Most brands treat their subscriber portal like a settings page. Turns out, it's actually their highest-risk revenue moment — 70% of subscribers who log in are there to cancel, skip, or bail. Piyush Jain, CEO of Loop Subscriptions, has the data from 1,900+ D2C brands to prove it, and the playbook to stop it.

‍

Inside the episode:

• How OSEA Malibu cut churn from 10% to 5% without offering a single discount — using a free travel kit timed to the exact order where most subscribers were dropping off
• The "Mystery Reward" pop-up that intercepts high-intent cancellations in real time — and reduces churn by another 23% for brands using it
• Why 20–25% of cancellations happen within days of your upcoming order email — and how Four Sigmatic engineered a 40% save rate on their cancellation flow
• How Good Protein drives 25% of total subscription revenue from upsells — and why second-order subscribers are worth 2x more than first-order ones
• Non-traditional subscription plays for brands outside consumables: from air purifier filter programs to digital membership add-ons
  

—

‍

Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact and request your FREE strategy session today!

‍

—

‍

Chapters: 

‍

[00:00] Intro — Mystery Rewards & The Portal Churn Problem

[00:22] Show Introduction & Guest Welcome — Piyush Jain of Loop Subscriptions

[02:29] Why 70% of Portal Visitors Want to Cancel or Skip

[04:09] Case Study: OSEA Malibu Cuts Churn in Half With Gift Rewards

[06:59] Mystery Rewards — Gamifying the Portal for High-Risk Subscribers

[10:55] Streaks & Loyalty Gamification — The Duolingo-Inspired Approach

[14:22] Zero-Day Churn — When Customers Subscribe Just for the Discount

[19:43] Cancellation Flows — How FourSigmatic Saves 40% of Cancellations

[21:42] Increasing Product Consumption to Reduce Churn

[25:03] Second-Order Subscribers — Why They're 2X More Valuable

[29:13] Upselling as a Zero-CAC Revenue Channel — The Good Protein Story

[34:20] Non-Traditional Subscriptions — Air Purifiers, Shoes & Digital Memberships

[39:07] How to Increase Subscription Take Rate on the PDP

[42:42] Wrap-Up & How to Connect With Loop Subscriptions

‍

—

‍

Connect With Brett: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/  

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQmbMwBW8LYDfFAqNqlgTGw 

Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

Request a Free Strategy Session: https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact

‍

Relevant Links: 

• Piyush’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/piyush-jn

‍

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, JC Hite, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D'Allessandro, Stephane Colleu, Jeff Oxford, Bryan Porter and more

‍

‍

Transcript: 

‍

Piyush Jain (00:00):

Last year we launched something called Mystery Reward where customers do not necessarily know about a reward unless they come on a portal.

‍

Brett Curry (00:22):

Wellllo and welcome to another edition of the E-commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're talking about subscription revenue, how to increase it, how to reduce churn, how to extend the length of time that someone has subscribed with you. How do you even think about non-traditional subscriptions? Maybe you're a business that you haven't thought about subscriptions. Maybe you're outside of the consumable space, obviously for beauty, for supplements, for anything food and bev. Subscriptions are a no-brainer. Maybe you're outside of that, but subscriptions could still work for you. And so many good examples we're going to dive into today. And my guest is the CEO and founder of Loop Subscriptions. Piyush Jane is with me and Loop is one of those services where so many of our clients, so many of the top D2C brands are using Loop Subscriptions.

‍

(01:21):

And so with that, welcome to the show, Piyush, and how's it going?

‍

Piyush Jain (01:25):

Thanks, Brett. Things are good. How are things with you?

‍

Brett Curry (01:29):

Doing good, man. It's going good. So it's a crazy start to the year, super busy. And yeah, hopefully barring any macroeconomic issues, I think this is going to be a great year for e-Comm and our D2C friends. And so let's dive right in, Piyush. I love the topic of subscriptions. Anytime you can build a structure where going into the new month, you already know to a pretty high degree of confidence, you've got this base level of revenue in the form of subscriptions. Makes your business more valuable, more predictable, more profitable, all of those things. And so I want to start with something that you shared with me that I thought was fascinating. And one of the best ways to improve your subscription business is to reduce churn. And so you talked about 70% of subscribers that visit the subscription portal or subscriber portal. They're going there to either one cancel or two skip.

‍

(02:29):

So 70% of people that log into their portal, it's with intention of let's either cancel or not get a subscription this month. So you get revenue leakage happening right there. So frame that just a little bit for us and then let's start to talk through what are some of the ways we can prevent that revenue leakage from happening.

‍

Piyush Jain (02:55):

Everyone generally just keeps on talking about it that they don't want to send emails to the customers because customers will cancel. Same thing about portal. Brands don't want customers to sort of log in into their portal because the probability of cancellation is higher. And that's actually, we've looked at so much of data across different categories, supplements, beauty, pet, different categories. And one of the consistent trends that we're seeing is customers who are going or who are visiting the portal are either going there. 70% of them are going with the intent to either cancel, skip, reschedule basically actions which are negative actions or revenue leakage actions. And when we looked at this data, the first thing was that what do we do to retain those subscribers? So we started with Gamifying subscriptions, there was about two, three years back where what if brands could make their subscription interesting by offering reward on future orders?

‍

(04:09):

Say hi discounts on third order, second order, fifth order, or a gift, things on those lines. And with that, what we did was also started showing a banner on the customer portal and we saw that it led to a really good reduction in churn. Case in point is a brand called OSEA Malibu. So they've been with us for about, they migrated to us about.

‍

Brett Curry (04:35):

It's OSEA Malibu that says skincare brand, is that right?

‍

Piyush Jain (04:38):

Yeah, the skincare brand. Yeah. So they migrated to us about two years back and they migrated with about the churn was a little over 10% and they don't do discounts. They're not a discount heavy brand, but we're able to figure out that their highest drop off is a third order.

‍

(04:55):

So one of the interesting things that they did was they did a gift of a travel pack sample size on the third order and they started communicating this from the first order on the customer portal. So as soon as the customer goes on a portal, the first thing that they see is this banner that, "Hey, you're two orders away from getting this gift." When they go on a second order, then they say, "Hey, you're just one order away from getting this gift." And this really helped the churn sort of dropped by about 5% drop off 50%. So their current churn is 5% now. So this worked really well. That's amazing.

‍

Brett Curry (05:33):

And I want to talk about that for just a little bit and then want you to continue on it. So this is OSEA Malibu, skincare brand, premium brand. They don't like to do discounts. We have several clients that are in that boat that don't like to do discounts. So instead they said, "Hey, as soon as you subscribe on the third month, you did a free travel kit." Do you know what the retail value of that travel kit was, PS? Do you know what kind of value they attach to that?

‍

Piyush Jain (05:56):

I wouldn't have idea on that, but it'll be-

‍

Brett Curry (06:01):

Totally cool.

‍

Piyush Jain (06:02):

Yeah. Yeah. But of course it won't be as expensive as saving a churn like

‍

Brett Curry (06:07):

Amazon. Right, for sure. And so let's just, and I don't have this side in front of me, so I'm just going to totally make up prices, but if say the subscription was $100 a month, maybe that travel kit had a retail value of 50. Well, we all know the cogs are going to be way, way less than that. So this is the true hard cost to the brand minimal, perceived value to the customer huge but also doesn't cheapen the brand. And so I love that that you're framing it from the beginning, you're setting expectations, you're creating this desire and anticipation for that reward. And so basically what you're saying is their churn rate was 10%, this dropped it to five. So essentially cut the churn in half or a significant increase in the rate of retention. That's huge.

‍

Piyush Jain (06:59):

So when we saw that this started working and then a lot of our brands sort of implement this pretty easy to set up and then we thought that how can we make it better Because in this case there is still that reward is just there. So then we thought that how about we gamify even further and how do we get customer opt-in onto this? So last year we launched something called Mystery Reward where customers do not necessarily know about a reward unless they come on a portal. And as soon as they come on a portal, there's this thing which just pops up and it says, "Hey, Brett, you've got a mister reward." And then customers clicks on claim reward and we see that about 40% of the customers would end up claiming the reward and the churn rate sort of further goes down.

‍

Brett Curry (07:55):

So let's just make sure I understand this. So someone logs into the subscriber portal, maybe again, they're there to skip, cancel, reschedule, whatever. They see this mystery reward and you can claim it. Are there stipulations there where it comes with your next subscription or something or you just get to claim it and keep it and the act of claiming it lowers churn? Talk about how that works.

‍

Piyush Jain (08:17):

Yeah. So the fundamental difference here is that in the earlier example, the earlier what we've done was that everyone would get that reward irrespective of whether they're visiting on the portal or not. Essentially, there was no opt-in there. In this case, this is for customers who are visiting portal where we know that there's a high risk only for those customers there's this reward which pops up. It's like a pop-up, like a full page sort of banner which with this gift, brands can design it however they want to and they're like, "We've got a reward for you. " And then just customers just clicks on it, brands can choose to offer multiple different types of gifts and customers can select one. And just this piece of opt-in and the reason that it works beautifully is that brands are not giving to everyone. It's only for those customers who are coming with a high intent to cancel or skip basically revenue leakage and there's a customer opt-in.

‍

(09:16):

So this is for the sort of taking down churn of about 20, 30%. So this has been working really, really well. And of course, all of this with a caveat that brands needs to have a customer portal, which is easy for subscribers to manage subscription and so on and so forth. So all of that's basic, but just the engagement with subscribers at the right time, because portal is the last place of defense and doing it proactively before they hit cancel,

‍

(09:49):

It goes a long way in reducing that churn.

‍

Brett Curry (09:52):

Yeah. I love this idea of gamification because it really speaks to human nature and it makes us want to do more. I think about the digital comparison is a lot of apps will talk about streaks, streaks of you using this app and then what that means for you. There are some of these brain games and learning apps that they try to get you to do that instead of scrolling social media and so they'll talk about your streak or like the Bible app talks about your daily streak and like you don't want to break your streak and so it motivates you to kind of get in there or the ... I'm using Wispr Flow now, which is kind of the voice to text app and every now and then it's going to say, "Hey, you've used this. Your streak is six weeks in a row or whatever and it's this many words." And it just kind of frames it and you're like, "Oh, cool.

‍

(10:39):

I got to keep going. " And so I think this is just sort of the product version and the D2C consumer version of that gamification. What else are you seeing from brands in terms of gamifying subscriptions that you found to be really effective?

‍

Piyush Jain (10:55):

So funny you talk about Streaks. We actually have a product which is called Streaks and the inspiration was Duolingo and

‍

Brett Curry (11:03):

Duolingo. Yeah, that's another one. Yeah, yeah.

‍

Piyush Jain (11:05):

Yeah. So in both of these example, what earlier I shared, we are rewarding customer irrespective of consistency, but the biggest drop-offs for brands would happen on their first three orders or first five orders. So then we thought that there should be some sort of a mechanism where we can also gamify this consistent behavior. So to solve for that, we sort of built a module where if customers complete X orders in a row, unspeculated timeframes, so for example, if it's a 30-day subscription, so if customers completes their next order in 30 days, another order in next 30 days and so on and so forth, then they unlock special type of rewards. Four Sigmatic does it really well where if customer coffee, Four Sigmatic is a coffee brand and everyone would end up-

‍

Brett Curry (12:06):

Mushroom coffee, Nootropics and Coffee, brilliant brand, excellent products. Yeah.

‍

Piyush Jain (12:11):

So for those guys, if customers completes their order in 30 days, then they unlock additional 5% discount. After two orders, another 5% discount. On the fourth order where there's a highest dropoff for these guys, let's say, then they would increase the discount to about 10%. So idea is that-

‍

Brett Curry (12:39):

And then that discount would be used for the next subscription or that discount would just be used for any additional purchase they want to make?

‍

Piyush Jain (12:45):

No, no, for that subscription, because

‍

Brett Curry (12:47):

Our

‍

Piyush Jain (12:47):

Objective is that the customer should be rewarded for their consistency. And in all of this, the important thing is that customer needs to be aware about all of these things. Otherwise, I mean, you can create whatever programs that you create, but if they're not being communicated to the customers upfront and very clearly, it doesn't solve very purpose. So of course it gets communicated in the upcoming order email and so on and so forth. But when customer visits the portal, there are, again, these banners, beautiful banners, which just talks about that, "Hey, thank you for subscribing. You are loyal customers. We want you to continue and here is something additional from us for you to continue." Now think about this, that how well this could work in the supplements category. We want you to be, for better health, consistently keep on using the product and we are with you and we'll offer additional discount and whatnot rewards and so on and so forth for you to order consistently.

‍

Brett Curry (13:41):

That's great. It's great. So you're communicating that via email, potentially via SMS and how are you seeing brands communicate that? Are they making that part of the, "Hey, your subscription is coming up." And so they're adding that in there maybe because your subscription is coming up. One, it can just be exciting if you're really ready to get that product again. Two, it could be a reminder to cancel or skip if you got too much of the product. So are you seeing brands put that, "Hey, bigger reward coming in this subscription, they're putting that communication there or it's a separate communication." What are you seeing?

‍

Piyush Jain (14:22):

Yeah, we've also looked at this data that when do customers exactly cancel? So there are two big hotspots. So one is immediately after ordering, which is what we call zero-day churn because customers only subscribe for a discount and then second is after upcoming order email. So another insight that we ... So another data point that we communicate with brands is that what is your zero-day churn and what is your upcoming order email churn? So after upcoming order email is sent, how many customers are sort of going and canceling? So about 20 to 25% of the cancellations which would happen would be triggered in last three, four days after that email is sent out. Interesting.

‍

(15:12):

So then designing that emails become very important and that's where whatever ... So of course, one is an educational component of that email why customers consistently keep on using the product. And second is also this additional delight or surprise factor which could be introduced in the email that would just says that, "Hey, we know your next order is coming in, but along with the next order, there's something extra which you're going to get. " And of course, so it's on the email and then it's on the customer portal. So customers do not miss it and that's how it works.

‍

Brett Curry (15:55):

Yeah. It makes a ton of sense where those, hey, upcoming subscription emails, you got to do it because there are some things I subscribe to and I love subscribing to things because then I don't have to think about reordering, but sometimes I'll run out and then I'm like, "When am I going to get ... " I order coffee from one of my favorite coffee shops and sometimes run out and then I'm like, "When's the next order coming?" So I'm looking for that email. I want that email to let me know, but for other things, maybe I got too much of it. And so that email, it's a trigger. It's a reminder. It's a, "Hey, you got another subscription coming up, you should probably cancel." That's kind of the underlying message. And so that's interesting. 25% of churn comes within three or four days of that subscription reminder email.

‍

(16:38):

So then shift the message and talk about the upcoming reward, the mystery reward, the bigger discount, the free gift type of thing that's coming up. So really craft and tailor that message, then get the portal to match that message and now you can greatly reduce that churn that's triggered by that email. Love that. That's super, super smart. This episode is brought to you by Northbeam. Here's a problem with your data. It's lying to you. Every platform takes credit for every sale. Meta says it worked. Google says it worked. They both say it worked and somewhere in the middle, you're making million dollar scaling decisions based on a number and numbers that don't add up. Northbeam fixes that. It replaces fragmented biased platform data with a universal attribution engine built on first party data. So you can finally see what's actually driving revenue and profit. Upper funnel video, cross channel journeys.

‍

(17:32):

Northbeam models the true impact of all of it so you can scale what works and cut what doesn't. And here's what makes it different for all of you. Northbeam ties attribution directly to your daily P&L by channel with profit benchmarks built in. So your CMO and your CFO are finally looking at the same number and agreeing on what good actually looks like. So stop guessing, start trusting the data, go visit my friends at Northbeam. Any thoughts on the zero day churn? I mean, I guess as we're optimizing the portal and putting banners and rewards and messages there, that's going to potentially help with zero day churn. Sometimes people are just going to do that because that's the way they shop. They do a subscription to get a discount and they cancel. But any tips for reducing that zero day churn?

‍

Piyush Jain (18:25):

Yeah. So educational. So most of those customers are coming in with the intent. I mean, if they're coming on a portal to cancel on the same day as they've subscribed, then the chances are that they subscribe only for discounts. So there are two ways that we've seen where brands handle it. So first is brands offer very aggressive discount on first order, but along with the condition which says that, "Hey, you've got to complete minimum two orders." And this is communicated upfront to the customer on the widget or while they're subscribing. So it's a very aggressive discount. We know we are giving a very aggressive discount, but we want you to try the product for at least two billing cycles. So that's the one way in which brands handle it. And then the second is, of course, all of these things are there upcoming rewards and mystery rewards sheets and all of that.

‍

(19:29):

But then one interesting thing that we started see brands do is when a customers are coming on portal to cancel, then the cancellation flow, the messaging on the cancellation flow, that is

‍

Brett Curry (19:43):

Basically

‍

Piyush Jain (19:43):

Designed for this segment who have not even received their products. So for example, again, I'm taking Four Sigmatic example again because they've done really good job at cancellation flows. Their save rate is 40% on the cancellation flow. It's one of the highest that we have seen. So customers. It's amazing.

‍

(20:03):

So those guys have even designed a cancellation journey specifically for customers of ordered and seven days within first seven days of customer ordering. So if customer clicks on cancel, then the messaging there goes like, "Hey, you've not even tried your first cup of coffee as yet. Why don't you try it and then see how it works and then sort of go from there." Because the only thing that brand can do is they can communicate that you should at least educate the customers or tell the customers that you should just wait for some time. So very simple thing, but we have seen that even this is sort of helping them save churn. It's a founder video or it's a cool shift so they're doing AB on this, but at least try the product.

‍

Brett Curry (20:58):

It makes sense, right? So it's a logical thing. "Hey, before you cancel, give it a try. "You can always cancel later, cancellation is easy, but why don't you give it a try and see. Is that just strictly an educational thing? Are they adding a little discount or something if they stick around or is it mostly educational in this case?

‍

Piyush Jain (21:14):

I think that's primarily educational at this point in time and I mean they do talk about it that hey, after 90% of the customers would see a positive impact and so on and so forth. So a lot of this is educational and they also talk about the fact that customer sees results very quickly, but you should at least try the product.

‍

Brett Curry (21:42):

I like that a lot. Well, what are you seeing brands do to increase consumption and to get someone to actually use the product? Because if there's active usage of the product, active consumption, then you're not going to have too much product, you're going to stick a litle bit longer. I've got a great example from just a brand that I do business with. They're not a client or anything, but would love to hear what your brands are doing to increase consumption and usage rates.

‍

Piyush Jain (22:12):

Most of this is communication primarily driven by email, educational information on depending upon the brand category, they would either talk about, " Hey, you started to take the product and these are the changes that you'd start to feel now. "Or they would talk about what are the different ways in which you can use the product. If there are, let's say it's a consumable and there are flavors involved and so on and so forth. So consistent reminders via email is what generally brands do to keep the consumption going on.

‍

Brett Curry (22:50):

Yeah. It's such a great call out and something that I think most brands don't do very well. One brand that is phenomenal at this, I am a customer, they're not a client, body health and they're perfect amino product. So I like to work out. I used to consume protein powder almost all protein powder bothers my stomach. I don't like it. I don't like the way I feel afterwards, that sort of thing. And so I saw perfect aminos, which are really like, that's the building blocks of protein. You get amino acids, you get the benefit of protein, but they're light, essentially no calorie, take them on an empty stomach, things like that. So I tried it. One of my biggest questions though, and taking it was like, how much can I take? Can I take two scoops, three scoops, five scoops? How much can I take?

‍

(23:34):

Didn't know, really. So I started using it. I got an email that was like, "Hey, this is your full guide to how to consume and use this product as you're working out and here's how you can do it. " And like, "Hey, this is the equivalent of taking 30 or 40 grams of protein, but it's going to have no caloric impact and gentle on your stomach or whatever." And so now I'm like, "Well, I could do at least two scoops a day." The only days that I work out, I'll take it before I go to the gym, after I go to the gym, that sort of thing. But as I was educated, then I felt empowered. I was like, "Well, I'm going to increase consumption." And guess what? I had one thing ordered a month and now I just throw in an extra pretty frequently because I run out.

‍

(24:06):

And so that's one of those things where if I hadn't been consistently educated, I may have churned by now or my consumption would just be average. Right now I know it's above average. And so yeah, that education is huge for sure.

‍

Piyush Jain (24:20):

And education mix with even motivation works really well. So for example, a lot of brands would also talk about that they would add in customer testimonials, they would talk about that after three months is what you can expect. Because when brands are acquiring customer, there's a lot of education which is happening on PDPs or a lot of these places. Idea is to reitrate that entire messaging to drive consumption. But again, so brands take a call on how do they ... There's a fine line on doing excess of it and the

‍

Brett Curry (25:00):

Answer

‍

Piyush Jain (25:00):

Is fine line, but yeah, education is important.

‍

Brett Curry (25:03):

Totally makes sense. Let's talk about, you mentioned something else when we were prepping that I thought was really interesting. Second order subscribers are often 2X more valuable. So people that order first, then they order again and subscribe two times more valuable, maybe double the LTV, that sort of thing. Kind of makes logical sense, but unpack that for us and then are there any nuggets or things we could try to tap into that?

‍

Piyush Jain (25:35):

Yeah, absolutely. So when you're trying to figure out LTV for subscribers, and we're just trying to dissect data in different ways. And one of the insights was that a lot of customers would subscribe on the first order, but then we saw that customers were subscribing on their second order. So first order was one time, but customers are subscribing with their second order. Their LTV is about 2X of customers who subscribed on their first order. So one time customer is of course the lowest subscriber and then subscribers who are subscribing out to the first order. So this was a really interesting thing and it makes a lot of sense also from this perspective that if a customer has already tried the product and if they like the

‍

Brett Curry (26:39):

Product- They know they like it at that point, right?

‍

Piyush Jain (26:41):

Yeah. So then the brands should ideally make that process very seamless for these customers to subscribe. So now to solve for that, we did something called built an entire utility where brands would create unique checkout URLs, one click checkout URLs. So for example, if you subscribe for vitamins, then brands could run interesting campaigns after 15 days, 20 days, 30 days, whatever the consumption frequency is and with an aggressive discount or some motivation where, hey, if you subscribe now, you unlock special rewards which are not available let's say on the storefront and whatnot and customer clicks on that link and it's a one click checkout. It directly goes on to Shopify. In most of the cases, all of their details are already there and they just need to just hit that ShopPay one button and then the subscription is started.

‍

Brett Curry (27:37):

Amazing. So I order, now I'm in the email flows and all those things that should be happening that we helped set up at OMG commerce and stuff, but at maybe day 25, 28, whatever, whenever they're probably running out of that product, you are now seeing an email saying, "Hey, on click, subscribe to this, you love it, you're beginning to see the benefits, but the real benefits come maybe in another month or two." So once you lock it in, lock in those benefits, get the subscription, and that's all just basically a one click deal or close to it to get that subscription. I love that. That's awesome.

‍

Piyush Jain (28:11):

And then brands can also actually figure out very interesting insights in terms of if they end up creating multiple URLs, then even figuring out which messaging is working, what timing is going well, like looking at different checkout URLs to see which URL is which messaging ... So for example, give insight in terms of which link is being clicked how many times and what is a completion rate. So for

‍

Brett Curry (28:34):

Example,

‍

Piyush Jain (28:37):

After 15 days as URL one, after 20 days another one and brands can do different types of testing for content, for timing, et cetera, and set up different URLs and they can keep on iterating even on the content side and they can see the entire results just on a dashboard pretty easily. So one of our common customers Livingood Daily, I think they've also been sort of-

‍

Brett Curry (29:08):

Great brand.

‍

Piyush Jain (29:09):

... our user of this particular feature.

‍

Brett Curry (29:13):

That's great. Another topic that I thought was really interesting is upselling as a zero CAC revenue channel. So taking subscribers, I think you talked about good protein potentially with this, where they're a subscriber product launches, new product launches go to them first, new opportunities go to them first, things like that. Talk about that a little bit and maybe unpack the good protein example or other examples if they're more top of mind. How do we embrace that zero CAC revenue channel?

‍

Piyush Jain (29:49):

So when we started solving for upselling, one of the things was that if customer likes one product or they're already subscribed to one product, it's a no-brainer Or to give them another product and directly do it on the customer portal, single click with the next order and so on and so forth. And this, by the way, can be another messaging which can go into upcoming order even. Hey, because you're a law subscriber, we're giving

‍

Brett Curry (30:14):

You

‍

Piyush Jain (30:14):

Something which will work very well with something that you're already subscribed to. Just

‍

Brett Curry (30:21):

Add this in your next order or hey, this pairs well, what you're ordering now pairs well with this new product or this additional product is added to your order type of thing will make it easy.

‍

Piyush Jain (30:30):

Yeah. Yeah. And these are very basic use cases where depending upon who the customer is, what you want to upsell to them and then just have that communication on email, have that communication on the customer portal and make it very simple for the customers to add another product with their future orders. Good protein is a very interesting case study because those guys are power users for upselling. Those guys drive significant. I think 25% of their revenue on subscriptions is driven by upselling. That's an insane number. And at their scale, those guys have high five digit subscribers.

‍

(31:19):

So they would experiment a lot with communication. So even on the customer portal, what communication makes sense? And brands figure out that which communication is driving higher CTR. What discount works better? Is it 10% discount, 20% discount, or 10% discount on next two orders? And this is only for the upsell, the newer product which is being added, not on the existing one. So brands can run a lot of these interesting things. They would run a lot of these interesting things to drive that upselling. And then they also started doing this that customers who have been their most loyal subscriber, like customers who've done 10 plus orders. Whenever they would launch new flavors, it would exclusively be available only for those customers. BFCM deals. So BFCM deals will first land on the subscriber portal only for-

‍

Brett Curry (32:10):

Early Black Friday deals only to you as a subscriber or maybe only to you as a 10 times subscriber, your true VIP, that type of thing.

‍

Piyush Jain (32:20):

And it works really, really well. So idea is that brands could essentially segment their customers into different ways and they could try to figure out that which product, which discount, which offer would work really well for which customer segment and then just run with it. So Good Protein does it really, really

‍

Brett Curry (32:40):

Well. It's so great. And just understanding the power of a good subscription business and as you make these little improvements and little tweaks over time, some of these brands you talked about have 10X, 12X, they're subscriber revenue. And so again, that subscriber revenue is a consistent base you can count on for next month, but it also leads to more upsells. So getting people to buy additional products, subscribers are way more likely to do that. There's also the benefit of increased word of mouth and referrals and things like that. Subscriber is way more likely to do that than someone who just buys once or twice. And so many benefits tied in here that I really love it.

‍

Piyush Jain (33:24):

Yeah. So one of the interesting things that we've done for brands is so one time customers or even these subscribers would also have, if the brand is using loyalty, then they would have these loyalty points. So one of the interesting thing that we ended up doing is that customers can directly buy the product from their loyalty points. So it's an incremental discount. So they would be able to, A, there's a discount on the product, they will be able to redeem their loyalty point and it's a very seamless way for them to add another product.

‍

Brett Curry (34:03):

So I'm subscribing, I'm ordering a bunch of loyalty points if that's the way things are set up in my system and then I could send an email saying, "Hey, add this additional product appears well with what you already have or it's a new product. I think you'll love it. "That type of thing. And hey, you've got X number of loyalty points. Just apply that to the purchase type of thing.

‍

Piyush Jain (34:19):

Yeah.

‍

Brett Curry (34:20):

Love that. Love that. So let's talk about this for a minute, Piyush. We work a lot in the beauty categories, skincare, supplements, love all of them. I love consumable brands and products, but let's talk non-traditional a little bit because I know you're always thinking about, okay, how can we add a subscription component to a brand to a product category where maybe it's not as obvious or kind of a non-traditional subscription type business. Can you give us some examples there and then how should those non-traditional brands that kind of approach that?

‍

Piyush Jain (34:57):

Yeah. I mean, all the different types of subscription, which are mostly for consumables. So individual product subscription, bundle subscription, prepaid subscription where customers end up paying upfront for 12 months, et cetera. So all of these things, brands have been sort of experimenting a lot. And one of the interesting type of use case that we started seeing is in a physical product space where let's say if there is air purifier brand, then they would sell air purifiers, but they would sort of have two different plans. So one is you can only buy air purifiers and another is you can buy air purifiers, but with a filter subscription. And now here the subscription is not, of course, air purifier, the subscription here is a filter. And that is something that we've started seeing pick up. We have few brands who have been using this type of a setup.

‍

(36:08):

Digital membership subscription is starting to pick up as well, brands like Signos, et cetera, where customer is buying membership along with the physical product.

‍

Brett Curry (36:22):

Membership too, was this like a fitness brand, so they're buying a subscription to a digital portal or something?

‍

Piyush Jain (36:27):

Yeah. Analytics, let's say if someone is buying a physical product, then it's a membership to see analytics, something on those lines.

‍

Brett Curry (36:37):

I really like that example of, so if I buy an air purifier, I've got that option. If I buy an air purifier and I go and get the subscription because, hey, you're going to have to get replacement filters and you know what nobody wants to remember and what nobody usually does remember is buying filters. And so just do that right now. Are you seeing then for brands like that, are they offering a discount on the air purifier if you go ahead and subscribe? Are they just offering a discount on the subscription, potentially both? What are you seeing that incentivizes that locking in the subscription when they purchase the product?

‍

Piyush Jain (37:11):

So the biggest one that we see generally with these add-on subscriptions is subscription on the discount on the add-on products. So let's say if filter is $100, then instead of 100, you can lock this price for $75. And it makes customer pause thing that they would be needing. And if they're buying filter, then they'll already decide that they need filter and then filter, sorry, air purifier. And then at that point in time they're like, they might as well sort of lock in discounted price for air purifiers, which would not be available if they just go and see air purifiers. They go and brands would have different discount for air purifier subscriptions. So for example, when you're buying air purifier, then filter is at Sanify if you subscribe, but if you're only subscribing to filter, then brands would keep that discount a little lower, say $20.

‍

(38:04):

Got it. Additional motivation for customers. Some brands also do this that they would also give the, even on the one-time purchase, let's say air purifiers for $100, then air purifier plus subscription would be say $90 compared to $100 for one time purchase

‍

Brett Curry (38:24):

Yeah, totally makes sense. So then you've got that added kind of psychological benefit of, I know I'm going to need the filters. If I go ahead and do that now, I'm locking in the biggest savings I can get, or potentially I'm locking into big savings and I'm getting a little bit of savings on the air purifier, that sort of thing. We have a refrigerator with an ice maker and the water that's in the door or whatever and I got to where I was just like always having to order the filters and so I was like, "I just subscribe to it. " And now just the other day the light came on, I'm like, "Oh wait, I just got a filter like yesterday. This was great. I don't have to think about it now. I can just plug it in. " And so yeah, that happens a few times and you begin to think, okay, some of these subscriptions are actually quite useful for me.

‍

(39:05):

And so I want to start doing them.

‍

Piyush Jain (39:07):

Even with very different, so air filters, water purifier. So all of these are standard things. Even with shoes, brands can offer subscription for souls.

‍

Brett Curry (39:18):

Yeah.

‍

(39:21):

Souls, laces, other things. Yeah, I think that's one of those things where really you're probably just limited by your imagination only. What is an extra utility that someone could get from my product and how can we make that a subscription? And even if your take rate is not the same or the duration someone says subscriber is not the same as a beauty brand or something, it could still be a meaningful impact to your revenue, to your business. So that's great. Kind of last topic here, Piyush, as we're nearing our end of our time here, what can we do to increase the take rate? So we've got a subscription business, what are we testing on the PDP or with offers or things like that? How can we increase the take rate for subscribers?

‍

Piyush Jain (40:08):

Yeah. So a lot of this would be about customers deciding whether they want to buy one time or they want to buy subscriptions. So then what is it that they're getting additional for subscription?

‍

(40:21):

So of course there are discounts which everyone is doing, but then some brands would get creative with it and they would communicate the subscription offering. They'd make subscription offering look like really big. So say if you're adding a gift with the subscription purchase, then that product might be, that's a $50 product and that gift is let's say worth $20. Then the brand could communicate that is if you subscribe, then you are unlocking these additional, you're unlocking $20 worth of another product. There's one thing which seems to be working well. Another thing which seems to be working well is target discount. So let's say first two or three orders at higher discount and then the communication here is that we want you to try this and we know that you'll see results. So first three orders are at let's say 20% off and then after that brands would reduce it to 10%, whatever that number is and that seems to be working well.

‍

(41:30):

Talking about some brands do this that on every order brands is doing some type of work mystery gift. So communicating it upfront that, hey, if you subscribe then every month you're going to get something and communicating all of this directly as a part of that subscription widget or on the PDP so that customers don't miss it.

‍

Brett Curry (41:56):

I love that. Where if I'm thinking, "Hey, I kind of want to subscribe anyway. I think I'm going to use this. I like the savings and the discount. Now you're telling me about a mystery reward that I'm going to get each month." Okay. Just one more thing to kind of ti me over the edge and make me say yes. That's

‍

Piyush Jain (42:11):

Really great. That's

‍

Brett Curry (42:11):

Awesome. Fantastic. Well, Piyush, this has been amazing. Love what you guys are doing at Loop Subscriptions. As I mentioned, a lot of our top clients are customers of yours and you guys are working with you. We already mentioned several, but Good Protein, Four Sigmatic, Livingood Daily, OSea Malibu, Primal Queen, NutriPaw, and the list goes on and on. For those that are saying, "Hey, I don't think my subscription game is where it should be. I need to check out Loop. How can they learn more? How can they get a demo? How can they connect with you?

‍

Piyush Jain (42:42):

Absolutely. Reach out to us on a website right to me at piyush@loopwork.co. We've migrated over 1,900 plus brands so far. And for every brand, churn reduction, improving upsell revenue and improving payment recovery. So this is something that we've done consistently for so many brands that we've migrated and we take care of end-to-end migration. Even if you're not thinking about migration, we can always do subscription audit for your brand and tell you what are some things that can fix.

‍

Brett Curry (43:23):

Love that. Subscription audit. If you get any component of subscription in your business or you're wanting to add it, take Piyush and his team at Loop up on that. Check it out. So that's loopwork.co and it's Piyush, P-I-Y-U-S-H at loopwork.co. So check them out. With that, Piyush, thank you so much. Love this topic. Love what you guys are doing and look forward to chatting again soon.

‍

Piyush Jain (43:49):

Yeah. Thank you so much, Brad. It was good to connect and talk.

‍

Brett Curry (43:53):

Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. Listen when you think about the show. If you found this helpful and you think someone else will find it helpful as well, please share the show with them. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening. That'll do it for this week's episode. One final mention if you feel like you've stalled out with your growth, if you feel like you've missed opportunities and if you feel like your current team or agency, they just don't have that buyer anymore, or maybe you feel like you've outgrown them, we would love to chat. You may be missing opportunities and we don't want to miss an opportunity to work with great brands. So if you'd love to scale on YouTube or Google or Meta or Amazon or email and SMS, or just look like a second set of eyes to look over how you're growing right now, visit us at omgcommerce.com and we can't wait to help you scale profitably.

‍