9 Email Segmentation Ideas for Engaging Current or Churned Subscribers
Simply stated, every brand’s subscribers are their VIP customers, and should be treated that way! That’s where personalization comes in handy — to really make customers feel like they’re building a real relationship with a brand.
The integration between your subscription app and your ESP delivers a ton of opportunities to make your messaging more personal. By using metrics (events) passed from your subscription app to your ESP, you can trigger unique email experiences, and personalize your messaging to effectively target that specific customer cohort.
Without further ado, let’s dive into 9 types of data-triggered flows that you can build using Stay Ai’s deep Klaviyo integration, to provide customer-loved email experiences.
Let’s wrap up with some overall subscription email best practices to keep in mind.
Carry your brand through every communication.
Take advantage of every email, SMS, and notification you send to build and reinforce your brand. The style and tone should be consistent across channels and tell an orchestrated story about your business. Our customers have busy inboxes – make sure you’re maximizing on your brand affinity real estate.
Personalize your offers and messaging.
Make your VIPs feel seen. Personalizing your offers and messaging based on information about your subscribers or their specific subscriptions can make even one-to-many communications feel almost one-to-one. Segmentation is really a one-time lift. Once you build out the flows with appropriate triggers, you can let them fire until you’re ready to further optimize.
Keep your subscription value props front and center.
Every communication should be a gentle reminder of the value of your subscription program. Whether it’s your subscribe-and-save discount, the promise of exclusive offers, or whatever else sets your subscription apart, make sure your communications reinforce those value props at every touchpoint.
We love this example below from Momofuku.
Best Practices: Subscription Notifications & Email Marketing
Let’s wrap up with some overall subscription email best practices to keep in mind.
Carry your brand through every communication.
Take advantage of every email, SMS, and notification you send to build and reinforce your brand. The style and tone should be consistent across channels and tell an orchestrated story about your business. Our customers have busy inboxes – make sure you’re maximizing on your brand affinity real estate.
Personalize your offers and messaging.
Make your VIPs feel seen. Personalizing your offers and messaging based on information about your subscribers or their specific subscriptions can make even one-to-many communications feel almost one-to-one. Segmentation is really a one-time lift. Once you build out the flows with appropriate triggers, you can let them fire until you’re ready to further optimize.
Keep your subscription value props front and center.
Every communication should be a gentle reminder of the value of your subscription program. Whether it’s your subscribe-and-save discount, the promise of exclusive offers, or whatever else sets your subscription apart, make sure your communications reinforce those value props at every touchpoint.
We love this example below from Momofuku.
Looking to boost your subscription retention rate, or scale up your subscription program’s profit margins? Stay Ai’s out-of-the-box tools are designed to boost your subscription revenue, while delighting your VIP customers.
1. Subscription Onboarding Flow
Use an onboarding flow, triggered by the Subscription Purchased metric, to show customers around the portal. Teach subscribers how to skip shipments, swap items, add on products, pause subscriptions, and more.
A Pup Above sends new subscribers a beautifully branded onboarding email, nudging customers to create an account. With this account, they can manage their own subscriptions via the customer portal.
2. Product Education Flow
Dealing with lots of subscriber order skips? Trigger a flow based on the Subscription Skipped metric that gives more information on how to use a product or reinforces the benefits of consistency. To make this super personalized, you can segment these flows by individual product SKU or bundle.
OLIPOP uses this Klaviyo trigger to send customers a product education oriented email detailing the benefits of probiotics a few days after their subscription purchase.
3. Customer Feedback Flow
Set up a flow in Klaviyo to fire upon the Subscription Paused metric that asks subscribers for feedback on what would make their subscription more valuable to them. This is an awesome way to collect and action on data directly from your most valuable customers, so you can further enhance sub program loyalty.
Beekeeper’s Naturals has built an automated email flow triggered by the Subscription Paused metric, that encourages subscribers to provide feedback on why they’ve paused their subscription. From there, they can personally address customer concerns – or simply collect that data for future program optimization opportunities.
4. Targeted Upsell Flow
Leverage the Subscription Purchased metric and segment by SKU. For example, if a customers subscribes to a trial size product or more basic formulation, only those customers will receive an upsell offer. Then you can tailor each email with the benefits of going bigger/better!
BKN – Upsell Email
Beekeeper’s Naturals also uses Stay’s Klaviyo integration to deliver targeted upsell flows to their subscribers.
In addition to implementing flows such as these, the BKN team has leveraged a variety of other out-of-the-box revenue-boosting features from Stay Ai, resulting in 62% growth in monthly recurring subscription revenue. Click below to read the full case study.
5. Targeted Cross-Sell Flow
Time to action on that sweet, sweet data. Let’s say you learned from your analytics that customers subscribed to Product A tend to also love Product B. Offer Product B to every Product A subscriber that’s about to receive their second subscription order. You can trigger the flow with the Order Upcoming metric and segment by order number to reach the right customers at the right time.
Using Stay Ai’s Klaviyo integration, Aura Bora segments subscribers who tend to purchase new flavor releases or seasonal flavors, and directly market to those cohorts by sending emails with Klaviyo Quick Actions to add-on new products.
By implementing these cross-sell flows – in addition to using a variety of other out-of-the-box revenue-driving features from Stay Ai, the Aura Bora team has seen an incredible 128% growth in monthly subscription revenue since migrating to Stay Ai from Smartrr. Click the button below to read their case study.
6. Product Launch Campaign
About to release a new product that complements a popular existing SKU? Send a campaign to the customers subscribed to that existing product, and offer the new product as a one-time add-on with a discount. OLIPOP’s marketing and retention team frequently uses Stay’s Klaviyo integration to launch cross sell campaigns, when new flavors are launched.
In 2022, OLIPOP launched a seasonal fall flavor – crisp apple. During launch month, OLIPOP saw 30% of the soda’s sales come from add-on purchases through Stay Ai. Learn more by reading their case study here:
7. Win-Back Flow: Customers With “Too Much Product”
Use the Subscription Canceled metric and set up a segment for subscribers who cite too much product as their cancel reason. Then, set your flow to trigger XX number of days after the cancellation metric fires — enough time for the customer to have worked through their stockpile.
Harmless Harvest uses the Klaviyo and Stay integration to trigger a subscriber winback flow that highlights subscription flexibility, so subscribers with too much product know they can re-enroll to the program with a different order frequency moving forward.
8. Win-Back Flow: Customers Who “Didn’t Like the Product”
Launching a new formulation of an old product? Send a one-off to past subscribers of the old version, who churned due to product quality/effectiveness. Be sure to highlight what’s new about the product, fresh reviews & visual collateral, and don’t shy away from directly addressing that you know what had room for improvement in the past!
Vita Coco sends their subscribers an email introducing alternate flavor options, while highlighting their subscription program’s value propositions – free shipping, delivery flexibility, and so on.
9. Win-Back Flow: Customers with Price Objections
Similarly to the aforementioned win-back flows, trigger a flow with the Subscription Canceled metric that directly targets your “price objection” cancellation segment. Use this email for product education to address those objections directly (ex: “premium ingredients” messaging), or offer a discount to entice new purchases. Subscriber-exclusive “bundle and save” deals can also be super effective with this cohort.
A Pup Above’s Klaviyo and Stay integration triggers a cancellation winback flow featuring a 15% off discount for cancelled subscribers.
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