đź’ˇ TIP: To learn more about enrollment rate, read our enrollment health metrics module here.
Key Takeaways
- If you style your enrollment offer to highlight subscription benefits, your net enrollment will only increase; at times by up to 4x! (cancellations will not disproportionately increase with your enrollment).
- Accidental Sign-ups are opportunities to meaningfully engage with your customer base and improve your program layout.
- Style your enrollment experience to be as transparent as possible and callout the benefits of subscribing through their checkout experience.
- If a customer has accidentally signed up for a subscription, educate them on their options and help them make the right choice for them. Subscriptions should never be forced on anyone, but many may not know their benefits and could intentionally convert if enabled.
- Cancellations are a natural part of any eCommerce subscription program. Listen to your customers and constantly incorporate feedback to improve their experience.
Accidental sign-ups shouldn't be a goal
Hot take: accidental subscription sign-ups don’t have to be a negative experience for your business or your customers.
A quick Google search for “accidentally signed up for a subscription” yields a little over 49 million results; with Reddit and Quora threads full of customer questions surrounding both digital and tangible subscription services. Most of these comments center around a misleading offer or the business’s lack of flexibility in responding to them; not necessarily the subscription itself. These largely stem from the common misconception that consumer duplicity is a good tactic to acquire new subscribers.
We believe that subscribing should be a luxury, not something to rope folks into. So here’s how to design your offer to drive real, intentional enrollment; and how to nurture lasting trust in your brand and subscription program. And finally, how to turn accidental sign-ups into opportunities for learning and customer partnership.
- Style your PDP enrollment offer to prevent confusion
- Clarify subscription opt-ins through the checkout process
- Educate and empower your subscribers
- Enable your customer support team on subscription functionalities and benefits
- Use feedback to improve your process
Be clear about what you're offering
Preventing accidental sign-ups starts at the beginning. We’ve walked you through styling your Product Detail Page (PDP) subscription enrollment offer to maximize enrollment in a previous module - luckily, a lot of these principles also apply to preventing accidental subscription sign-ups.
Highlight subscription components and benefits
To emphasize what customers are opting into, use a concise, clear offer copy with a distinct program name like “Subscribe” or “Auto-Deliver.” We also recommend bolding your offer copy, and color differentiating it to really highlight the “subscriptioness” (we’re coining that, you heard it here first) of the offer. Not only will this really differentiate to your customers the concept of subscribing vs. purchasing one-time, but it will also highlight the benefits you offer to subscribers; driving higher intentional enrollment for your program.
Peet’s Coffee clearly outlines their free shipping incentive within their CTA of “Subscribe & Ship Free” and summarizes their discounting structure in a concise subscription offer display before one-time. Making it clear when a customer signs up for a subscription discourages accidental sign-ups and raises intentional conversion.
Reassure customers of their options
If you feel like customers are reluctant to subscribe because they’re intimidated by subscription manageability or control, we also recommend placing some smaller copy beneath the subscription offer that highlights the ease of subscription management, like “Skip, Pause, or Cancel anytime.” You can further explain benefits and manageability with a clickable infographic field like in the example below.
Clarins details subscription management options like skipping or pausing orders, assuaging subscription anxiety and encouraging intentional enrollments.
Highlight subscribing through the checkout process
Some merchants have opted to include a checkbox mandating an acknowledgement of subscription sign-up during the checkout process. While the benefits of this do include fewer accidental sign-ups, we do not always recommend this practice as it creates an additional obstacle to conversion - and a streamlined shopping experience is crucial to drive meaningful site conversions. So rather than having a customer “check to acknowledge,” it’s just as effective to clearly highlight what customers are signing up for, why it’s beneficial to them, and how they can expect to manage and interact with their subscription throughout the checkout process. This includes cart opt-in as well as the PDP subscription offer (insider tip: for more on this, check out our module on driving a 3x lift in enrollment with subscription cart offers).
Maely’s clearly calls out that the customer is subscribing in their shopping cart, and highlights immediate benefits to their subscribers.
Educate and empower subscribers
The (bulk) subscriptions created email
As we discussed, managing customer expectations and education is the key to successful customer sentiment and relationship building. We go through all transactional subscription emails in this Retention module; but your bulk subscription created email* in particular is a great area of opportunity to align on expectations and empower your subscribers to subscribe with full consent and control. You can even catch some accidental sign-ups right after they occur.
So let’s break this down. 💪🏼
Subj Line: Welcome to Your 15% Discount with Amazing Brand Autoship!
Highlight that they’ve subscribed + related benefits
This might sound a little obvious, but we recommend you emphasize that this customer has started a new subscription with your brand. You can do this by using your program name like “autoship” in your subject line; bolding subscription-relevant and enticing copy such as discounting, free shipping, and any other subscription benefits; and outline their subscription details such as quantity and frequency of shipping.
Let them know they’re in control
The modern consumer is shaping up to be different in many ways. Namely, data security and privacy concerns have influenced the overarching desire for more control in the consumer experience. Let your subscribers know that they’re in control of their subscriptions, and managing them couldn’t be easier. Highlight that before every order, they’ll receive a reminder email with the opportunity to skip or delay if they’re feeling overstocked.
Give them support
Always provide your customers with a next step if they have any questions or concerns with their subscription. Link to your subscription program landing page (which we discuss in this Academy module) and FAQs, as well as providing them access to your customer support team.
*Please note that we recommend using the Bulk Subscriptions Started email in lieu of the Single Subscription Started email, which sends an individual email per subscription created. The Bulk Subscriptions Started email will work for singular product subscriptions in addition to multiple subscriptions. 🙂
Subscription program landing page & FAQs
We have a full Academy module on building the best subscription program landing page for your business, (which you can access here 🤓) so we won’t waffle on too long here. But a proper subscription landing page complete with FAQs, ways to contact your team for support, and a program overview with benefits can go a long way to preventing accidental sign-ups.
Nest your program landing page directly within your visible navigation bar so your customers become familiar with subscriptions generally. And within your FAQs, include a short section on accidental sign-ups that’s inclusive of your refund policy. Be sure to leverage any benefits they’ll miss out on upon termination of their subscription.
Train your support team to be subscription experts and champions
Customer support teams are our unsung heroes; the frontline communicators for your customer base. To set them up for success, training them on subscription benefits and manageability is critical. While accidental sign-up customers may initially chat in to request a cancellation, it may be that they don’t understand all of their alternative options.
So here’s how to address cancellations by enabling your customer support team to manage back-end subscription functionalities and become champions of subscription benefits.
Highlight alternatives to canceling
đź’ˇ TIP: For a comprehensive guide to managing customer subscriptions in Ordergroove, check out our handy Ordergroove 101 guide here.
To address accidental sign-ups without the need for cancellation, we’ll take a look at some alternative functionalities of subscription management first. These actions should be familiar to your customer support team, and will often answer the customer’s actual concern rather than defaulting to immediate cancellation.
They include:
- Skip, delay, or pause subscription orders
- Change products or frequencies of a subscription
While it should never be difficult for customers to cancel their subscriptions (more on that here), offering them more beneficial alternatives can oftentimes resolve the real root of their concern. This starts with meaningful customer engagement upon a cancellation request. Your support team should (respectfully) dig into how the customer accidentally signed up, if they’re aware of their other options, and fully understand the benefits of subscribing. And on that note…
Promote subscription benefits
I know we sound like a broken record here, but make sure your customer knows what they’ll be missing out on if they cancel. Your support team should outline all subscription benefits, confirm that they’re okay with missing out on these, and offer those alternative actions as a means to sustaining these incentives. If the customer still wishes to cancel their subscription, that is perfectly okay! Giving customers a positive cancellation experience can leave the door open for opportunities down the road.
💡 TIP: On this note - here’s our module on how to craft an awesome and ethical cancellation experience. Well, as awesome as cancellations can be, anyway.
🧠Apply your learnings:
Here’s a quick example of applying these best practices to a customer conversation.
Customer: Hi, I’d like to cancel my subscription.
Agent: Hello! Thank you for chatting in. I can certainly help you with that. May I ask why you’re canceling your subscription?
Customer: I signed up by accident.
Agent: Oh no! I’m sorry to hear that, and can absolutely help here. To help us do better next time, may I ask what part of the sign-up process was confusing? I see you’re currently benefiting from our lifetime, subscriber-exclusive 20% discount with free shipping and want to make sure you’d like to terminate those benefits.
Customer: Oh, I thought this was just a discounted price. I didn’t realize it was a subscription service. I’m just nervous I’ll forget to cancel the subscription in the future and end up with a ton of product.
Agent: Yep, it really is a great deal! It helps us prioritize your orders when you’re signed on for subscriptions, so we only offer that lifetime deal to our loyal subscribers. That’s a very valid concern - just so you know, we send you a reminder 3 days before every order places, so you’ll never be charged without a heads up.
And I see you’re currently signed up to receive this product every 2 weeks - would it be helpful if I changed your frequency to receive this every 4 weeks instead? You can update this at any point in your account page as well, or chat back into the team and we can do it for you :)
I can also put your subscription on hold until you’re ready to start back up again.
Customer: Oh, that would actually be great. Could you change my frequency to receive my product every 4 weeks? And I get to keep my discount, right?
Agent: Absolutely! And yes, you’ll continue to receive 20% off all orders, free shipping, and 2x loyalty points that you can redeem on your future subscription orders, too.
Customer: Thank you!
Use feedback to improve your process
At the end of the day, there is no such thing as a perfect subscription program. But we’d like to get as close as possible! To improve your process, use regular customer interactions to inform optimizations. If customers are accidentally signing up for subscriptions with regularity, dig into the Why. Is your enrollment offer unclear, or your PDP too busy? Or are subscriptions less familiar to your customer base? Partner with your Ordergroove CSM to find these areas of opportunity in your subscription program.
We value each and every subscriber that benefits from our merchant programs; and view them as our north star, guiding us toward the optimal subscription program for you. You can track cancellation reasons and export them natively through your Analytics Dashboard in Ordergroove, allowing you to keep tabs on trends in customer feedback.
Finally, have your support teams track common trends in accidental sign-ups. Whether it’s their point of entry (email marketing campaigns, etc.) or a recurring theme in the demographic of customers, there are always opportunities for us to improve, meet your subscribers where they need you, and deliver a better experience.
🚀 Intelligentsia Boosts Net Enrollment by an average +113%
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 changes (in %) month to month (MoM) 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.
While testing defaulting to subscription from September of 2023 to January of 2024, the average MoM increase in net enrollment was 159%; with a high of 398% and a low of 41%. This means that, taking into account any increases in cancellations alongside those in enrollment, the month over month changes to this merchant’s subscription counts was consistently (and pretty awesomely, if we do say so ourselves) positive.
To put this into context holistically; when comparing the average monthly net enrollment count from 2023 before and after 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 - strategically styling your subscription offer and defaulting to subscription will boost your enrollment rate; even taking into account any related cancellations. Accidental sign-ups do not need to occur if your offer is set-up optimally.
đź“ť Try it now!
- Ordergroove lets you configure and style your enrollment offer easily. Work with your Ordergroove CSM to style your enrollment offer to mitigate confusion and accidental sign-ups.
- Here’s how to style your Bulk Subscription Started email to highlight subscription benefits and management options.
- Schedule a Customer Support Agent training session with your designated Ordergroove CSM today; and get them started with Ordergroove 101: our comprehensive guide to our tools and functionalities.