Dose #73: Subscription Website Teardowns

Matt here with your weekly Subscription Prescription 💊

Last week I participated in a live teardown of multiple ecommerce sites selling subscriptions with a few other experts. In this week’s dose, I share that recording and give you the recap of what we found that works - and a lot of what doesn’t.

In case you missed it - last week I sat in on a live teardown of multiple ecommerce sites offering subscriptions. You can grab the link to the 1.5-hour presentation below, or read on for my synopsis of some great ideas to make your subscription site better.

I won’t take credit for all this incredible knowledge. On the webinar, I joined Jay Myers, the co-founder of Bold Commerce, Chris George, the CEO of SubSummit, and Andriy Rudnyk, the Founder of Good Subscription Agency. All established veterans in the space.

For reference, you can check out some of the sites we tore down here:

Clean Haven Naturals sells candle subscriptions.

Whisky Drop sells different types of whiskey, including a drink of the month club.

Aqua Omega sells Omega-3 supplements.

FreshPatch sells all-natural grass training pads for pets.

The Homepage

One of the big dilemmas in ecommerce is how to build a great homepage. If you have one product, then the homepage becomes a glorified product page. But when you have multiple products, it can be difficult to find the right one(s) to highlight.

Several of the sites we viewed had too much clutter on their homepage. It should be clear at a glance what you’re offering to site visitors. Even if you have multiple products, you should focus on the biggest outcome available or the most popular product.

Use only one hero image and a consistent call to action throughout the home page. “Shop Now” is pretty standard, and you can get a bit more creative if you want to be on brand (think ‘Get Hydrated’ for a hydration product). You can add a secondary call to action, like ‘Take the Quiz’ or ‘See How it Works’ if that fits with your offering.

Quizzes are a great way to get instant engagement with site visitors. Most ecom sites are about frictionless, quick sales, but quizzes are for customers looking for answers or help on their purchase journey. Subscriptions are a great fit for quizzes.

Homepages need to tell a bit of a story, if not with so many words, then with beautiful imagery that links back to outcomes. If you’re selling coffee, for example, you can have images of the product itself, but lifestyle images showing someone just waking up to a great cup of your coffee goes a long way too.

Finally, don’t overthink the navigation bar on your homepage. Jay Myers brought up several times that any items on your nav bar should lead directly to sales. Don’t overcomplicate it. Use the footer for all the extra links.

The Product Page

We covered a lot on product page design, and that’s something I’ve covered a lot in past doses. In fact, a recent podcast episode walks through a lot of best practices you can implement on your store:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-optimize-product-page-design-selling-subscriptions/id1703680719?i=1000628421246

The biggest opportunity I see for brands looking to improve their product pages comes down to the offer. What are people buying, for how much, how often, and what extras come with it? Think more outside of the box than free shipping and a discount. What else comes with a subscription?

That’s it for this week’s dose! If you want to watch the webinar and see what we discussed for each of the sites mentioned above, you can access the recording here:

LINK TO THE RECORDING: https://vimeo.com/867263750/90bb6e28d1?share=copy

Stay tuned for Dose #74 next Tuesday!

- Matt Holman 🩺

The Subscription Doc