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15+ CRO Strategies for Subscription Businesses [2026]
The biggest pro of the subscription-based businesses is also their con — recurring revenue.
As a business owner, of course, you’d love recurring revenue from your customers. But that’s exactly why customers might hesitate to purchase — because they’ll have to pay recurringly.
That’s why you must implement robust CRO strategies for your subscription business. Not just for subscription conversions, but also to keep those customers for a long time.
So, in this blog post, we’re sharing a comprehensive guide to building and solidifying the CRO strategies for subscription businesses. Plus, the best CRO tools for your Shopify store.
Let’s have a brief intro to “CRO” for those just getting started!
What is CRO in eCommerce?
CRO stands for “Conversion Rate Optimization”.
What is a conversion rate? The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take a certain action as per your business goal. For a subscription-based business, the conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete the purchase of the subscription offer.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the master plan that includes several strategies and tactics to increase the conversion rate.
The goal is to maximize the number of sales from the traffic of potential customers, which eventually results in increased revenue, ROI, and profit.
15+ CRO Strategies for Subscription Business
Now, let’s go through the complete CRO masterplan that will show you how to increase the conversion rate of your subscription offer.
1. Gather customer insights on subscription requirements
How do you know whether the customer wants a weekly or a monthly subscription?
Customer research is imperative. Don’t assume what the right subscription offer is for them. Build your strategy with data-backed decisions.
Here are some of the ways you can conduct customer research:
- Collect insights from historical data if you’ve sold the same products before.
- Research third-party data if you’re new to the business.
- Ask your customers directly. You can collect feedback using pre-purchase and post-purchase surveys.
- Use a heatmap tool to observe your customer behaviors and identify patterns.
Use customer insights to build valuable and attractive subscription plans. Also, identify if you need to offer multiple tiers in the subscription offer. For example, Birchbox — a beauty subscription brand — offers two different types of subscription plans:
(1) Delivered Every Month (2) Delivered Every Other Month.
Learn more: Post-Purchase Surveys: Guide, Examples, and Questions
2. Set up a strategic sales funnel for your subscription offer
A sales funnel is a marketing strategy created to walk customers through a guided journey—consisting of subsequent stages—from making them aware of your subscription offer to enticing them to buy it.
Building a sales funnel for your subscription offer lays a solid foundation. And when you want to build a sales funnel, what could be a better platform than GemPages?
GemPages has immense experience optimizing thousands of Shopify stores for conversion.
GemPages Sales Funnel feature is built based on extensive research on 6 to 8-figure brands and what goes into building their winning sales funnels. In GemPages Sales Funnel, you have two options: 1. Build a post-purchase funnel, and 2. Build a “Full Sales Funnel”.
Learn more: How to Build A Sales Funnel Strategy [+Examples]
3. Implement personalization in your offer
Personalization is the key to winning modern-day customers.
When selling a long-term commitment like a subscription, you must ensure you’re satisfying those customers' needs with a personalized experience. By offering personalized subscription offers, you can boost your conversion rate.
Blue Apron is a great example of how a brand can implement personalization. The brand has redesigned its subscription offer to the “Autoship & Save” offer.
The key highlights: Customers can set up a schedule and select proteins and menu items as per their personalized preferences. Depending on your business types and items you sell, you can implement personalization that suits your customers' preferences.
Pro Tip: AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) technologies have a great scope in several eCommerce processes, including customer research and personalization strategies for your subscription offer. You can leverage these tech solutions to enhance your subscription offering.
Learn more: How To Build a Personalization Engine for a Shopify Store
4. Create a dedicated landing page for your subscription offer
It’s not just about what you have to offer. You must also be able to present it in a compelling way. A dedicated landing page can help you do just that.
Once again, use GemPages to create your subscription offer with conversion-focused elements. Also, you can leverage GemPages’ vast library of landing page templates that are professionally designed and optimized for conversion.
Here’s a glimpse of one of the GemPages’ templates: Socks Monthly Subscription.
From social proof to trust badges — these templates incorporate conversion-focused elements stylishly and elegantly. Also, you can include tiered subscription pricing plans with ease, with no coding or web design experience.
Learn more: How to Improve the Landing Page Conversion Rate?
5. Define and highlight the USP & value proposition of your subscription offer
For a customer, a subscription purchase means spending a certain amount every month. Why should they pay you every month?
You can create a compelling offer with a detailed explanation of your USP (Unique Selling Point) and value proposition.
Pro Tip: Customers are highly likely to remember something they’ve visually seen rather than just reading about it. Make the visual presentation of your USP and value proposition on your subscription page. You can do this by showcasing images, animations, GIFs, or even video content.
Learn more: How to Create a Unique Selling Proposition & Value Proposition
6. Write copy that converts one-time buyers into subscribers
Talking of conversions, it’s important to write copy that converts.
When writing your copy, there are a couple of important points that you must consider, which we already covered:
- Customer research — the buyer personas
- Your USP and value proposition
Apart from these aspects, you can also build excitement with creative storytelling. When you tell a story that’s built around your buyer persona, your landing page visitors can see themselves in that story — and that’s how you convert them.
7. Use A/B testing to optimize your subscription offer
A/B testing is a technique to compare two different versions of a digital asset and identify the best version for the desired business goal.
For a subscription business, the goal would be to increase “conversions” of the subscription offer. And that’s why you may want to test your subscription offer to see which offer brings the maximum conversions. For example, “$20 discount” vs “20% discount” offer. You can also test a cash discount vs a free shipping offer.
Wondering how to perform A/B tests on your Shopify store? Well, we’ve got an amazing solution — “GemX: CRO & A/B Testing” app. GemX is built with our years of experience in CRO and A/B testing — and it makes the whole process reliable, fast, and easy.
8. A/B test the design of your subscription landing page
So, we talked about testing the “subscription offer”. But you can also test the design layout and different conversion elements on your landing page to optimize the conversion rate.
Here are the most important elements on your subscription offer landing page:
- The hero image
- Headline and sub-headline copy
- CTA button
- Color scheme of the entire page
- Social proof placement
- Trust badges
For example, the subscription page below explains “Harry’s Subscription Benefits” with a simple design consisting of icons and text copy. This design can be A/B tested with more striking visuals.
Learn more: Landing Page Split Testing For eCommerce — Complete Guide
9. Optimize your subscription landing page for mobile
Mobile optimization is non-negotiable for any eCommerce brand.
Make sure your subscription landing page (and even other digital assets) are optimized for mobile. Most importantly, you need to ensure that your subscription page is responsive to adapt to mobile as well as desktop screens.
Any media elements (images, videos, animations, GIFs, etc.) and even subscription page copy must be crafted and designed for small screens. In a nutshell, your entire sales funnel for the subscription offer must be optimized for mobile users.
10. Create a detailed FAQs section
Whenever customers are stuck with a query, many queries can be addressed with just the FAQs section on the page. Make sure to address all of the critical questions that may impact the purchase decision.
The subscription page of a grooming brand, Harry’s, covers the FAQ section for all critical queries that may make customers concerned before the purchase.
If you want to design a stylish FAQ section, you can use the FAQs section from GemPages.
Pro Tip: Review and analyze support requests and complaints in your customer care data. It could give you some great insights into what must be included in the FAQs. Make sure all the frequent questions from the support requests are addressed, especially complaints.
11. Be clear about the subscription cancellation policy
When buying anything with a recurring subscription, customers might hesitate if they don’t find clear instructions on how they can stop that recurring charge.
You can highlight your easy-to-cancel trust badge on the landing and/or checkout pages. It gives customers the confidence to buy the subscription plan without future worries. For example, a note that says, “Cancel anytime with a single click.”
You must cover this information in your FAQs as well.
Pro Tip: Offer the option to pause and resume the subscription. When customers have complete control over the subscription management, they’ll feel safe and secure to proceed with your offer.
12. Build and leverage social proof specific to the subscription offer
Show your new visitors or potential customers how your existing subscription-based customers are benefiting from the offer. Record video testimonials of your customers and share them on your landing page.
You can also share the details about how much your existing customers are saving from the subscription offer every year. Apart from customer reviews, press mentions can also work great as social proof.
13. Target the right audience in your paid ad campaigns
Running paid ad campaigns is already an expensive affair. You don’t want to waste your ad budget on audiences that have little to no interest in your offering.
Before spending a huge budget on an ad campaign, validate the whole idea and the audience with A/B testing. Based on your buyer personas, target the right audience.
All major ad platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and TikTok have native tools to A/B test your posts or ads.
Learn more: A/B Testing Social Media — Everything You Need to Know [+ Tools]
14. Optimize your site speed with Instant Landing Page
One of the best ways to optimize your page speed is to build it with headless commerce technology. Headless commerce is a tech architecture in which the frontend is separated from the backend.
Implementing headless commerce is complex and can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. But don’t worry, we’ve got a cost-effective solution for you.
"Instant Landing Page" (ILP) is an advanced GemPages feature, powered by Shopify Hydrogen. It helps you implement headless technology to provide a faster and smoother browsing experience — and all that with an affordable GemPages pricing.
Learn more: Headless Commerce — Is It Right for Your Business?
15. Offer live chat support if you can
Things that can’t be solved with the FAQs can be resolved by offering the option to chat with your customer support/sales team. Live chat support can boost your conversion rate by resolving customer concerns in real time.
16. Monitor the churning customers and collect feedback from them
Regardless of how hard you try, there’s going to be a certain churn rate.
But it’s important to monitor the churn rate regularly and identify the root causes behind it. Collect feedback from customers who cancel your subscription.
Depending on your subscription offer, you can ask different questions in a churn survey. Here are some critical questions customized in a Canva template for a churn survey:
Question 1: How satisfied were you with our subscription offer before deciding to leave?
Question 2: What is the primary reason you decided to stop using our subscription offer?
Question 3: What could we have done to retain you as a customer?
17. Conduct a subscription CRO audit at regular intervals
If a subscription offer is your long-term strategy, you should regularly conduct an audit that evaluates all of your existing CRO strategies. Ideally, every 6 months or annually.
To help you make this process fast and easy, we’ve created a checklist of all the key parameters that you should evaluate in your CRO audit:
Learn more: How to Do eCommerce CRO Audit + Checklist
Final Thoughts on Subscription Conversion Rate Optimization
Your subscription CRO strategy should not be seen just from a business revenue perspective — you must consider customer experience throughout the journey.
Going even beyond the initial purchase, you should also ensure that customers are provided with great customer service whenever they need any help. Or else, it won’t take them long to switch to your competitor.
Last but not least — strengthen your CRO game with the “Sales Funnels & Post-Purchase Upsell” features, available on the GemPages Optimize plan at just $59/month. Or just install GemPages for FREE to create and publish your first page.
To learn more about other eCommerce marketing strategies, tools, and best practices — check out more resources on the GemPages Blog. Also, join the GemPages Facebook community to network and learn from like-minded entrepreneurs and experts.
FAQs About CRO Strategies for Subscription Offer
