Dose #72: Quick tips to help acquisition or retention

Matt here with your weekly Subscription Prescription 💊

Need a quick subscription tip? This week's dose is coming to you from a conference, so it contains conference-style tidbits. Read on to learn what you can do right now to improve your acquisition and retention strategies, no matter the size of your brand.

This dose is coming to you straight out of San Diego and the Commerce Roundtable conference put on by Sendlane. With so many great minds and operators in one place, it's hard not to feel inspired.

Like any great conference session, I want you to walk away with 1 or 2 things you can do better today. I'll list some opportunities on both the acquisition and retention side of things. There is an example of what to do whether you're a large brand or small.

Acquisition

Small brands: the hardest part about growing subscriptions when your brand is young is that you don't have a ton of traffic or orders to test out different offers on. So, instead of thinking about all the ways you could improve the product page, you need to nail down that initial offer.

The real test is getting better at content for paid ads, social, or SEO. Developing a strong process for creating and publishing content will take your subscription program further than tweaking the subscription offer. Focus on getting your brand in front of more people.

Large brands: the biggest mistake you can make is keeping everything the same for everyone. Imagine an amusement park that opens with a single ride. That's fine for a smaller audience, but the more people that come in the door, the more you need to offer them.

You can start by releasing new products with different offers, bundles, and upsells across the board. You can also look into more creative loyalty and membership options. Look for ways that will let customers self-select themselves as wanting a VIP experience.

The goal here is to drive greater profitability without overcomplicating everything.

Retention

Small brands: the name of the game here is personalization. At a smaller size, you should spend time talking to subscribers regularly. Understand what is working and what isn't working for them. Look for ways to personalize that experience as much as possible.

This hands-on approach will give you two big opportunities: the first is taking that feedback and turning it into ways you can improve. The second opportunity is taking those insights and turning them into content - ads, and articles that talk about why what you offer works.

Large brands: lean into your data. With over 1,000 subscribers, you get a lot of data around churn, buyer preference, common frequencies, what upsells work, why people buy, and from where.

Start digging deeper into that data. What products are bought first most often? What products make the best upsell? At what point do customers add more to their subscriptions? What offers are working the best to keep them around longer?

If you don't already have a good process in place for collecting and consolidating this data - including post-purchase and cancellation surveys - then put one in place. Create a holistic, overarching view of how your subscription program works. At scale, you can start segmenting subscribers in such a way as to understand the increasing nuance of what's going on for different customers.

This means you can market to those segments differently as well. That's where the real profit comes from.

That's it for this week's dose! I hope you found something fundamentally useful in this dose. If you're ever looking for inspiration or ideas, please hit reply and ask away.

Stay tuned next week for Dose #73.

- Matt Holman 🩺

The Subscription Doc