4 Strategies to Optimize Your Shopify Subscription Program for Black Friday/Cyber Monday Success
How to Craft Winning Strategies for Black Friday/Cyber Monday Success
Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) is fast approaching, which means Shopify subscription brands are preparing for the busiest eCommerce sales period of the year. With the right strategy and program optimizations, Black Friday/Cyber Monday is an excellent opportunity for your DTC brand to boost sales and increase recurring revenue this holiday season.
A successful Black Friday/Cyber Monday comes down to preparation. This means you should optimize every touchpoint for potential new one-time purchasers (OTPs) and subscribers to craft an unparalleled shopping experience.
In this article, we’ll highlight 4 areas of your Shopify subscription program that could use a refresh ahead of Black Friday/Cyber Monday to optimize your holiday strategies and ensure your brand is prepared for success.
1. Optimize Your Product Pages (PDPs) and Buy Boxes for Subscription Purchases
One of the most critical places for customers and potential subscribers to learn about your subscription program – and its benefits – is on your product pages (PDPs). Our UI/UX experts put together these four PDP best practices to help nudge your customers toward subscription.
In addition to optimizing your PDPs toward subscription, buy boxes are another way your DTC brand can entice new customers to subscribe. Expose customers to your subscription program’s value at a glance, encouraging them to opt for recurring orders over a one-time purchase.
2. Fully Customize Your Customer Portal
A well-crafted Customer Portal can provide an unmatched subscriber experience that reduces CX tickets while increasing LTV. With an intuitive design and exclusive access to subscriber discounts, deals, and other surprises, a well-branded Customer Portal enables subscribers to take control of their subscriptions without contacting support.
Here are a few of our favorite Customer Portals from Stay AI merchants to help inspire your own portal customizations – no code required.
3. Implement Subscription-oriented CRO
Subscription-oriented conversion rate optimization (CRO) specifically aims to convert your new holiday shoppers into subscribers.
We sat down with our friend Rand Owens, VP of Marketing at Nostra AI, to unpack the tactical CRO checklist and strategies your brand can use to optimize and scale your program leading up to BFCM. This checklist includes optimization tips for early-stage DTC subscription brands and later-stage DTC subscription brands alike, so regardless of your Shopify revenue, you’ll find value in these subscription-oriented CRO strategies.
4. Remember to A/B Test
A/B testing allows you to make decisions based on real customer data rather than assumptions or gut feelings. By comparing two versions of a campaign, whether split-testing different variants of a PDP, different products as upsells, or testing a free gift with a subscriber’s 2nd (or 4th) order, see which resonates better with your audience in real time.
When it comes to your subscription program, the possibilities are nearly endless when it comes to testing, optimizing, and scaling LTV. Your program should never be a static, set-it-and-forget-it component of your marketing strategy. Instead, leverage subscription as a performance channel that needs constant optimization.
With the help of an advanced promotions builder like ExperienceEngine, you can test a wide range of discounts, add-ons, upsells, and gifts to your subscriber cohorts to uncover what deals actually resonate with shoppers before BFCM hits.
Leveraging advanced AI, ExperienceEngine discovers the highest-converting cross-sells, upsells, and discounts without the need for manual testing – and even better, provides you with in-depth analytics to further inform your strategy. You can also present exclusive promotional offers to subscribers identified as high churn risk, incentivizing them to stick to a subscription before they even consider canceling it.
Did you know that ExperienceEngine automatically tracks over 25 KPIs relevant to your promotion so you can clearly understand how the promotion impacted your program? These include actionable data insights around subscriber churn, including percentage and total subscriptions active/paused versus subscriptions canceled, as well as insights like additional revenue and AOV from accepted and declined experiences.
Looking for More Black Friday/Cyber Monday Strategies?
Looking for additional Black Friday/Cyber Monday resources to ensure your Shopify subscription brand is ready to scale this year? We’ve got you covered –
Check out these 100 Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals and strategies from some of last year’s top-performing Shopify subscription brands.