Dose #205: Your BFCM Subscription Playbook Starts in the Summer

Matt here with your weekly Subscription Prescription 💊

BFCM is right around the corner, what are you doing to prepare? In this week’s dose we’re diving into what you can do now over the summer to be ready. Mine your existing subscriptions for high-ltv combos, talk to your customers, and test more offers. Let’s go!

This week’s newsletter is also a full podcast, so you can listen or read at your convenience:

Matt here with your weekly Subscription Prescription 💊

Black Friday is months away.

Which means right now is exactly when most subscription brands are doing nothing about it.

That's a mistake.

The brands that win BFCM aren't the ones scrambling in October to throw together a 50% off sitewide deal. They're the ones who spent the summer building the foundation. The offers, the data, the testing frameworks. All of it ready before the fall rush.

Today I'm walking through three things you should be working on right now so that when November hits, you're not painting yourself into a corner.

The Problem With "Just Discount Everything"

Here's how most brands approach BFCM subscriptions.

They already offer 15-20% off to subscribe. Then the season rolls around and they try to layer on more. Sitewide 40% off. But what does that mean for subscriptions?

Do you match the sitewide discount? Then there's no incentive to subscribe over a one-time purchase. Do you stack on top of it? Can you even afford 60%?

You get boxed in.

The goal this summer is to build a smarter, more intentional approach. One where you're not defaulting to the biggest number you can stomach. You're leading with compelling offers rooted in what actually works for your customers.

Here's how.

1. Mine Your Subscription Data for High-LTV Combos

Start with what you already have.

Pull a CSV of your subscription orders. If your platform lets you segment by top-selling products or combos, use that. If not, export the data and drop it into Claude, ChatGPT, or any LLM. Start asking simple questions about what's performing.

What you're looking for: product combinations that outperform individual products on LTV.

If product A when bought with product D retains longer than product A alone, that's a signal. That combo is already telling you something about buyer intent and satisfaction. Those are the offers you want to build around.

Once you've identified your top combos, build specific, aggressive offers around them. Not a flat 20% off sitewide. Something more like:

• Subscribe to A, get B free for your first month

• Subscribe to A and B together, get 50% off month one

These combo-specific offers are more compelling than generic discounts. And they're targeted at the customers who are already your best subscribers.

Takeaway: Your best BFCM subscription offer might already exist in your data. Find the combos with strong LTV and build around them.

2. Talk to Your Customers (Before October)

Post-purchase surveys and cancel flows can only take you so far. They give you data points, but rarely context. You can't ask follow-up questions. You can't probe.

A good friend of mine, Brian Stark at 100 Celsius, has built a tool specifically for this called Customer Conversations (customerconversations.co). It uses AI to conduct real phone conversations with customers, triggered by Klaviyo flows around specific events. Someone cancels, you send a link. They opt in, give their number, and an AI calls them to have an actual conversation.

The result: 5 to 15-minute calls where customers tell you what they actually think.

We had Bella from Space Goods on a few months back. She shared how Space Goods figured out through customer conversations that the way people made their mushroom coffee directly affected whether they stuck around. Once they nailed the "perfect cup" guidance, first-month LTV went up significantly. Small insight. Big impact.

For BFCM prep, the two moments that matter most are the first unboxing and product experience, and the cancellation moment.

The first tells you what people love and what's confusing. The second tells you what failed and what could have been clearer.

Both give you material to fix your product page, sharpen your onboarding, and design better offers before the fall rush.

Takeaway: You can't build a compelling offer around a problem you don't understand. Talk to your customers now, while you have time to act on what you learn.

3. Build Your Offer Testing Flywheel This Summer

If offer testing isn't a muscle you're currently exercising, summer is when you build it.

Not because summer is slow. Because summer gives you enough runway to actually learn something before November.

Start with the combos and customer insights from the first two steps. Build landing pages around different offer structures. Replo is great for this as you can stand up variations quickly without a heavy engineering lift.

What to test:

• Bulk options (pre-selling two or three months upfront)

• Gift with purchase tied to specific combos

• Aggressive first-month discounts on high-LTV bundles

• Different price points for the same combo

Here's what most brands miss when they test: they only look at conversion rate.

That's not enough.

Track first and second month LTV for each offer. An offer that converts slightly lower but retains significantly better is often more valuable than the one with the highest initial conversion.

If you find an offer that converts 10% less than your best performer but keeps people around twice as long, that's your BFCM offer. You take that one into November.

Takeaway: Start testing now so you're not guessing in October. Look at conversion AND early LTV. The winner isn't always the one that converts the most. It's the one that retains the best.

Bottom Line

BFCM is the biggest acquisition window of the year. But acquisition without retention is expensive.

The brands that win aren't the ones who discount the hardest. They're the ones who show up with intentional, data-backed offers that attract the right subscribers and keep them around past month two.

You have the summer to build that. Start with your data. Talk to your customers. Test your offers.

By October, you'll know what works. And you won't be scrambling.

Until next Tuesday, that’s your Subscription Prescription. 💊

 - Matt Holman 🩺

The Subscription Doc