Momofuku’s Kyle Seebohm Talks Subscriber Acquisition & Churn with Stay AI
One of the keys to retention, especially in subscription land, is continually anticipating and answering questions your customers may be asking themselves, like, “What can I do with this product?” “Why should I keep using it?” “How can I get better results?”.
This is just one of the things our team talked about with Momofuku’s VP of Growth, Kyle Seebohm. The whole convo is a peek into how the brand is thinking about subscription as a part of their growth story. Check out the interview loaded with Kyle’s expert insights here.
Kyle Seebohm is Momofuku’s VP of Omnichannel Growth Marketing. He started his career in consulting, then in 2020 moved in-house to consumer brands with a growth role at Quay Australia. He’s built his career around key skills across acquisition, lifecycle marketing and retention, and is now putting those skills to work at Momofuku.
Q: Thanks for sitting down with us, Kyle. We love the Momofuku brand and watching it grow. Can you talk a little bit about the current goals for your subscription program?
Kyle: Our biggest goal is trying to understand where and how subscription fits in our lifecycle, and the best place to message it for customers. In other words, balancing between pushing customers to subscribe on their first purchase, versus after they know what products they like.
Q: What have been your most successful sources of subscriber acquisition?
Kyle: The biggest growth driver so far is our buy box on PDPs, whether it’s customers shopping our site who see the subscription value prop, or they tried it in-store and we haven’t seen them online yet, or shoppers who came via word of mouth. We’re also pushing subscription in our post-purchase marketing flows for customers who’ve purchased 2-3 times, reminding them of our subscription value propositions.
Q: Once you’ve got the subscribers, how do you keep them engaged with your brand and products?
Kyle: Educating them from the start helps them know exactly how to get the most out of our products. That makes us better able to increase the frequency of use. We want to give them inspiration versus just the core use case of opening up the bag and cooking per the instructions. And if they know they’re going to be using it more frequently, and they can use it in all these different ways, that strengthens the value proposition for subscription.
Q: How do you approach reducing churn and keeping your customers subscribed?
Kyle: The biggest thing we can do is make sure every shipment and every touchpoint is a great customer experience. So, that includes the messaging before each and every shipment, reinforcing the value proposition, and making sure that the delivery and fulfillment experience is very smooth.
Q: You’re also using Stay’s RetentionEngine to help with churn; what have you learned since implementing cancel surveys?
Kyle: RetentionEngine reinforced that one of the big reasons why people churn is because they end up buying too much, or buying in retail. We’re an omni channel brand, and one of the biggest questions that we’ll be facing is where subscription fits into that — thinking of ways we can increase our subscription value propositions will be really important.
Q: Now that you’ve been doing this for a while, what would you tell other brands to look for in subscription platform functionality?
Kyle: I would start with the service aspect — finding a partner that you trust and is going to give you the support that you need. We’re a smaller team and didn’t have the capacity to do it all by ourselves. Stay helped immensely. That’s honestly probably first and foremost for me.
From the functionality standpoint, you need a partner that’s forward-thinking about big picture retention questions. There are a lot of newer players in the space, so there’s going to be a lot more functionality built out in the coming years. Make sure your partner has that strategic vision.
Finally, of course you need all the table stakes functionality of seamless signup experience, the seamless portal, being able to report and visualize, and churn mitigation tools.
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