Convert Your One-Time Customers to Subscribers

As far as subscriber acquisition tactics go, farming your existing customer base is one of the most effective routes. It is also one of the most cost-effective. 

What we’ve seen from brands trying this tactic, however, is a jump to the most obvious options—a discount or a free gift.

It works, but not always, and certainly not as effectively as other solutions in certain situations. In this article, we cover other solutions to converting customers to subscribers. 

(If you’re looking for general subscriber acquisition tactics, we have those right here in our article: 

Educate your audience using customer reviews

Product education might not seem like an acquisition strategy, let alone a way to convert current customers to a monthly subscription, but we promise it is. 

We’ve worked with companies that have experienced skepticism from one-time purchasers that kept them from subscribing. The majority of the time, that skepticism stemmed from a misunderstanding of how long it would take for the product to work. 

These customers have a general understanding of the product, but the details are a bit fuzzy. 

Product education solved this, but here’s the kicker: there’s more than one way to deliver product education. 

Yes, add it to your landing pages, buy boxes, product images, winback and welcome emails… but let your existing customers do some of the heavy lifting. 

That’s right, use a little UGC (user-generated content) to explain how long it takes to see results. Showcase the reviews that mention results timelines, like this:

OBVI has several sections exclusively dedicated to these images and reviews, often with signs showing the timeline between each picture. The reviews themselves also share how long it took them to see results. 

If that wasn’t enough, OBVI also includes customer before and after shots throughout their burn bundle landing page.

Make the case for loyalty before they even become a customer

A large segment of your customers selects one-time purchase solely because they’ve never tried your product before. They’re not ready to commit to a subscription without knowing whether or not they’ll like the flavor or will experience any results. 

But, just because they aren’t ready to subscribe doesn’t mean you shouldn’t convince them they should well before they make that first purchase. 

Just look at this example from Alice Mushrooms:

This is only a snapshot of their landing page, but you notice a few things that send the message that a subscription with Alice Mushrooms is totally worth it. In fact, they make it incredibly hard to click one-time purchase. 

Not only are they giving you a silky sleep mask (which would make most girlies perk up), but subscribers also get an extra 20% off their order, free shipping, breathwork and meditation guides via app, and of course they’re letting you know there’s no long-term commitment if you do subscribe. 

Then they emphasize that you don’t get any of that when you hit one-time purchase (except the lack of long-term commitment). 

The content across the rest of the page also helps to bolster the idea of taking their product consistently (“sleep like a baby, every night”). If you scroll down the page, they also go into detail about the ingredients and how each one impacts your body and your sleep. 

All of these factors help to build the conception that, not only is this product great to use nightly to solve any issue you have with sleep, but the subscriber experience is also worth it. 

Utilize post-purchase touchpoints 

There are three different post-purchase touchpoints that offer an opportunity to convince your existing customers to subscribe, including:

• Post-purchase communications
• Unboxing experience
• Checkout

Post-checkout offer

If you know the average reorder period (e.g., 20 days after receipt), you can send the customer an offer to encourage subscription. Just make sure that the timing is directly tied to consumption frequency.

“The best times in the customer lifecycle to send these messages are related to consumption frequency. We have to ask them to buy again at the right time, versus just being greedy and missing the mark.” — Shray Joshi, Founder & CEO, Good Peeps

You want to say in these messages, “Hey, we hope you love the product. Did you know you can save X% if you turn it into a subscription?”

You can’t stop there, though. Let them know they’d also get a free gift every third order, free shipping, and a chance to influence product development. They have to see a real reason to keep coming back.

Feel free to put all that detail (along with some product education, if needed) into two or three emails. One usually isn’t enough to do the trick.

Unboxing experience

It’s one thing to have killer marketing, but if your product experience doesn’t live up to the same hype, people won’t come back. That product experience starts at the unboxing. 

Some of our most successful brands really go all out on their unboxing experience. They add fun puns as microcopy. They’re consistent with their branding. The packaging material is high quality (Dad Fuel is great at this)…

When you can tie everything together thematically, it shows that you’ve put a lot of thought and effort into creating an exciting experience for your customers (and they’ll appreciate it). 

If you’re trying to turn the unboxing experience into a subscription conversion opportunity, though, you’ll need to add other elements, like:

• Beautifully designed product education that tells you how to get the maximum benefits from the product.
• A QR code that leads them to an instructional video.
• Samples of other products related to the one they purchased.
• Handwritten cards from the founder or team.
• Discount coupons.
• Free gifts or swag that make sense to pair with their product (e.g., a bowl to go with your cereal).
• Social media encouragement.
• Void fill that’s fun and/or useful.
• Recycling instructions if you’re using eco-friendly packaging.
• Feedback requests and information on how to contact the brand.
• Stickers, packets of flower seeds, pressed flowers, or any other toss in that adds a little extra fun to the unboxing experience.

Don’t forget the box itself, too. Dress it up. Add some fun microcopy. Add tons of colors. If your product is for children, turn your box into something they can play with when it unfolds. The point is to get creative while staying on-brand. 

Add samples to your deliveries

We’ve already mentioned this in the list above, but wanted to double click on it for a second because it’s a really effective conversion strategy. 

If you add samples to deliveries, include a QR code with a checkout URL link to generate a new subscription.

Upsell to a subscription on the checkout page

Just because your customer reached the checkout page, doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity to upsell. 

Sure, upsell products, but the checkout page is also a great area to nudge a subscription. 

Stay’s Easy Upsells enables customers to upgrade their one-time purchase to a subscription purchase right at checkout. 

Segment your one-time purchasers

By segmenting your one-time purchasers for communications via email and SMS, you can target them for subscription upsells.

If you’d like to get more detailed, send out a post-purchase survey to understand your customers’ use cases or pain points they’re trying to solve, then leverage that customer data to segment your audience by use case/ problem.

Then, send them messages with conversion-focused content specifically addressing those use cases. 

Leverage bulk offers and bundles to expose new customers to subscription value

Here’s the truth: a big part of retaining subscribers is creating habits. If your customers don’t build your product into their routine, they’ll not feel that you’re as essential to their lives. 

Bulk offerings or bundles give your customers several months’ worth of product (increasing your AOV), which they’re more likely to use. Who’s going to pay for all of that product and not use it, right?

Most bulk offerings hover around a three month supply, and that’s typically enough to get most customers over the habit-building hurdle. 

It’s the perfect time to offer a subscription for that product. You can leverage workflow automation to roll customers into a regular subscription with a monthly shipment.

Reactivate former subscribers who make a one-time purchase

Brands are 40% more likely to win back churned subscribers than to acquire new ones. But most win-back flows have some fundamental flaws, including:

• Poor timing
• Using discounts as a default attraction
• Not offering personalized treatments for each cancellation reason

First things first… Don’t default to a 90-day winback period. That doesn’t work for all brands or all products, and certainly not all customers. 

Considering purchase latency is one way to optimize the timing of your winbacks, but it still involves a lot of guesswork. 

Implementing AI (like Stay’s WinbackEngine) is one of the best ways to truly be sure you’re perfecting winback timing. Not only do you avoid the manual data analysis and A/B testing, but you completely remove the guesswork from your winback campaigns. 

When you send out those winback emails, make sure you add layers of personalization, such as addressing their reason for churning, mentioning the products they were subscribed to, and how long they were subscribed.

Addressing customer churn reasons

Customers who cancel because they have “too much product” aren’t going to respond to discount offers. No matter how big the discount, they’re still not ready to buy. 

On the other hand, if you offer to delay their orders for a while and remind them of your product’s benefits, they might be more tempted. 

Customers who cancelled because they didn’t like the product’s flavor might respond to an offer to try a newly released flavor.

You get the picture. 

Make re-engagement really easy

Every extra step for ex-customers to return is a chance for them to get cold feet. Remove any and every obstacle in their way.

One of the best ways to do this is with Klayvio Quick Actions. 

Our most recent update of Quick Actions enables you to stack multiple actions within a URL. So, if you want to create a winback flow that includes a free gift offer when the customer resubscribes, you can stack the following actions:

• Reactivate a subscription
• Add a free gift
• Get It Now (to trigger immediate fulfillment)

This creates a fully automated reactivation funnel inside an email.