Dose #93: How More Wine Improved Retention for WINC

Matt here with your weekly Subscription Prescription 💊

This week’s dose is about user experience. When you spend time learning what people do with the product, how often they use it, and what they want from it, churn lowers and conversions increase. We will cover examples of how this works and ways you can gather information.

If you’re trying to hire talent for your e-commerce business, then I highly recommend looking at fractional talent. It’s how I get so much done as a subscription consultant, and it can be more affordable and effective than full-time hires.

There’s a new place in town to get the work done that you need, and it’s with The Starters. Go check them out for fractional roles in growth, creative, operations, and more at https://hirethestarters.com.

This week’s dose is more than just how WINC turned around their subscription business. It’s a full interview with their former CMO, Jai Dolwani, and you can catch the full dose here:

The single biggest improvement to retention you can make is aligning customer expectations with customer experience.

This week’s dose dives into how WINC improved retention by adding more bottles of wine to their monthly subscription box.

The story may seem simple, but the effect was profound and can also be for your business.

How WINC Started

WINC started out as a monthly wine club to develop and sell their own wines. Their D2C business focused on allowing experienced wine drinkers to discover more bottles aligned with their preferred flavor profiles.

Like many businesses during COVID, WINC boomed with people ordering more and more things delivered to their homes.

They excelled at getting people in the door with fun offers, interesting ads, and heavy discounts.

The goal for them - and like many other subscription brands - is to get someone to try it, and you can then work to keep them around.

As WINC grew and ultimately went public, they discovered how hard it is to keep someone who came in on a discount purchasing repeatedly.

Selling is one thing - selling for a long-term subscriber is different.

How WINC Improved Retention

There is rarely one single thing that improves retention. There are multiple touchpoints, tests to run, offers to make, and more to keep customers returning.

WINC did one of the most impactful things I’ve seen for subscription brands, and that’s aligning customer experience with customer expectations.

New WINC customers were sold on a world of wine - tons of variety and discovery each and every month.

The actual experience, however, proved limiting. Even with 30 wines to choose from, because of different flavor profiles, some people could go through everything they might like in 1 or 2 months.

To fulfill their marketing promise and improve the customer experience, WINC added 3rd party wines to their platform. This increased their SKU count from 30 to 100.

By solving one of the biggest expectations customers came into WINC with, they were able to drastically improve retention.

Looking for ways to improve subscriber retention? Schedule a free chat to learn more about my consulting services. Even a quick conversation will help shorten your learning curve. Schedule time with me here.

Finding the Right Focus

One of the things I harp on all the time in this content and in my consulting is simplifying your focus. You may sell 10 different products, but if one is a clear winner on retention, focus on that.

Focus is a fun word because we’re constantly bombarded by things that distract us from that focus.

So, if you’re looking for what to focus on with your customer experience to improve retention too, think about these things:

• Are your subscribers new to this type of product or experience?

• Have they tried something like this before?

• What are customers expecting to happen with your product?

• What’s the learning curve or time it takes to make your product a habit?

• How many people try it once or twice and don’t return to it again?

Diving into the customer experience will let you uncover opportunities to onboard subscribers better so they love your product and keep using it. If you find gaps - either in the product or the experience itself - you can take steps to fix them.

Keep looking for ways to overdeliver on the subscription experience.

That’s it for this week’s dose. Stay tuned for Dose #94 next Tuesday!

 - Matt Holman 🩺

The Subscription Doc