two great points. Like, so it's two different parts of of the spectrum that, I think talking to brands, especially being on kind of, like, the subscription platform side of side of the house. Oftentimes, it's like, well, we're seeing churn. Is it because we haven't set this up right? Is it because, you know, this button's below the fold?

And oftentimes, maybe the churn's happening because the product isn't meeting the needs for the consumer Right.

Or their credit cards are not going through and that's why they're churning. And so I think, looking at kind of, like, the very, like, existential questions around, does this product make sense on subscription?

If not, how are we flexing the subscription to make it work for that product? And how are we ensuring that folks that love the product continue to receive the product if they want it?

Oh, I I I love that. Like, Dimitri, we had a client we recently helped migrate from a platform that didn't have very good analytics to a platform that did. And within the first week, they were like, hey. How come we have so many orders in Dunning?

And and I realized that we had never had this conversation because of other things that we had been working on, but I was like, hey. You guys are in the supplement space. You don't know that you get five to ten percent involuntary churn or just lost payments from failed processing. And they're like, no.

I'm like, yeah. K. We're we're gonna get you a tool for that. But it is widespread, and we're seeing yeah.

So, you know, there there's two big things. One is being able to offer, local payment methods around the world. So this really helps maximize the audience that you're working with, to capture as much transactions as possible.

And the second is also giving optionality in terms of, the where the the merchant to maximize, where where they wanna display certain things. So, for example, if they have a merchants that typically, or customer base that's more Gen z related and they wanna be able to work with BNPL, surfacing that a little bit higher on the checkout page, right, versus, some of the alternative payment methods, etcetera. That really helps capture, and convert as much users across different demographics and geographies as possible.

It's a perfect segue into a topic that I'd love to dig a little bit deeper into, and that's really around experimentation and how experimentation intersects with experiences. Dimitri, Matt, how do you think about experimentation, whether it's through AB testing pricing, subscription cadences, offers, UI, where things are ranked on a page, in order to not only improve conversion rates, but ultimately, like, retention and and and LTV?

Yeah. I I'd say for us, we see like, I I think that brands don't do enough AB testing on the offer standpoint. And when I say offer, that encapsulates, like, price, perks, or benefits, something as simple as which frequency option you're defaulting to.

Like, with something we see, really common tactic that brands wanna do is they wanna default to the shortest frequency possible. Even though when you're looking, say, in their back end, you see that eighty or ninety percent of their subscribers are picking a different frequency. So something as simple as just putting it on the the right frequency, explaining to people how the product is used. I think when I first started making content years ago, I used to harp all the time on, you know, if it's a if it's a a pill bottle with thirty pills and you take one pill a day, you should say that on the product page. And that's still true today, years later. It's just simply explaining things.

So explaining people showing people copy, showing people those experiences. I think giving people different purchase options is something we're seeing as a trend for the last year and a half that's being really, really effective.

Yeah. I mean, I've got a controversial one. So, yeah, I think SMS messaging, I think, the more people you can opt into SMS, you'll have a better customer experience. And so I think when we're when we are consulting with brands, I know that the biggest question is always churn.

Right? Like, everybody thinks about how every time I send out an upcoming billing reminder, email, or SMS message that people go cancel. So there's this weird, like I think it's the difference between correlation and causation. Like, yes, somebody sees an email, they click on it to go cancel.

Yes. That is causation. But they are not canceling just because they got the message. They're canceling because you've reminded them that they don't want the subscription.

And so what we're seeing, I think, is a push for actually leaning into that, where if you can actually invest in an experience where you can get people to feel like they have more control, then that fear of wanting to be on a subscription comes down. Right? So your ability to acquire more subscribers or have people and have people come back to your subscription is gonna go up.