Dose #114: Beef Up Retention with These Email Templates

Matt here with your weekly Subscription Prescription 💊

This week’s dose is about sending better emails to subscribers. We cover how to improve upcoming order notifications and use a welcome series to improve retention. I’ve also got 8 email templates you can grab to make this process easier for you.

This week’s dose is also a podcast! Listen or watch on your favorite platform:

B2B Subscriptions Are Possible

Running subscriptions for B2B customers is complicated.

The complexity comes from how different a B2B customer is from a B2C one. With B2B orders, you typically see larger orders, need unique pricing or discounting rules, and want to review + approve orders before processing, to name a few differences.

Subscription apps struggle to reconcile these differences, but creating a dynamic, powerful, and mostly automated subscription program is possible.

Nimbus Dental accomplished this by using QPilot’s Autoship Cloud app, Shopify Plus, and Riess Group, a leading Shopify dev agency.

The result is a unique program that lets B2B users manage recurring orders through a typical subscription portal experience. Nimbus can also customize this experience to work best for its business and its B2B customers.

If you’re working on a B2B subscription program, want to learn more about the ins and outs of what makes it complicated, or read how this solution works for Nimbus Dental, you can read all about it in a blog article.

Read on to see how you, too, could craft the ideal B2B Subscription experience.

Email. Almost every subscription brand treats email for subscribers similarly: they avoid it.

Many will still send order notification emails but hate them because it sparks churn.

You may be practically spamming one-time users, but when they become a subscriber, the emails disappear.

While this makes sense in the short term, in the long run, this strategy misses some massive opportunities.

In this week’s dose, we’ll explore how to make the most of your emails, including some free templates/examples you can use.

Let’s dive in!

Upcoming Order Emails

The best place to start improving emails for subscribers is the upcoming order email. This is most likely the only email you’re sending month after month, so let's review some simple ways to improve it.

First, you need to stop using the default templates from your subscription app. You’re generally restricted in what you can put into this email, so moving it over to Klaviyo or Sendlane is a great step #1.

Second, invest some time in making this email feel less transactional. You’re excited to send them another subscription shipment; how can you make the customer feel some of that excitement, too?

Can you remind people of the benefit they’re getting in this email? “Another month of peaceful sleep is headed your way!” or “Ready for another month of great activities for your kids?” Use the team or ChatGPT to help brainstorm some ideas.

Making this fun and on-brand is the goal here. Invest a little time in great copy.

The next step is to remind customers of any extra benefits of their subscription. This can be price, a gift, or another element of your subscription offer.

For example, iHeartDogs reminds subscribers how many shelter pets this next order will feed.

The final must-have piece is how you link to the subscription portal if they want to make changes. Again, this is a great spot to make this feel less transactional; don’t lead with “Click here to make changes to your portal.”

I prefer more broad or general language, like “At Trader Joey’s, we value personalization. Remember that if you need to adjust the schedule of your order or the flavor you’re getting, you can make that change here.”

The extra piece is adding an upsell or two to this email.

Welcome Emails

One of the biggest misses for most brands in terms of retention is the lack of a great welcome series for new subscribers.

They made an order, and now you’re hoping that a discount and the occasional gift will keep them subscribed for the next ten years. What if they don’t end up using the product? What if there’s something they don’t understand?

When customers cancel with ‘too much product,’ is that because they just ordered too much or never used it in the first place?

A great email welcome series is your first line of defense in retention.

The first week after an order is a great time to send emails about the product, how to use it, how it’s formulated, more about your story…, and everything you can to get them excited and educated on product usage.

Driving product adoption into a subscriber’s routine is the best way to increase retention.

So, as a special gift with this email, I’ve got 8 email templates you can grab for ideas on what you should be sending. You can grab that document here:

Your big opportunity here is two-fold: overcome common objections or questions while explaining how it works and tell a story about the product/brand.

Take a little time and scan through those templates. I created a fictitious gluten-free bread company as an example.

Final Thoughts

There are two simple ways you can improve the health of your subscription program TODAY:

1. Customize the subscription upcoming order email

2. Write a compelling email welcome series for new subscribers

Doing both of these things well will allow you to communicate with subscribers while improving retention simultaneously! This is a great opportunity that is worthy of some time this week.

That’s it for this week! Stay tuned for next dose #115 out next Tuesday.

 - Matt Holman 🩺

The Subscription Doc