Dose #95: Profitability That Lasts

Matt here with your weekly Subscription Prescription 💊

This week’s dose is about the power of a great offer. When you focus on creating value for customers, profitability follows. We learn from what XEndurance does to drive 2x higher LTV for their program members compared to other customers.

Subscription brands without an upsell offer are losing 10-15% of possible revenue from every order.

That’s because upsells signal higher intent, buy-in, and long-term commitment to the subscription. And you can add upsells in just a few clicks with the OneClickUpsell app. 

OneClickUpsell is already the #1 upsell app for over 18,000 Shopify stores including brands like Tushy, Dr. Squatch, Buffy, and Victoria Beckham—and guess what? It’s made an extra $670 million in upsell revenue for merchants just like you. In fact, the average OneClickUpsell user boosts their TOTAL sales by 10–15% as soon as they set it up their free trial! 

OneClickUpsell has more features—and more offer placements—than other upsell apps on the market. So you get your pick of state-of-the-art features like interactive popups, on-page widgets, subscriptions, and their brand new A.I. powered upsells. 

Plus, you can easily run split tests inside OneClickUpsell so you can quickly find the most lucrative upsells for your specific Shopify store. 

So it’s no surprise that OneClickUpsell has already made merchants like you over half-a-billion dollars (that’s BILLION with a “B”!) in extra upsell revenue. Or as one of their 18,000 happy customers said, downloading OneClickUpsell on your store is “literally printing free money.”

It’s so easy to get started. You can install the app, launch your first upsell funnel, and start making 10–15% more sales today, in just 10 minutes or less.

Get started with OneClickUpsell.

This week’s dose is also a full interview with the CFO and Cofounder of XEndurance, Thor Kellin. We dive deep into their offers, memberships, and how they 2x the LTV of their members compared to retail customers.

Acquiring customers is only the start. Real revenue and scaling a business comes from customers spending more and more with you over time.

You don’t build something like this overnight, and XEndurance is a perfect example of this. A few years ago they backed off of the typical e-commerce model, eliminating their Amazon listings and wholesale options so they could focus on owning the customer experience.

This was a big risk, but it was done with a reason. They believed they could offer more value - and capture more value in return - by owning that experience.

It’s working! I’m going to outline how they’ve grown and found profitable customers through a compelling membership program.

A New Membership Experience

XEndurance needed a website that emphasized the right buyer journey. Instead of treating memberships like an additional offer, they wanted it to be the focus.

This is what their product page looks like now for their flagship product:

They do acquire subscribers, but the clear winning offer here is the membership. It gives you the best discount PLUS a host of other perks. Things like:

• 25% off sitewide

• $100 in product credits

• Free US Shipping on all orders

• Partner perks, like discounts from Thrive Market, Classpass, and Whoop

All for $95.

The membership does a few things. First, it provides revenue upfront for the business, so they don’t have to wait for multiple orders to be profitable for a customer. Second, it promotes more spending. Even though members get $100 in product credits, they are spending much more. Third, members buy more frequently than other customers.

Members are worth 2x the LTV of nonmembers. That’s a huge difference!

You can make more from customers with a few obvious and tested methods. Upsells are a great place to start (see the mention of OneClickUpsell above). Subscriptions are another to lock in additional purchases and higher LTV. Email marketing is powerful. Memberships are profitable too.

Thor Kellin, XEndurance’s CFO, says they are obsessed with providing more value through the membership. They even launched a new skincare line so that they could have more products to offer members!

How do you know when to do what? How do you make the right offer at the right time? You have to figure that out, and it isn’t done overnight.

Selling Without Discounts

The product page above mentions discounts for subscriptions and the membership, but XEndurance doesn’t use discounts outside of these to motivate purchases.

On their landing pages they use something different - $25 product credits. When you buy from a landing page, you aren’t getting a discount so much as you’re getting a free product, or credit off additional products.

Focusing on Memberships

It isn’t that memberships are the north star for profitability. It’s about focus: knowing where the ideal customer is, and building offers to captivate them again and again.

By focusing on owning all their sales through the website, by pushing the membership as the clear winner with their website, copy, and offers, XEndurance is activating the right kind of customers - those that spend more with them.

There are a lot of other ways to do this. In-cart upsells like OneClickUpsell (see above), email upsells, subscriptions, add-ons… you can do a lot to get customers to spend more with you.

As you test different options, keep in mind that you want to make a clear path forward for the best customers. XEndurance has subscriptions, for example, with plenty of customers who don’t want anything more than the product with their discount.

But the ideal customer finds that membership and sees incredible value. That should always be the goal for your program - build the path for the profitable customers.

That’s it for this week’s dose. If you’re struggling to build a better subscription or membership experience, hit reply and ask for help. I’m here for you. Stay tuned for Dose #95 next Tuesday!

 - Matt Holman 🩺

The Subscription Doc