Name: The Subscription Guide to Winning BFCM
Uploaded: 2025-10-08T18:16:04.465Z
Duration: 1 h 3 min 52 s
Description: The Subscription Guide to Winning BFCM

Transcript for "The Subscription Guide to Winning BFCM": A couple of things already backstage, and I was told I have to do some stand up, while we wait. So I'm just gonna use chat g p t, to write me some jokes on the spot. I actually haven't really done this, so this is live. Thankfully, my Chat GPT knows a lot about subscriptions because that's basically my secret best friend, that I get to talk to about my subscription madness. So I'm gonna ask you to give me some jokes, and we'll see how that turns out, while we kill some time. So give me three ecommerce subscription jokes. More puns, the better. What we got here? Okay. Chat g p t is giving us chat g p t difficulties. That's awesome. And we'll try the four point o model. And chat g p t just refuses. Okay. You know what? I'll spare you all all of that. Maybe that's the side that we should probably just get to the webinar, which is exactly what we're gonna do. I'm getting thumbs up backstage that we are pretty much good to go. And, so I'll start off with no further ado. So my name is Andriy. I am the founder of Good Subscription Agency, and, what we do is, I help Shopify brands fundamentally grow recurring revenue by implementing good, transparent, flexible customer centric subscription experiences. I fundamentally, I'm a subscription nerd, but what I do a lot of the times is we design websites to optimize for subscriber acquisition, onboarding emails, unboxing inserts, upcoming order notifications, cancel flows, and all of those things. Like I said, I'm a subscription nerd. So fundamentally, that's why, I'm very excited to actually chat to three leading brands, in the subscription space today to really fundamentally pick their brain, because it's more very self serving for me, about the kind of the toughest time in the subscription, in the subscription industry, but also in the ecommerce industry. And it's specifically Black Friday, but also Black Friday of twenty twenty five. So we'll and, we'll get to that in a second. One thing that I did wanna kick off, with is that we're gonna do a little bit of introduction. So at first, kinda I'll set the stage of what this webinar it's a little different than a typical Black Friday webinar. We'll do a merchant round table where we'll spend fifteen, twenty minutes talking about the exact challenges of Black Friday and how these brands have, managed to grow and and still actively deal with these challenges. But also but we'll cover more tactical. Like, we still pack this webinar with very tactical, actionable advice that you can just take and implement on your side right away, for this black Friday season. So very, very, very, very packed hour. And just to start off with an intro, to and kind of set the stage for this whole talk. I actually had a funny experience yesterday. I was went out to get a new webcam, and, the clerk took forever to find the webcam in the back. So the cashier asked me, I was like, hey. What do you like this webinar? What are you doing? Because I was told there was, you know, a new webcam for a webinar. And I told her, hey. We're doing Black Friday webinar. And she's like, oh, so you're like a business coach? I was like, yeah. Kind of like that. And then she's like, oh, what kind of business? And I said, ecommerce subscriptions. And she kind of, like, paused for a second, and she was like, well, I had an online subscription to a thing once, and then, I they told me I had to call to cancel. And then I never bothered calling. So, like, for the last three years, they've been sending me emails about trying to update my old credit card info. So, I mean, subscriptions get a bad, bad wrap overall, often. And I think for many reasons because businesses are it's not to judge anybody. I'm sure, like, guilty guilty as charged. It's because business is really challenging. But the real thing is that, when Recharge reached out to me about doing this webinar, we knew that we wanted to do it a little differently because subscriptions, we all believe, on this team that subscriptions are actually the best way to grow a more sustainable, profitable way. Fundamentally, at the core of subscriptions is repeat business, and we all know that repeat business is, basically what's required and what it really incentivizes is an awesome product and an awesome customer service. So this kind of transparent, flexible, customer centric approach is really what builds is kind of built into the subscription model because you have to acquire repeat customers and keep them really happy for them to stick around and be so profitable, and that's one of the big reasons why people prioritize subscriptions. So, so fundamentally, that's what we really wanted. We have wanted to have a little mindset shift from this idea of tricking people into subscribing or just kind of, stop people from having to justify why they sell subscriptions and actually start to see it as this is the best way to grow long term and sustainably. So, at this point, I'm gonna invite on stage, Kendall from Arrae, supplements. I'm gonna invite Daniel, from carpet deodorant and Thomas from Oats overnight to talk exactly about this, the challenges of being a customer centered brand, and especially during the Black Friday Cyber Monday season. So, hey, everybody. K. I got everybody here. Do you guys wanna jump in and tell us a little bit about yourself and, the brands? Hi. Yes. I can start. My name is Kendall. I work for Ray, which focuses in supplements for unsexy problems. That is our big tagline. I work as a product manager, so I oversee our web, digital, and retention efforts here, and I'm super excited to be here today. Awesome. Hey, everyone. I'm Thomas Keller, director of ecom at Oats Overnight. We sell these awesome, oatmeal shakes that are best eaten cold. Some people try to to eat them warm as well, which is fine. You eat them warm out of the bowl. But, yeah, I'm super excited to be here today. And, Kendall, I love your I love your tagline. I did not know that. That's a good one. Yeah. It it is a brilliant one. And, again, yeah, like, really awesome amazing products. I love on, one thing that Ray does that I love is, again, calling out effects and, like, seventy five, eighty five percent of customers experience effects within sixty days on daily consumption. Like, really high quality, but also just clinically proven, but also naturopathic doctor approved, like, really awesome stuff. And Oats Overnight, you guys have been my personal, darling favorite. Not I have all everyone's a favorite, here, but, I've been using you guys as an example for acquisition funnels in many ways. So, we're really really pumped to talk to you, Thomas, too. And then, last but not least, Daniel from Carpe. Hey, everyone. I'm Daniel, head of ecommerce at Carpe. We make a highly effective antiperspirant and sweat stopping products for all over the body. I lead the full flywheel from website acquisition to, subscription retention to the customer portal and through customer service. So very excited to be here. Awesome. Awesome. K. Just getting a little everybody's mic's working good. I'm getting thumbs up. I think we should be good. Alright. So to kick it off, I wanted to start off by, again, just focusing in on at the core of subscriptions, we have this repeat business. And at the heart of repeat business is great product and a great customer service. So for all of you guys, here at the at the table, all of your brands are really high performing, and you're 70 to 80% of first time buyers choose to buy a subscription with with all of you. And that's a really high stat. Those are exceptional world class numbers. I'm really curious what made so it means that your company put in a lot of effort into getting subscribe customers to become subscribers on first purchase. I'm really curious to know what what was that decision making process or, why did your company decide to become so focused on subscriptions? And maybe some of the challenges that you had along the way, but also maybe some of the impact that it had on your team, but also on your growth. So, I'll kick it off with with Thomas maybe first. Yeah. So a couple even just a few years ago, we were we were not, like, always subscription first. We started off, like, a couple years ago just as I was kind of joining from the ecom side. I've I've worked previously in customer service, but, so what I was doing, ecom, I owe to start. We were at around thirty percent first time subscription rate and, seventy percent one time. And at that time, that looked fine. I mean, we didn't know it could be better than that. But, I was looking into the data really closely, and, a lot of these, one time customers were, you know, they were easy to acquire. They were cheap to acquire, but they didn't really repurchase at a very high clip. So they were purchasing our eight pack offering at the time, and that was by far our biggest offering. So we made a very aggressive decision to actually remove that offering altogether. So we moved to only our bigger sixteen and twenty four pack offerings. And, by doing that, we were, we were able to give a deep discount for first time subscription orders for the sixteen and twenty four pack. And almost overnight, we saw this huge shift in that first time subscription rate. We saw, it go from 30% to 60%. And then as we continue to optimize, we have it at 87% now. Wild. Yeah. And, again, you guys don't hide the one time purchase button. It's right there. Like, one one thing that I again, I use your acquisition flow as kind of a gold benchmark for that because, your your offer is very clear and simple on why you wanna subscribe. I don't still try and find better wording for it, but you almost, you kinda want people to feel stupid for not subscribing. It's like it's cancel anytime. It's zero risk. It's the best deal. You get priority service. It's like, why would you not try subscription? You guys are phenomenal at that. So, and it's really interesting because it's what I'm hearing is financials just made sense at the time. When we decided to make the shift, once and I feel like a lot of businesses are in in this spot. Customer acquisition is becoming expensive. You cannot support that funnel anymore. You need to find a more sustainable way financially. It just made more sense. Kendall. That's awesome. Daniel, do you wanna jump in here? Because that same question, I'd love to know how did you guys stumble into this idea of focusing on on repeat subscriptions and maybe some of the challenges and impact it had? Yeah. Yeah. So when I started five years ago, we were very much not a subscription brand. We had about 15% of people, who were on Firstsource subscription. And that was really a factor of us focusing on products throughout the entire body. And the difficulty with that is that you use a face deodorant and underarm antiperspirant and a hand antiperspirant at all different frequencies. So it's very difficult to get people on an upfront offer that makes a lot of sense for how often they're using it. Over the past couple years, we've moved very much towards underarm as our hero product and it just makes so much more sense. It's a product that you use every single day or every other day or twice a day. And so you everyone uses it on a very regular cadence and so it's very easy for us to just make it a natural transition and make it the natural way to buy on our website. So we focused we shifted our focus a couple years ago from being focused on deep discounts on high I AOV customers to deep discounts on subscription only customers. So yeah. Very interesting. And and so that impact, do you feel like, like, from the five years that you've you've been on, what what kind of changes have you seen? Maybe even internally, like, from a culture standpoint and just KPIs you track? Yeah. I mean, obviously, LTV increases a ton when you go subscription first, but the biggest impact that we didn't expect was the impact on customer service. So you get a lot more people. You know, originally with customer service with 15% of people on subscriptions, most of the, the tickets were just about the product, right? Asking questions about the product, which ones they should get. And it shifted a lot towards just questions about subscription. And so we really had to beef up our customer service and our retention tactics there to, you know, every time someone reaches out wanting to cancel their subscription, we can't just go and cancel it, right? So running some more retention offers there as well is something that we didn't really expect and was a huge unlock in the last couple of years. Yeah. Yeah. So what I'm hearing is that, first of all, you found the product like a hero product that the consumption rate just makes sense to offer as a subscription. Right? First of all, it's daily yogurt, unit you found here. This is our hero. We need to onboard people onto this funnel. And then that's how we know that we can get them to start with the subscription at a much higher rate. And the product is kind of the consumption made sense. Makes perfect example. I love that. Kendall, at least last but not least, I'd love to hear from you. Same thing. I know that the brand hasn't started up probably I mean, it's a very natural fit, obviously, supplements. But, I'm curious what that, what that looks like, especially from a product management standpoint, like the priority shifts and and and the challenges that you might have seen. Yeah. So we started very much a subscription first business with a pill a day, a supplement a day for thirty days. It was a direct fit. That being said, as we work to increase our SKU portfolio, we started introducing other supplemental products that are more situation based. So it's not just one capsule a day and it's more as you need. When we introduced that, we really had to reframe how do we work this into the business, and we even played around with not prioritizing subscriptions as much and trying to do more short term AOB plays. That being said, we've come back to know that subscriptions are the backbone of our business 100%, and the LTV tied to subscriptions is one of the most important things you can build. So it's really for us of, like, continuing to prioritize subscriptions, knowing that is the number one priority while still not forcing somebody to be on a subscription if the product or the use case doesn't make sense, and it's more how do you still focus on value and AOV of that customer otherwise. Yeah. I I love that because that really highlights kind of the typical challenge. I, when I deal with brands, a lot of that is through that transition. I help brands go from offering maybe subscriptions kind of as an afterthought and then going into, oh, LTV is the new king and then everything goes subscription only and then they realize, hold on. We can't just force everybody into a subscription. We need to have a good one time purchase experience as well. So, it's a it's a very natural process. And and again, yeah, it's like everybody kinda rides that way. I get questions of like, how long does this transition typically take? Like, this is some growing pains. But I feel like maybe about a year once you go through Black Friday as that, I feel like that's a really, a really trialing challenging time, but, also, character build. K. I love that. I don't wanna move on from that question because I'd love to hear all the backs because I know that there's so much cool stuff that goes on internally with companies on teams. But, moving on to question two, Black Friday, Cyber Monday typically comes with so much promotional FOMO, especially on the team side. Right? It's like, are we gonna get the customer? Are we gonna hit, like, our top line, numbers? It's a real test of commitments to that LTV and that long term sustainable customer growth and profitability because discounts and profit, right, they're literally counterbalancing each other. So, I'd love to hear how do you guys structure your BFCM offers to, first of all, not to have, like, cause customer churn right away, you know, and acquire bad low commitment subscribers, but also not piss off your current subscribers. That's a real, real challenge that I don't even have great answers for. So I'd love to hear what kind of you guys tested and played around with to whatever the reason of success. But, yeah. And, you know what? Let's start off with, let's start off with Kendall first, though. Yeah. One thing we saw is exactly the problem you were saying. You know, you have these high value subscribers that may be joined in their own personal promotional period. They've been with you for a long time. They've given you a lot of LTV, and then maybe as the business beefs up, the next year you have an even better offer that they weren't able to capture. And one thing you see happens is your current subscribers will maybe unsubscribe to resubscribe again and kind of do that gamification of offers. Something we found very helpful was just actually communicating that through some of the CS outreach that Daniel focused actually communicating that through some of the CS outreach that Daniel focused on. Like, we heard in our CS team that these subscribers were unhappy, feeling that they weren't seeing the value as new acquisition customers, and we actually went ahead and utilized some of Recharge's credit systems and offered current subscribers additional credits if they purchased anything during a Black Friday, Cyber Monday period. So, basically, you're currently with us. Hey. If you get anything at this discount, we'll give you an additional credit because you've been with us. And that's something that we saw really effective to just honor the subscribers while still being very cost conscious, keeping it in the ecosystem, and resulting in that gamification turn churn. Yeah. Yeah. A perfect example. I personally personally for me, I had a great first experience. It was AG one had, like, a promo that I was like, this is exactly how you would do it, exactly the same as yours. Hey. If you just place an order within that Black Friday period as a subscriber, you'll get the free, you know, the free sign up promo that you got whenever you signed up. If we, d vitamin d. I can't remember. D k two. I not, not as deep into the supplement game as I should be probably because it's kind of important. But, yeah. So it's like place an order within that time frame, and you'll get the same promotion as everybody else. And and they framed it as, hey, subscriber. This is a deal just for you. So I love, I love how you guys handle that. Daniel Nunn, same same question to you. It's like how do you how do you structure those promotions and to make sure customers don't churn and also existing customers are not pissed? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if your goal is to have a similar LTV on your Black Friday customers, it's just not gonna happen, right? Like, you have to just prepare for that and how you spend on marketing and how you, you know, send your emails out. You're gonna be getting a lot of lurking customers who aren't purchasing on a regular basis. You're waiting for that really good offer to come through their email or their, you know, text message. And you just kind of have to factor that into the math, right? These customers aren't necessarily less sticky. They're just really value oriented. And so, you know, like Kendall Singer Cook said, we're giving them credits. We're giving them extra lifetime discounts. Just trying to keep them, you know, in it for the long term with that value. But, you know, if you're a consumable product, if you're a CPG product, like Black Friday for a lot of us isn't the best time of the year. It isn't our, you know, it isn't our Super Bowl. And so don't overdo it just because you think you have to. Right? That's that's kinda like the big the big takeaway. Yeah. I think it's like don't don't bet the farm on it and, exactly. You had you have to bake that into the expectations of your projections and that you're gonna acquire lower commitment customers through Black Friday. One way that I always like to frame it's like, you want to make subscriptions the best time to subscribe to become a subscriber. Right? So it's like, you'll still get the best deal of the year, but you will still get a lock in and discount for the rest of the year. That's one of the, you know, good core messages. So, perfect. There great reality check on that. Thomas, same question to you. And I know you have a contrarian view on this, so that's why I left left you for last. How do you guys think about Black Friday, Cyber Monday promotions and without pissing off, like, without, pissing off your current subscribers? So, yeah, we we have a lot of strong thoughts on this one. Given what we sell, you know, it's it's a breakfast product, relatively low AOV, and it's also it's something we're hoping people will kind of eat on a daily basis or, you know, several times a week and not just kind of eat on occasion during, you know, like a promotional period. We we really we don't offer a lot of discounts for Black Friday Cyber Monday. We actually will often pull back spend during this time. During this time How much will you pull back spend typically? That if that really that varies a lot. Not like a crazy amount, but, like, tax are usually just somewhat higher. So, you know, basically, the cost to acquire customer during this time is just a little more. And oftentimes, the customers, you know, during this time are probably just more value seeking and maybe a little less valuable in general. So it's like we it's not like we cut spend altogether, but we might pull back, like, 20% or or something like that. But, we so we don't really like, as a general company philosophy, we offer a large discount exactly for first time subscription, and we really try to not offer other discounts. We do offer a discount for recurring subscription, but it's like a pretty modest discount, really. And we we kind of wanna make it enticing to subscribe any day. Whenever you're ready to try out tonight, we want you to subscribe. We don't we really don't wanna, we don't wanna teach customers to only buy during specific times or, like, buy as one time and, like, stock up during a really good sale. That's just kinda not how we've approached the business. We do offer we do offer a discount on Amazon. We do offer, like, 20% discount off all our products on Amazon for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. On that marketplace, you really kinda need to do something to to compete. But and, again, like, I think if you have, like, a high of the item, you know, if it's, like, electronic, something, you know, something where it's very meaningful to get that one purchase, yes. I would definitely, you know, really lead in here to discount. But, you know, so I think it just really kinda depends on what you're selling. Yeah. No. Makes total sense. But I think to me, like, the logic of, customer acquisition costs are generally higher because everyone's trying to compete for the same customers. And discounting furthers, you know, you pay more for the customer, you make less on the customer, because of, just the nature of the lower commitment customers makes total sense to pull back, spend, and just maybe not even didn't really incentivize any more than you need, and make any day a great day to subscribe. That's a you know, that you can put that on a sticker. I'll probably be the only one who's have that sticker, but yeah. So I love that. I love that approach, personally. So, I think that's I'm getting a a wrap up here, because I'd love to see some of the tactical examples as well, on, on exactly how to build an acquisition funnel that is that high performing and getting repeat for long term sustainable customers right out the hop. So, I'm gonna pass it on to, to Russell, and, he's gonna take us through that. Thanks, Andriy. Hey, everyone. My name is Russell from the product marketing team here at Recharge, and I'm here to talk about the best practices for how to acquire more subscribers during Black Friday Cyber Monday. So first, why focus on subscribers? Well, they're your often your most valuable customers. On average, we see subscribers being worth about three times more than non subscribers, and in some cases, more than 21 times more as valuable. And at Recharge, we give our brands the tools to make sure that influx of those new customers that come in during Black Friday become subscribers. And last Black Friday, Saturday Monday, our top brands convert over 64% of their first time customers into subscribers. And to dive deeper into this topic of subscription acquisition, I'm thrilled to welcome back Daniel from Carpe to discuss best practices for acquiring more subscribers. There you go. Thanks, Daniel. My first question for you is that Carpe is an extremely subscription focused brand with around 80% of your customers choosing subscriptions. How do you kinda optimize your website to have a subscription first mindset? Yeah. I spoke about this a little bit earlier, but, really, you need to make your website have subscription as the normal way to purchase your product. So for us, it's a CPG product, very easy. Everyone uses it every single day. And so for us, it just makes a lot of sense to make subscription the normal way to buy. Right? So that means defaulting everyone into a subscription. Right? If you make it an option, people are gonna take whatever option you give them. Another really cool tactic that we use is, we have a lot of, you know, decisions that someone used to make on this page. Right? You're choosing how many Underarm Sticks you want. You're trying to choose what scent you want. You're trying to choose whether it's a subscription or a one time purchase. And so what we do is we default everyone into a frequency that makes the most sense for our subscribers. Most customers go through an underarm stake in about four weeks. And so we have everyone start off their subscription at that four week interval, and we make it our goal in the retention place to get people on the correct frequency if that's not how they use the product. Some people use it more. Some people use it less. And so we make it a huge focus in our customer portal to, get them on the right frequency long term, and so they're a a lifetime subscriber. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I like how you put it. Making kind of subscriptions the normal way to buy and taking decision fatigue out of the equation. We see a lot of brands also on recharge being the exact same thing, kind of removing friction from removing friction by making subscribe the default option on prod pages and then kind of reinforcing that throughout the journey in places like the cart or at checkout. And I know, like, Carpe specifically has leaned on our checkout upsell feature to show that option to upgrade to subscription at checkout to convert more of those onetime buyers into subscribers. My second question for you is that moments like Black Friday and Cyber Monday bring in a ton of subscribers, but a lot of them cancel after the first order and just wanna use that discount. How do you make sure you're attracting the right subscribers who actually wanna stick around? Yeah. So number one, you need to be extremely clear about the offer upfront. Right? If you're giving someone a big discount, you know, you wanna make it super clear that it's on a subscription so they're not surprised after a month, especially, like, right after Christmas and New Year's. Everyone's looking at their budget. If if they get surprised in a month that's, you know, not a very good customer experience, you make it super clear that you're giving them this high discount to to stay on a subscription and just makes a lot of sense. Right? Number two is interesting. We actually see a lot more, customer service reach out from Black Friday customers just because they are more value oriented. Right? They are gonna be a little bit less sticky. And so we make it our goal to segment out these Black Friday, Cyber Monday customers and give them, I guess, more lifetime discounts in the retention plate and customer service as well as in the portal. So in the portal, if someone normally goes in there, maybe they get, you know, a 20% discount on the next order, a Black Friday customer might get 30% for life. Right? So just being, you know, aware of the fact that these customers are are value oriented, and so you're gonna need to kinda match you know, meet them in the middle. Right? And, specifically, what type like, what signs would you say tell you subscriber will kinda stick past that first or specifically? Yeah. The biggest thing for us is if they change their frequency. Right? If they're interacting with their subscription in the portal, they're a lifetime subscriber. And so we make it a huge focus. Like like I said, we we default everyone to a certain subscription interval that makes sense so there's no friction. But if it's not working for them, instead of just delaying them by two weeks or delaying them by four weeks, get them into the correct frequency that matches that delay, you know, the delay amount. Right? So it just if you delay people, it just pushes the problem down the road. If someone wants to they start on four weeks and they wanna delay it four weeks because they use it every other day, then get them on to an eight week frequency. Right? And so you can keep that customer for life. They don't need to go in every month and manage the subscription. It just comes shows up at the door every month, and that's how you, you know, build lifetime subscribers. Yeah. That's interesting. So it really comes down to empowerment and flexibility, encouraging those customers to manage their subscriptions early and laying them adjust their delivery frequency, which can kind of help them discover their cadence with, like, their real habits. Because, I'm guessing, like, when those customers feel like they're in control rather than they're locked in, they kinda stay a lot longer. Exactly. Yeah. My my next question for you is that when it comes to Black Friday's Cyber Monday acquisition, what types of offers or strategies have worked best for Carpe in driving those new subscribers? Yeah. So, really, our big focus during Black Friday, obviously, like, you're gonna need to send out high discounts. Right? You're competing with every other company on the market in terms of what is the highest number you can put out in someone's email or or text message. Right? And so there's a lot of competition during this time. You're gonna need to kinda buff up some of your discount offers, but, really, what we're focused on is getting, customers who purchased one time in the past, especially if they're just someone who purchased a lot or they only purchase every Black Friday. Getting them getting them into a subscription just makes a lot of sense for us and for them. And so getting them the high discount first subscription offers to, you know, either non purchasers or purchasers who only purchase one time is a big strategy that we use. And alternatively, if someone cancels their subscription and they still love your product, then get them into an offer where it's a one time purchase. Right? Some people just aren't really, you know, people have a lot of subscriptions. They don't wanna subscribe to your product. That's fine. But, you know, if you can kind of segment out those customers and get them into the right offer, make it very clear that it's a one time offer, get, you know, 600 arm sticks at one time for a certain discount, we've seen that also work very well. Yeah. We see a lot of our brands do that kinda larger subscribe and save discount on the first order, and they kinda scale it back to protect their margins. Yeah. If you kinda had to leave the audience with one last action to take to optimize their website, I know we're short on time. What would you say to help them convert more subscribers during Black Friday's Money? Just one action item. Send more emails. Send more text messages. You're competing with so many brands. So, you know, a lot of times, you're gonna send you don't wanna send too many emails because you're scared of you go getting too many unsubscribes, but Black Friday is your time to do it. So send more emails. Yep. Alright. Thank you so much, Dan. I really appreciate it. Awesome. Thank you, Russell. Before we move on, I just want to leave everyone with a a few key action items you can keep in mind when it comes to acquiring more subscribers that you can do directly in Recharge right now. So first is optimizing your buying journey for subscription conversion. So making sure again, subscription is the default option on your product pages and highlighting the value of subscriptions, throughout the customer journey, whether it's in the cart or at the checkout. The second thing is to use strategic first order discounts to drive more subscribers. So after a higher subscribe and save discount on the first order and to entice those new subscribers, and then kinda scaling back those discounts to protect your margins on those future orders. And the last thing is to personalize your campaigns. So tailor specific customer segments when building your campaigns. For example, tailoring your win back flows based on cancellation reasons, ensuring your messaging speaks directly to each customer's experience. So those are kind of the three things that you should focus on, for this Black Friday Cyber Monday. And we'll be sending out a detailed acquisition checklist, to all attendees later after the webinar wraps up, which will give step by step guides on how to put these strategies, into action. So now acquiring subscribers is incredibly important, but just as important as requiring them is retaining them. During Black Friday, Cyber Monday, your competition is likely throwing their own deals to lure your customers away, so it's crucial to have a good retention strategy in place. At Recharge, we found that across our brands, 70% of churn happens on the third order. So that's why it's important to have the right mechanisms and the strategies in place to move customers from that first order to the second to the third and beyond. And to speak more about subscription acquisition or retention in particular, I'm thrilled to welcome Kendall from Arrae. She's here to share how Arrae keeps subscribers active, engaged, and excited long after the first order. So my first question for you, Kendall, is that brands tend to see a surge in new customers and subscribers during Black Friday Cyber Monday. How does Arrae get those new subscribers to stick around after that first order? Absolutely. So like Daniel mentioned, we noticed that the subscribers in the Black Friday Cyber Monday cohort are very value based. We already have a credit and value based system for our subscribers that the more they spend with us, the more we will give back to them in savings. So we put a really strong focus in creating immediate value beyond the first purchase. Because the way we do this is in credits. So for our black Friday, cyber Monday customers, we make sure that this value is very clear and communicated in post purchase emails. So we do this quite frequently, especially with this black Friday, cyber Monday cohort. We also will work on sending them additional emails focusing on this value, and we do this before the upcoming order. So we see that most cancellations actually come in around the ten to twelve day mark before their upcoming order, so we really make sure to prime those customers beforehand and focus on the value we already have in place. I would, yeah, I would love to know specifically around Arrae loyalty program. How do you kinda keep those customers after that first order beyond just email communications? What kind of what you're doing on a from a loyalty standpoint? Yeah. Absolutely. So email is one of our biggest piece. Absolutely. We have also utilized, Recharge's SMS AI feature where we go out and text them as well, but we've also added certain customizations in our customer portal as well. So during certain periods, we have discount codes from other brands that our subscribers can access during other months. We also have particular upsells at a special offer discount in our customer portal. Some of those features that are only eligible for subscribers, so we really try to get them to go to their portal and see some of those elements versus just reaching out via, customer service to cancel. Yeah. It's great. We we've seen a lot of brands like Arrae and a lot of Recharge brands kinda use low key programs built around, things like what you said, upsells, credits to encourage that next order. It's kind of a great way to keep those customers engaged after that initial purchase. And like you said with the customer portal, there's a lot of other brands who kinda use those credits and then highlight them in their cancellation, flows and also in their customer portal to deter those customers from canceling. It seems like a small thing, but it's actually had a lot of impact for a number of brands for reducing churn and getting customers to stick around longer. Exactly. And we do exactly what you said. So featuring our credits and our discounting and our cancellation prevention is one of our really, really strong strategies. It's not the initial strategy when you go to cancel, but it will be the fallback offer often. And we found that that's one of the biggest save, opportunities when people get to that point. So, again, if somebody were to reach out via customer service, we really like to to try and direct them to that cancellation prevention portal where we really have worked to strategize it and try and save them. My second question for you is, what are some of the most common churn risk you see with customers acquired during Black Friday started money? Things like deal seekers, payment errors, and how do you kind of address them? Yeah. So we normally see deal seekers throughout this period. So we'll see a big influx of people canceling and wanting to resubscribe to get some type of discount. Kind of like I said earlier, we've done certain strategies where we will give them additional credits or something if they stay during the period. But I think it's also, speaking again on what Daniel said, this is a specific type of cohort. So it's like you shouldn't necessarily fight them knowing that they're value based cohort and, understanding that they're gonna be a deal seeker. So it's like, okay. What is your threshold for this, and where can you give them additional credits or highlight the additional discounts that you already have in place? Maybe just a little bit more than you would for an evergreen cohort. Yeah. So it's like it it makes sense. Those customers are deal seekers who are coming in. So it's making sure your attention strategies like your cancellation flow. It feels like it's giving them something to win, maybe, like, a deeper discount on their next order or some credit to kind of keep them engaged. Then on the back end, you're segmenting those Black Friday, Cyber Money customers, and recharge. So your email strategy kinda reflects that as well. So you're not treating them as long term customers, but you're warming them up and nudging them towards that next order. Yeah. Absolutely. So we utilize Recharge's cohort analysis feature quite often, both with seasonality of when we gain subscribers as well as just generally looking at our different subscription buy types and our subscription products. We have, certain offers where you can buy multiple bottles of our product at once in a subscription, and then your renewal is a few months later than every single month. And so we treat those different buy types, differently. Yeah. So what you're seeing here is this was, an offer we had where somebody, was a previous subscriber during Black Friday, Cyber Monday period instead of canceling. We offer them additional credits if they continue to purchase and continue to stay with us. Just fully trying to remind them that, like, the more you we you invest in us, the more we'll invest in you, and you don't have to gamify the system. Like, we are here for you. But, yeah, the cohort analysis tool has been really, really helpful. And, like I said, we we see very different behavior based on seasonality and different products there. Yep. That is a beautiful email, first of all. Thank you. Our our design team and our copy team is quite fabulous, so I will send them the kudos. What kind of data I know you spoke on us a little bit recently, but what kind of data and insights specifically do you use to better understand, your customer behavior during this time, and how does that shape your retention strategy? Yeah. I think so the cohort analysis is the biggest way, and then what we'll do is we'll basically look at that in line with the cancellation prevention strategy. So, one example will be we we have three month subscription product types. So you subscribe, you're subscribed for three months, your next renewal is not for three months later. So that is very different than somebody that's getting a box at their door every single month because our touch point of that customer is so much longer from when we go to the door. So we really, really have to keep them engaged throughout those three months. So what we'll do is, we will look at cancellations from a three month renewal, see why they're canceling, what are they saying, what type of, what date range are they canceling before their first renewal, and then we'll look ahead of, like, okay. When's that next three months from Black Friday Cyber Monday gonna come again? Based on the cancellation prevention, how can we prep for them these next two months before to make sure that we never get to the point where there is a large influx of cancels due to seasonality. So it's kind of prepping those cancellation flows to make sure that it's specific to that customer cohort, whether they're in that first sec first order, second order, or third order. Yeah. If you could leave the audience with kinda one action item to reduce, post Black Friday Saturday morning churn, what would it be? Kinda one last tip for everyone in the audience here. I think the biggest thing is just, like, they are a seasonal cohort, and you have to treat them as such. They they will not act the same as somebody during a standard acquisition evergreen period where they came full standard price by themselves in their own will. So you have to know that that's the case and also be okay with a little bit of higher churn, a little bit of lower profits for that particular cohort. So it's like the balance of you want to, you know, you want to treat them differently. You want to help them out as much as possible with the same day. Like, they are what they are and being okay with that to some extent. Thanks, Kendall. That was great. I feel like you shared a lot of tips that would be really useful for a lot of people in the audience on how to build a really robust, retention strategy. Awesome. Thanks so much, Russell. I appreciate it. Before I hop into q and a, which is coming up after this, I would like to share a few practical action items you can take within recharge to strengthen your retention strategy during Black Friday Cyber Monday. So the first thing is reduce friction after that initial Black Friday, Cyber Monday rush. So make it as easy as possible for customers to manage their subscriptions post sale. Many of our top brands, like Arrae, are using our new concierge SMS product, which lets customers manage your subscriptions directly through text. And it's helped a lot of our top brands deflect over 86% of cancellations simply by helping customers have a faster and more convenient way to average or to manage your subscriptions right from their fingertips. The second thing is making sure you're protecting your recurring revenue with personalization and automation. So after Black Friday, Cyber Monday, payment failures and cancellations tend to spike. So you have to make sure automation is key. Set up those targeted cancellation flows to deter customers from canceling and use a failed payment recovery tool to automatically recapture those failed payments before they turn the next month. The third thing is to reinforce loyalty before war rewards. So keeping those customers engaged beyond their first order, beyond the second order by creating a reward strategy that motivates them to stay subscribed. Offer things like offer rewards like credits are exclusive gifts for loyal customers to build that long term connection. And, again, we'll put all these tips and a few more in a retention checklist that we'll be sending out after the webinar so you can easily put them into practice. So now I'm gonna pass it back to Andriy who will take questions for anyone, or myself, right now. Awesome. Thank you, Russell. Thanks, Kendall. Thanks, Daniel. Those are, again, like I said before, there's a reason why we wanted these brands out here, world class, master class of, how you should do acquisition and retention. So perfect examples. We have, awesome long list of q and a questions here. I will invite, just well, I'll I'll address this one one by one, and then, we'll get people hop on stage to, to fill these questions with me. Thomas, I got a first question for you. So if you wanna hop on stage, so one first question that I got from the audience. When when you guys were going from thirty percent first time subscriptions to 87 now. Did you notice an increase in cancelation cancellations on, before the customer's first recurring order, so before over two? Like, was there a massive spike? And what have you guys done to mitigate that? Yeah. So this is a great question, and we definitely did notice that customers that we acquired like, so, like let me back up for a second. So you have 30% of the customers that you're acquiring as first time subscribers. These are gonna be by far the most qualified customers for, like, having a subscription. So when you, like, kinda open that pool up, like, by several times, just inherently, the eighty seventh, you know, eighty seventh percentile subscriber that you acquire is just not gonna be quite as qualified. So, yeah, the the short answer is yes. We absolutely did see this. And, it it it's kind of tricky. It's like there's I don't think there's necessarily a good way to, like, combat it. I think it's more of just, like, looking actually, looking at the overall cohort blended between one time and subscriber. Like, while each individual subscriber got a little bit less valuable, the actual average person in the cohort became way, way more valuable. So it almost like it didn't really kinda matter. Yeah. Yeah. No. I think the the stats that Russell showed about an average one time customer LTV, you know, typically, we see, you know, let's call it a $100. A typical an average subscriber would be typically across industry and vertical, what I see is two and a half to three x higher. And then an an outlier subscriber, let's call it that ideal subscriber or super fan, that 20% is like 20 to 30 times higher. And because you acquire so many more of those super fans, like, the one time flaky customers are just they kind of get lost in the app and it doesn't really make a make a big impact. No? And also, Thomas, just as a shout out. So, I understand, like, you guys, surpassed 250,000 subscribers, I feel like years ago at this point. Are you still on a good growth trajectory, like, given that you were still this anti Black Friday, anti discount model? Yeah. No. It we're we're doing we're doing very well for sure. Yeah. It's for I I did see another question come in about, like, what we do, you know, to just kinda spike sales when we it's given that, like, we're all really lean into Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And, really, for us, first quarter is our huge season. Like, people, you know, are just thinking more about being healthy, being fit, you know, to kinda having being their best selves. So we spend a lot in q one. And then kind of actually, going into q four is is usually our slowest time. Like, people are thinking about the holidays and not necessarily thinking about, like, eating a healthy breakfast. So, yes. Q one is really where we lean in. That said, about a a year and a half ago is the last time that we actually changed the offer on the main store to get, like, a deeper discount. So it's like it really is that infrequent that we we do that. Not to say we're not totally opposed to ever doing it again, but it is something like, when we do it, it is pretty, like, random. So it's not something where, like, a customer can just expect, oh, if I wait till such and such a date, they'll get a discount. Like, we intentionally do not wanna be predictable with discounts in that way. Yeah. No. I love that. I love that. And the idea of, obviously, Daniel mentioned before, it's like Black Friday is not of a Super Bowl for for this. It's truly, I think, New Year, new me q one is the real subscription growth season. And then just keeping that in mind, again, aligns so so well with your idea of, like, okay. Well, we probably don't wanna work too hard or spend too much on these low commitment subscribers from the get go. So and it's just, you know, you have to kinda ride that rodeo a couple of times to to see that, this is truly the wiser way forward. Yeah. I love that takeaway. I have k. I'm noticing another question with Thomas. You have a large discount on the first month, but this is I love that this question came up, because this is one of my favorite examples to shout out. You have a larger discount on month number one, but then every additional month is not as heavily discounted. How do customers respond to this? Is there feedback? But also, I actually have a pushback to that idea because, fundamentally, it's the job and I probably got this from Brian Tate, really. It's the job of the product. It's the job of marketing to acquire a subscriber, and it's the job of product to retain a customer. So, on second, third, fourth order, you might be discounting customers who are perfectly happy to pay full price probably, and it's just they're happy to be a subscriber for convenience sake. So I'm curious what has but what was the pushback when or what's some of the customer issues that you've had? And, yeah, how does that offer come about? Yeah. For sure. It's a it's another great question. When so we did used to just get kind of a flat discount of your first subscription order was, like, $56. Your all your next subscription orders are $56. When we moved it to a deeper discount first order and then, like, a much more modest discount compared to one time purchase price to the next, there there is a there are still, like, people occasionally to reach out and, like, are confused. Like, we try to make it very clear, like, what current price will be. But it's almost like a surprisingly small amount of pushback. I think at the end of the day, you it's really important to have a great product. Like, the product, you know, like like, you can great marketing will get someone to try product, but to actually keep it, like, the product has to be really good. So we have worked super hard on the flavors, the quality of the flavors. We look really closely at retention data, all sorts. We leverage AI. We do. We're really trying to be on the actual frontier of of all this, like, from a data food science perspective. So we really we're confident once we get someone subscribed, even with a modest discount compared to one time that we can keep them, and fortunately, that's worked out so far. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Okay. So thank you so much for that. As a final note, if anybody wants to go and treat themselves to a healthy breakfast that should taste like dessert, but it's actually tasty, and also you'll basically be doing company homework at the same time. Go sign up for an Oats Overnight subscription and just see what that funnel looks like. It's it's really it's really cool. So shout out to that. Now I'm gonna we're gonna move on with questions to Kendall now. I got a bunch of questions for you too. So first one, do you offer both subscription, tiers as well as a loyalty program without subscriptions, or just one or the other? Like and how do you try to balance that in the messaging and priorities? We currently do not offer our loyalty and credit tiers to non subscribers. That is something we've toyed with in the past and considered, but currently, we find it to be a very, very valuable program for our subscribers, and we like to value the subscribers. That being said, one thing we do on-site is we do offer a multi product tier discount for our one time purchaser. So if you find two, three, four bottles at checkout, you get a deeper discount than if you were just buying one bottle. So that is our way to kind of value those one time purchasers at the time saying, hey. We appreciate, you know, your large cart value. We appreciate that you're committing to us for multiple different products. But at the same time, you know, we can't trust you're coming back month over month. So we leave those, like, larger, credit and values to our subscribers as a credit. But it's also like a a no brainer value add to become a subscriber is you get access to these things. And as a subscriber, you probably feel good that you get things again, exclusive access to perks like that is is a needle mover. So, again, if you tested, you know, your opt in rates before and after offering that to subscribers, I'm I'm sure that it it boosts your subscription subscriber growth and with that, obviously, MRR growth. So, yeah, I love that. What's, this might be a planted question, but what platform do you guys use to manage your loyalty rewards than coupon codes? That's a really good one. You might have heard of it. It is Recharge. They, they help us a lot with it. Yeah. So we do we do all of our loyalty rewards processes through Recharge. That said, we do some discounting through our Klaviyo and Shopify as well, but mainly everything with loyalty is through Recharge. Mhmm. K. K. Sounds good. So to me, I think simplifying the I mean, the kind of idea of, sending the app Shopify store is dying, in many ways. And and the Shopify marketplace, I mean, through the pandemic, it exploded. I mean, we saw, just yes. Ever first of all, ecommerce obviously, exploded. But now simplifying that process and actually getting these apps to all be working within, within one platform or all of this functionality under one roof, I'm a big believer that's, that's that's why I believe Recharge is the leading platform and a no brainer because you have so much data, about the customer journey. And, yeah, I'm I'm pumped about what the team has been cooking, especially on the AI side. I'm still trying to push them on the predictive churn analytics. It's like, hey. I want to know how likely our customers to be predicted to churn based on all of their portal interaction and email, open rates, and so on and so forth. That's a topic for another day. Kendall. I have a couple of questions for Russell. And, right we're not no. Kendall. Yes. Russell, PDP widget. What is, some some of the best practice or is it best practice to preselect subscribe and say as the default on the PDP instead of one time purchase? And, and, also, like, if you're not sure about that, how would you go about testing that? Yeah. The best practice is to actually put subscribe and save as your default option. So when a customer goes to your PDP, subscribe and save is the first option. It's above onetime purchase, and it's and it's the one that's automatically selected. Across a lot of our merchants and a lot of our top brands, we see about a four times increase in conversion rate when a when a merchant selects subscribe and save as the default option. So there's a lot of data that backs us up, and that shows that that is kind of the go to option if you wanna increase subscription conversion. Yeah. Yeah. No. I think that's actually exactly the same thing we see across everybody is that as soon as you preselect subscribe and save, typically, you can take with little to no literally no effort at all. Like, it takes two clicks to change which which widget is preselected. Your subscription so if you think about your subscriber growth goes about four x. Your conversion rates generally pretty much stay flat, because as long as you have a very clear one time and subscriber stable options on the PDP, your your conversion rate generally stays flat. You're not suffering anything from your customer acquisition side, but your customer lifetime value instantly doubles or triples Yeah. On those customers and then you get four times more subscribers and that's like with no effort whatsoever. So and that obviously goes to your subscriber MRR and MRR growth every month and that all compounds and now goes to profitable bottom line. So, it's my personal hobby horse is that you will test that. And I know that you guys have also been working on AB testing this stuff, if you're not sure about, about doing it. So, k. A couple of questions aimed at me. I feel very flattered. So one, one question regarding gift subscriptions during BFCM. How to set it up? How do they work? And is it is it recommended? I think gift subscriptions are a great way to do it. If you think about just general consumer buying patterns, typically, people either buy for themselves, but also during the holiday season, they buy a lot for friends and family. I mean, you have to be understand, like, if you're buying deodorants for somebody, you have to know them really, really well. So you have to pick, pick and choose your products well. However, if you're selling subscriptions as pretty much everybody can afford to to set up the subscription gifting, and, everybody who is a not even necessarily from an acquisition standpoint, you're not gonna have a lot of new customers buy a subscription a gift subscription either for themselves or for someone else. But for your returning subscribe or your existing subscribers or repeat one time customers, offering a a gift subscription that can have an auto expiry or, or a, and Recharge does a great way of you are able to update the customer or the gift recipients can later just continue with their own credit card. It's a really good way of dealing, dealing with gift subscriptions. Yeah. Especially for, like, your your existing subscribers are your most die hard loyal fans, and they're the ones that are likely gonna be the most, most likely to gift your your product to someone else. So do you definitely do it? It takes very little to implement and then promote it to your existing subscribers. So, another question here, getting subscriptions. K. What do you classify as a deep discount and what percentage moves the needle? So in my mind, it's not even, it's a question not about comparing yourself to others, but, comparing your own discounts internally. And, if you do have customers who are on the fence because if customers were not considering you before, it's really difficult to acquire them first go. But if customers were already on your email list for a while and they were waiting for that discount, simply highlighting is, like, even 30% off could be enough to be like, hey. But this is indeed our biggest discount of the year. Like, some of that copy and positioning and how you frame that can actually move the needle quite a bit. So, I mean, also, it's, I'm I'm I'll be honest. I'm very much with with Thomas around the Black Friday acquisition and discounting strategy where, if you want to acquire the customers that will be a good fit for you anyways, and sometimes it makes no sense to just really deeply discount, one time or basically customers, that that's, that would not be a very good fit for the brand or the product anyway. Another thing to think about when it comes to recurring discounts, I would rather than doing a deeper one time discount, we just think about locking in a longer term discount. So lock in prepaid subscriptions are great for this, but also prepackaging three, six months together and selling it as a bundle. There's a yeah. That's one really good way of saying buy it one time, buy it from on a monthly cadence or prepay for three months, and that's your best deal. Something along the lines of that. And then kind of discount those, stagger your discounts accordingly. So, okay. We're wrapping up now. We everybody can, do their thing. We could keep going, with q and a. Yeah. I think, I'm looking at other sheet of questions here. Oh, by the way, we're gonna have a bunch of resources, a bunch of resources that are will be going out to everybody. A checklist for you to be ready for Black Friday, Saturday, Monday. I also shared, a retention funnel, click click through files so you can look at some examples of onboarding emails, upcoming order flows, and kinda how to handle a return. Like, a retention two point o is something fundamentally I do. So that will be there. But as a as a final wrap, fundamentally, what I wanted to, to start off as I was saying, it's like when we initially started to fund this webinar about Black Friday Cyber Monday, we wanted to have a a bit of a different spin on it. And I think I think that we started to scratch that itch of, not only showing that subscriptions are especially through Black Friday, subscriptions don't have to be, a way to trick your customer into becoming a subscriber. Subscriptions genuinely, are the when you implement them in a transparent, simple and to understand, flexible way, that is really customer focused, it's actually the best way to grow your profit and business sustainably and actually feel good about doing it. That's kinda why Black Friday can be so exhausting for some people is that, they they don't feel like they're treating their their, their customers as well as they probably should have. So, I think that's kind of my, my final wrap up thoughts on that. And I think we can, yeah. So, everybody can jump out. I wanna say thank you so much to everybody, all the speakers who joined. If you guys have other things to do, feel free to jump off. But, yeah. We're good. Alright. We're all good. We're wrapped up. Thanks so much, everyone. K. Thanks, Kendall. Thanks, Thomas. Thanks, Mike. Alright. K. I'm getting so I can hop off stage or should I field some some more questions here that I'm just looking through the chat? Because I know there's a bunch of questions in the chat too. Yeah. If anyone's connecting Jam even more on BFCM, would love to on LinkedIn. People are dropping their LinkedIn comments, profiles. I love that. Questions about payment methods. Which payment method do you recommend, for prepayment? Oh, man. That's a technical. I wish, for direct debit. Those are probably connect with your Recharge payment rep. But, Shopify payments also will probably be your best provider. So connect to your Shopify support, with that. I wish I wish I had a better answer to that. Looks like people are having a great time, some good insights, a really great panel. Took a ton of notes. That's awesome. Thanks, Christiana. K. BFCM tip. Mental health check. Yes. Super important. Remember self care. Remember self care. Yes. Period. Don't have to go further than that. Questions about customers, about people losing money on first order. So, k, I'm getting all of those as a side note, getting notifications so we have stop recording. So this will not be part of our recording, but, if people are still we still have some people on the call, so, I'll keep basically going until I run out of notes here. So losing money in first time subscribers, during BFCM for brands. Oh, okay. No. I'm getting kicked off. Okay. Perfect. That's my that's my cue. Kendall. Alright, everybody. Cheerios.