Your product detail pages (or PDPs) are the backbone of your Shopify subscription ecommerce business. If you are not familiar with what exactly the PDP is, this is where a site visitor learns more details about the product; for example what variants (sizes/colors) the item comes in, how much the product costs, what the product looks like and other pertinent product details. And most importantly, the “add to cart” button lives on the PDP, meaning your PDP pages are where your sales come from. These pages are typically accessed by a site visitor clicking into them from a broader product or collection page.
As you look to grow your subscription business in during the holiday season, it’s important to test different copy options your PDPs. Perhaps you are not converting as many new subscribers because your copy isn’t clear. It’s essential that you dive into the analytics to understand what the conversion rate looks like on your PDPs prior to, during and after the BFCM rush so you can understand if some pages do better than others. The more often you iterate on what the copy says on these pages, the more information that you will be able to capture to help inform you of what actually performs well and results in more site visitors becoming subscribers.
If you don’t understand your historical business metrics during this pivotal time of year, you cannot understand the gaps that exist in your business that you can fill. Digging in and understanding why merchants are churning (or why they subscribe) for example is an essential part to growing your business during BFCM.
Let’s say that you take the time to look at your metrics and you discover that 60% of the subscribers are churning after their third shipment because they indicated that they had too much product. Knowing this, you can deploy a churn deflection tactic when a subscriber goes to churn after their third order that offers them the ability to simply skip their next shipment. This could help you deflect more customers that are about to churn by keeping them in the fold by simply allowing them to skip their third shipment. By successfully implementing a tactic like this, you will be blocking subscribers from leaving you and in turn be growing your ecommerce subscription business.
A great way to increase your average order value (AOV) and increase interest in your subscription offering during this time of year is to add products to your site offering that are complementary to your existing subscription products. For example, say that you sell protein powder. Consider developing and offering complementary products that go along with the protein powders. Examples of products that you could introduce are shaker bottles to make it easier for your subscribers to make a protein shake on the go or a branded smoothie recipe book for your subscribers to draw inspiration from.
After you have built up your subscriber base, you are likely to have a number of loyal customers since they are receiving products from you every 30, 60 or 90 days for example. What better way to capitalize on their brand loyalty than by offering them products that go along naturally with their protein powder subscription? Doing this will likely grow your ecommerce subscription business since more subscribers will be adding these complementary products to their subscription.
BFCM is a time when consumers expect deals and great offers. As such, now is the time to be aggressive with your offers in an effort to grow your subscription base. Perhaps you want to offer a percentage off a customers first two shipments or you want to offer them a special gift with purchase.
Use this time to lay the foundation towards building a new cohort of subscribers that could potentially bring a nice boost of revenue to your business throughout the year.
Just starting to explore adding subscriptions to your Shopify store this holiday season? or are you evaluating Upscribe vs. other solutions?
Explore our ROI calculator to and understand what the cost savings of running your subscription business on Upscribe is.
