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Strategies to Increase Your eCommerce Subscription Sales
Updated:
10
minutes read
With all the benefits that it offers, it’s only natural that the eCommerce subscription model is getting very popular among online businesses. Statistics show that about 54% of online customers have subscribed to one kind of subscription box service or another.
But even with the benefit that the subscription model offers to customers, most of them are initially very wary about it. Getting customers to commit to a subscription poses a major challenge for this eCommerce business model.
One of the reasons customers are hesitant could be the thought of having to use the same product from the same brand, over and over again for the duration of the subscription, despite having countless options available. One of the downsides of the ever-expanding online market is that you are more likely to lose out on sales in the face of such immense competition providing consumers with a lot of options.
But if you make the right moves, you can grow your subscription business and increase subscription sales way more efficiently. In this blog, we will share a few essential tips on improving your subscription sales.
How To Get More Subscription Sign-Ups?
Different eCommerce subscription models can vary in many ways.There are a lot of way you can make them work for you. Customer retention is something that a subscription-based model can excel at but you need to know how to get through to customers and increase your subscription sales. The key is to attract more valuable repeat customers who offer better lifetime value.
And speaking of value, your main objective is to convey to buyers that they are the ones who stand to benefit when they buy from you regularly over long periods of time. In short, convey that you offer better value on your subscriptions than on one-time purchases. We have provided some strategies and ideas that could help you do this. Remember to experiment with these ideas, and explore and combine them to find out what works well for your business.
Add Subscriber Only Products
How does your subscription plan benefit the customer? The answer to this is to add an exclusive product that can only be accessed by subscribers. This makes the subscription more profitable for the customer. Offering any product as exclusive, won’t make much sense and will have very little effect. Ensure that the product being offered to your subscribers is something that’s very much in demand and too irresistible to pass up.
You could offer a popular best seller with an exclusive discount to subscribers or new products only subscribers can lay their hands on. Leverage the customer psychology of wanting what is exclusive, to make more customers buy your subscription.
Another good strategy is to include surprise products in the subscription. This creates intrigue and a sense of excitement, as customers eagerly anticipate and wait for something new that comes along with their order. By adding this sense of exclusiveness to the benefits you provide with subscriptions, customers tend to feel more interested and engaged in the subscription plan than they would have otherwise.
Offer Subscribers Special Deals
Incentivizing your subscription model is an obvious and highly effective strategy to grow your subscription sales. Offering discounts and special deals to subscribers is the best way to highlight why a customer should buy your subscription product. Communicate the value you provide with the deals along with subscriptions and drive home the point with numbers. You have to convey how customers can get more out of their money with the subscription products they purchased. There are a few ways you can do this:
- Offer “Buy Two, Get One!” or “Buy One Get One Free!” deals with your subscription products.
- Conduct giveaway programs exclusively for your subscribers.
- Offer free entry to your loyalty program for subscribers.
- Provide free shipping on subscription products.
- Offer limited-time deals and offer prices for subscriptions so that a sense of urgency is created.
- Offer exclusive discount coupons for subscribers.
- Celebrate by sending gifts and bonus discounts when reaching brand milestones like your first 100 subscribers.
- Provide free educational content and media to subscribers.
- Offer discount prices and referral rewards, to promote your product subscription with word-of-mouth marketing tactics.
Add Seasonal Offers
The holiday seasons are a time when almost every business tries to offer some exciting deals to their customers. Customers are always looking out for offers and specials around the holiday season. This is a great opportunity for your business to improve your business subscription sales.
Attract customers with seasonal special offers along with your subscription products. You can combine incentives and work on creating a sense of urgency by providing limited-time offers on exclusive products. For instance, you can do this by providing exclusive offers on products that are specifically themed around a particular celebration like Christmas or Diwali. Whatever your subscription pricing strategy might be, seasons and celebrations deliver the right opportunity to improve your business subscription sales.
If your subscription deals with services, you can also employ seasonal offers like free lessons and holiday-related product gifts. Seasonal discounts on the overall pricing of the subscription plan can also be a great opportunity to convince customers to opt for a longer subscription period. You can offer a relatively lower price for an annual product subscription plan than the cost of a plan that covers six months.
Offer Early Access to new Products
Offer your customers/subscribers first access to new products. Here you try to leverage the sense of discovery and inclusivity to nudge customers to purchase a subscription from you. Providing access to products that are very new to the market, and are hard to lay your hands on, customers will be more than tempted to subscribe. Think of a new product everyone is lining up to buy. You can provide exclusive early access so that your subscribers can skip the queue and get to it first. The key is to let them know that your subscribers are special to you!
If you already have a huge customer base eager to view your upcoming products, this is your opportunity to leverage the situation and employ upselling strategies and promote your subscriptions.
Learn more about what to sell on Valentine's day in 2023
Conduct Events for Subscribers
Trying to get your subscriber count to grow can be a process that happens simultaneously as you grow a base of loyal customers. You have to turn your subscriptions into something more akin to a community formed around your brand. You can run events for subscribers so that this will attract more shoppers while growing a community that engages and improves customer loyalty.
You can invite subscribers to offline workshops, have events to showcase new products, conduct live events on social media, and have online Q&A sessions on topics related to your products. You can also take this opportunity to showcase other subscription products and provide a sneak peek into new and exciting product launches you might have in the future. Events are a great way to attract repeat customers to explore more of what your brand offers and make your subscription products seem more attractive. You can also combine other methods like incentivizing to enhance the appeal of your special events.
Make the Subscription Model Flexible
A subscription model helps in reducing customer anxiety by offering a simple system where customers are guaranteed timely deliveries without having to go through a tedious purchase process multiple times. But this business model sometimes can be rigid and limiting. Most subscription models in eCommerce traditionally offer fixed plans with little wiggle room for customers to customize the product subscription plans that they pay for.
This is the reason why you need to make your subscription model more flexible and customer-friendly. Let people edit and modify their subscription plans based on their preferences. Allow customers to change products and customize what delivery dates they would like, or offer different durations for deliveries. With more options and flexibility in shaping their subscription plans, customers feel less stuck. And the less stuck they feel, the more likely they are to purchase subscriptions.
Sell more Subscriptions!
Considering how hard, selling subscriptions to customers that have too many options can be, you must have the right strategies to remedy this. A lot of the answers you need can be found if you look closer into your customers and try to understand their needs and demands.
It’s practical knowledge that a good business learns from its customers. To get your subscription model to sell, it’s important that you continually learn from your existing subscription customers and use this learning to adapt and evolve.
Request feedback on your subscription model and learn from their needs and requirements, as well as from the subtle changes in customer purchase behaviors, preferences, and purchase patterns. Use the insights to change your approach, tweak your subscription offers and bring better strategies to the table.
With the right strategies in place, growing your subscription business will be a very rewarding process. You can get started setting up an efficient, eCommerce subscription model that sells better, with Appstle Subscriptions.
