đź’ˇTIP: Before reading this module, review our Academy module on Enrollment Rate to learn more about subscription enrollment rate and how to start supercharging your subscriber acquisition.
Peet's Coffee defaults to subscription to minimize clicks to checkout and immediately highlight their subscription benefit of free shipping.
Key Takeaways
- Defaulting to subscription can drive an up to 5x increase in enrollment, with the average brand seeing a lift of 114%.
- Consumers only spend between 2.5 and 5.7 minutes on a retail site total. Defaulting to subscription maximizes this time by showing them immediate subscription value.
- You can avoid accidental sign-ups with the right offer and customer enablement, and actually see a boost in net enrollment (outpacing cancellation increases!). Brands using default to subscription maintain the same or fewer cancellations than before defaulting.
Defaulting to subscription is when the option to subscribe, autoship, etc. is the default selection when a customer lands on your Product Detail Page, or PDP. It's becoming increasingly more popular nowadays, with subscription powerhouses like Amazon.com A/B testing defaulting their subscription offers and dozens of op-eds and thought pieces proffering varying opinions on this strategy. Most notably, it's divisive. Many fear accidental subscription sign-ups and angry customers; leading to a poor program experience and performance. In this module, we'll break down the benefits of defaulting your offer to subscription, which products to consider defaulting, and how to avoid accidental subscription sign-ups. So let's dive in.
Immediate value drives enrollments
eCommerce trends from a 2022-2023 retail analysis reveal that your average consumers will only spend between 2.6 and 5.7 minutes on a given retailer’s site for mobile and desktop shopping respectively. This doesn’t leave your company a lot of time to communicate your value and story, especially given that customers are also spending increasingly less time on top-of-funnel pages like your homepage and hopping directly to mid-funnel pages like your PDPs or category pages.
Defaulting to subscription makes the most of these precious few minutes on your PDPs and boosts enrollment by up to 5x. In this module, we'll breakdown:
- How Ordergroove merchant Intelligentsia boosted their net enrollment by over 100% (net accounts for cancellations, meaning that's pure growth for your brand!), and other A/B Testing Results with defaulting to subscription
- Which products you should default to subscription
- How to style your enrollment offer to avoid accidental sign-ups
Defaulting to subscription simplifies checkout
You've probably spent countless hours of research, in meetings, and pacing in proverbial circles creating the best experience for your loyal subscribers. Or maybe you're trying out a new incentive structure with your designated Ordergroove CSM, and hoping to see a good turnout. Regardless of your setup experience, we're guessing you'd like to see some great enrollment results. To do this, we've found that fast-tracking your customers to see all their subscription benefits by defaulting to subscription on your PDP can increase enrollment rates by up to 5x their previous results.
How, and why does this happen?
When you default your offer to subscriptions, you immediately highlight your customers' best possible offer - which also happens to be the most sustainable return on investment for your business. And even better than that? Eliminating the need to "opt into" subscriptions - and rather giving the customer the ability to "opt out" - has been scientifically proven to increase conversion.
Bonafide defaults their offer to their prepaid subscription plan, highlighting total savings incurred and labeling the 3 month plan as the "best value" to drive intentional conversion.
With every additional action or obstacle that stands in the way of purchasing, conversion outcomes can dwindle. Fewer clicks mean higher conversion for your business. So it’s only logical that defaulting your offer to subscription eliminates an obstacle to enrollment; and also gives you the opportunity to highlight the value of subscribing upon page load. But enough with the scientific research - let's prove it with real Ordergroove customer results.
A/B Testing Results: Up to 5x boost to enrollment rate
Through partnering with some of our early adopters to test defaulting to subscription, we found that enrollment rates increased by up to 577% with an average lift of 114% when A/B tested over a period of 30 to 90 days. The incremental increases ranged anywhere from 26% to 577%, with 13 total merchants representing beauty, appliances, coffee, pet, health, and retail.
We also found that defaulting to subscription with a strategic shift in offer incentive (% off) can be a powerful combination to boost net enrollment, which takes into account any cancellations incurred during this timeframe as well.
🧪 We Tried It: Intelligentsia Boosts Enrollment Without Additional Accidental Sign-ups
While the benefits of defaulting to subscription can't be denied, no recommendation comes without its considerations. One of the concerns our merchants have surfaced around defaulting their offer to subscription is the possibility of higher customer support escalations and increased cancellations from accidental sign-ups. Working with these merchant teams, we’ve gathered some valuable insights on their impact to your business, and how to handle accidental sign-ups like the experts.
Net enrollment takes cancellations into account
Ordergroove coffee merchant Intelligentsia worked closely with their designated CSM to test defaulting their top products to subscription on their PDP from September 2023 through January of 2024. Their team gained a 43% boost in average monthly subscription enrollments when comparing the timeframe of January 1, 2023 through August 31, 2023 to September 1, 2023-January 31, 2024 (before and after implementing default to subscription).
Now it’s important to understand that with any increase in enrollment, we can expect a proportional increase in average cancellations. A program with hundreds of thousands of active subscriptions will certainly have more cancellations than a program with a few thousand subscriptions; and cancellation fluctuations can also vary.
So to accurately evaluate the impact of default to subscription on enrollment and cancellations, we took a look at the net enrollment counts during this timeframe. Net enrollment looks at both new subscriptions and subscription cancellation counts incurred during this time. Anything in the positive means overall MoM growth in subscription counts for your program. So it’s a great metric to focus on when evaluating an optimization’s impact to both the growth and retention of your subscriptions.
We compared the average monthly net enrollment count during our test timeframe of defaulting to subscription from September of 2023 to January of 2024 to the average monthly net enrollment count from the same period of time in 2023 before implementing default to subscription. Intelligentsia experienced a lift of +113%. This means that when comparing the monthly net enrollment numbers in the timeframe of 2023 prior to defaulting to subscription vs. post defaulting, there was an overall increase of 113%.
So it's clear - defaulting to subscription drives a meaningful improvement to your enrollment rate; even taking into account any related cancellations.
But we think we speak on behalf of all eCommerce and Customer Support teams (thank you for all you do!) when we say we'd really like to avoid those accidents in the first place. So in our module Preventing and Learning From Accidental Subscription Sign-ups, we’ll give a detailed explanation of what to do before, during, and after a customer accidentally signs up for a subscription.
Which products should you default to subscription?
Not all products are created equal, so the saying goes. So which products should you default to subscription? To find this answer, we need to truly understand our target audience; the lifeblood of our businesses: the average eCommerce subscriber.
Recent McKinsey research reveals 11% of replenishment subscription model consumers signed up for subscriptions due to their liking the traditional subscription business model, 16% because they need that type of product regularly, and 24% because of financial incentive. That means 51% of subscription consumers signed up for the recurring access and financial value propositions of subscriptions.
This insight, in combination with Cornell research proving a 28% increase in total Customer Lifetime Value when using 1-click functionalities to simplify checkout, nets out to the (not very shocking) conclusion that eCommerce consumers value simplicity, financial incentives, and flexible, recurring access to their favorite products. Defaulting to subscription simplifies checkout, draws immediate attention to the best financial offer possible, and lets the ideal subscriber know that autoship is an option.
With this all in mind, your most popular subscription products should always be defaulted to subscription. Be sure to follow our guidelines to styling an ideal subscription offer that drives intentional conversion and dissuades accidental sign-ups.
Additionally, your most replenishment-friendly products should be defaulted to the subscription offer (that 27% of eCommerce subscribers who signed up for the replenishment model will thank you for it!). Here are a few examples of products in our most common verticals that fall into the replenishment-friendly category:
đź“ť Try it now!
Ordergroove lets you default to subscription on a product-by-product basis, and we recommend defaulting your top performing products in your catalog and/or the products that are the most popular for subscriptions.
Here's a short checklist to follow to make sure you're following best in class recommendations for your defaulted subscription offer.
- Make sure all evergreen products in your catalog are eligible for subscriptions.
- Default your PDP enrollment offer to subscription* for your top performing, if not all, products.
- Style your enrollment offer to avoid accidental sign-ups - here's our module on how to do this right!
- Style your enrollment offer to maximize enrollment rates - here's our module on how to tailor this to your brand.
- And here’s how to choose the right subscription incentive for your business.
*Please note that defaulting to subscription is available for merchants using Ordergroove hosted offers only. If you have questions about this, please email help@ordergroove.com or contact your Ordergroove CSM directly.