Key Takeaways
- Email marketing can generate up to 27% of a brand’s total revenue - and subscribers are your best spenders, spending up to 60% more in the 6 months following their enrollment. Double down on this impact by marketing to your existing (and potential) subscriber base.
- Segment your customers by subscriber status, subscription products, and order data.
- Promote subscription benefits and logistics in every program marketing communication. Highlight subscription plan options like Prepaid or Bundles to entice customers to try out new offers.
- Target one-time purchasers of subscription eligible products to offer them the additional benefits with subscriptions.
- Post purchasing emails have open rates up to 17% higher than other email automations. Promote subscriptions in these emails to take advantage of the increased engagement.
- Market new subscription benefits and functionalities to entice new customers to convert, and current customers to take advantage of these new perks.
- Promote subscribable categories like product refills and consumable or routine products.
- Craft subscriber-exclusive campaigns including creative recipes, use-cases, and subscriber benefits.
- Use comparison campaigns to help customers visualize subscription benefits in their shoes.
- Promote giftable subscriptions during gift-heavy seasonal holidays to boost recurring revenue for you, and gifts that keep giving for your customers.
Why market subscriptions specifically?
While it’s commonly known that email marketing is a veritable eCommerce gold mine (at times generating up to 27% of a brand’s total revenue), subscription program marketing, separate from regular transactional emails, is something less discussed. But why?
Subscribers are your best spenders - spending up to 60% more in the 6 months following enrollment, we’ve found. Drive the up to 2.5x increase to CLTV that subscribers power by promoting your best offers to them. In today’s module, we’ll dive into general subscription program marketing best practices, subscriber segmentation, and 7 program marketing flows that have boosted subscription AOV for countless serious subscription brands. So let’s get started.
Segment your customers
Segmentation is the bread and butter of email/SMS (and pretty much all forms of) marketing. Subscription programs are no different. In addition to your normal segmentation techniques, use our powerful Webhooks 2.0 to create segments by components like subscription product type, frequency, quantity, or even subscription cancellation reason. Basically, who are you talking to? And why should they care about the specific benefit you’re marketing?
The 2 most general audiences of subscription program marketing are:
- One-time purchasers: Targeting these customers (especially those who’ve purchased the same product from you more than once) with subscription marketing is a highly successful conversion tactic. These customers are ideal subscribers who’ve already exhibited habitual purchasing behavior; but haven’t unlocked the additional value of subscriptions, which leaves them at a higher attrition risk.
- Current subscribers: Cross-selling current subscribers on additional subscription product options (and upselling them on additional subscription plans, like Prepaid or Bundles) is a seamless, built-in part of the subscriber experience. Engage them with targeted campaigns to add products to upcoming subscription orders, to reactivate canceled subscriptions (more on that here), or to delay their order if they’ve received X consecutive orders in a row and might be overstocked (X = your most common order dropoff number, which you can find per-product in our native Analytics Dashboard).
We’ll cover both audiences in today’s module; and break down the 7 top program marketing campaigns we’ve seen the best results from over our 12+ years of experience in the market. Most of these examples are email, but we highly recommend you short-format these for SMS opportunities, too - which can drive even more revenue per recipient than email. But first, let’s cover general program marketing best practices.
General subscription program marketing best practices
We’ll start with some general subscription program marketing email and SMS best practices. These best practices apply to most if not all your subscription marketing comms, regardless of audience or campaign type.
Promote benefits, options, and what to expect
Every transactional and marketing communication should emphasize general subscription program highlights, like financial, convenience, and exclusivity benefits. You should also educate potential and current subscribers on subscription logistics and what to expect - we live and breathe subscriptions every day, but there are thousands of consumers who’ve never held a retail or consumer packaged goods (CPG) subscription before.
Use this opportunity to overview shipping and fulfillment, order management options like SKU swap and frequency changes, etc.; like in Kate Sommerville’s language of “change, skip, or cancel at anytime” below.
Kate Sommerville highlights the simplicity of subscription creation and management, plus all benefits subscribers enjoy: 20% off first order, 10% off the rest; autopilot routine refills; free shipping; and 2x rewards points on 1st orders.
In fact, you should ongoingly market these order and subscription management capabilities to your subscribers; especially if you haven’t always offered them. McKinsey research has shown up to 19% of eCommerce subscription cancellations can be attributed to a lack of flexibility; and customers aren’t always aware when their subscription flexibility changes. Especially after migrating subscription providers, bringing on new functionality, or increasing your subscription options (like more delivery frequencies, etc.). Read more on marketing SKU swap and order management options in this retention module.
Highlight subscription plan options
If your business offers other subscription plan options like Prepaid (more on that here) or rotating clubs or bundles, include a brief plug for these programs in all marketing communications. Customers love knowing they have options; and for brands offering seasonal clubs that can surprise and delight customers, it’s a great opportunity to address your novelty-seeking consumers that may not see themselves as a traditional recurring product subscriber.
Stumptown highlights 3 subscription options, including pay as you go (PAYG) regular subscriptions, their Blend Shuffle subscription (rotating club of cult classics), and Roaster’s Pick (rotating club, randomized and seasonal).
Headline with subscription benefits
All program marketing should lead with subscription benefits (see above), but running campaigns with subscription-benefit headliners is a great way to get your customer base familiar with subscription logistics and benefits in a branded manner. Take a look at Dr. Barbara Sturm’s email campaign below, with the main callout to “never miss a drop” drawing from one of subscriptions’ biggest value propositions, continuity.
Now that we’ve discussed general program marketing best practices, we’ll jump into specific campaigns we’ve seen particular success with.
Target one-time purchasers of subscription eligible products
Targeting past one-time purchasers of your products is essential. Why? Existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products from your brand; and 31% more likely to increase their average order value (AOV). Especially if the customer has purchased the same product more than once, they’ve already exhibited subscriber-adjacent behavior and should be encouraged to take advantage of the additional benefits subscriptions have. Take a look at our SMS follow-up example below:
You can set up these flows to hit your customers at a specified cadence post receiving their one-time purchase. You should particularly target customers who’ve reviewed your products with positive ratings and are thus more likely to purchase again.
Promote subscriptions in post purchasing emails
Similar to the aforementioned one-time purchaser targeting, post purchasing emails are a great way to engage customers at their most open-minded state. Post purchasing emails, however, hit inboxes immediately after a customer purchases a product with your brand (rather than a delayed period of time afterwards). Because they send at such an engaged time of a purchasing journey, post purchasing emails have open rates almost 17% higher than the average email automation. Take advantage of this increased engagement period to promote subscriptions to both one-time and subscription customers.
One-time transaction post-purchasing emails are relatively straightforward. You can read more about those best practices from our friends over at Klaviyo here; but you might be wondering what post-purchasing emails look like for subscribers.
Subscription transactional emails cover everything from the moment a subscription is created, to amending orders or swapping products. But these emails are also great opportunities to promote/market relevant offers, too (we went over Order Reminder email promotional opportunities in this module). Two of these emails, the “bulk subscription started” and “order placed” emails, can be considered a type of post-purchasing email, in which you can embed cross-sell opportunities and include a link to a subscription-eligible product landing page, like the example below:
Promote new benefits and functionalities
You’re bound to make changes to your subscription program over time. Our CSMs work closely with brand teams to implement subscription best practices strategies to improve key performance indicators like order retention and acquisition; and we’re constantly adding new features and functionalities to our end-subscriber experience.
Your team puts a lot of effort and time into curating these offers (well, you should. Here’s a good intro to getting started if you’re still thinking that through!) - so anytime you change it, you should let your subscribers know. Leverage it to your advantage and include non-subscribers as well; enticing them with the new offer(s) available exclusively to subscribers.
Here’s a great example from Skinceuticals:
You should also market new functionalities once adding them to your program. For example, if introducing the ability to swap between subscription products (more on that here), you should notify your current subscribers of their new option and continuously educate them on those options, like this Stumptown example:
Promote most subscribable categories
When choosing which subscription products to promote, you should strategically highlight most subscription-friendly products, like Tatcha’s refills campaign below:
Or general routine items, such as coffee and skincare - which are both items that customers use regularly and would thus benefit from continuity orders for. Stonewall Kitchen does this well for their coffee line below:
And La Roche Posay promotes daily suncare routines alongside their auto-replenishment program:
Subscriber-exclusive campaigns
Exclusive benefits are enticing for many reasons, but the main one to consider is the consumer psychology behind FOMO (fear of missing out). FOMO can create a sense of urgency and drive impactful conversion. Leverage this sense of exclusivity and offer subscriber-exclusive promotions, products, sales, and other benefits. A creative way to do this is via a subscriber-exclusive recipe to leverage a subscription eligible product, like the viral Sleepy Girl Mocktail campaign below:
Comparison Campaigns
Sometimes, showing people a side-by-side can be more convincing than simply listing benefits out. Target repeat one-time purchasers or promotion-favoring shoppers with explicit value-proving messaging like the below comparative of a subscriber vs. one-time purchaser from CBDistillery.
Seasonal and holiday promotions
For gift-heavy holidays such as Mother’s Day, Christmas, or Valentine’s Day, you should promote subscribable gifting options, like La Colombe’s Mother’s Day Prepaid subscription SMS example below:
For more on gifting subscriptions and holiday promotions, take a look at our BFCM subscription best practices module here.
📝 Try it now!
- Here’s a general overview of our Klaviyo integration, and our “Recipebook” of commonly used email flows and actions with our Klaviyo integration.
- Here’s a general overview of our Attentive integration.
- Here’s our Webhooks 2.0 overview. Use Webhooks to configure custom ESP integrations and act on key subscriber actions and subscription data.