Key takeaways:
1. Successful subscription strategy relies on product-market fit and customer loyalty before focusing on acquisition strategies like starter kits, trials, or welcome gifts.
2. When building your first 1,000 subscribers, focus on creating effective marketing funnels with product education, social proof, and commerce optimization rather than perfecting messaging.
3. Make bold A/B testing changes rather than incremental ones, and consider using high-perceived-value gifts and customizable bundle options to increase perceived value and maintain AOV.
There are two approaches to subscription strategy.
Passive—you just turn on the subscription program and maybe pull in 10-20 opt-ins at a time directly from the PDP.
Or, active— you run meaningful dollars to drive paid subscriptions with strategic subscription marketing.
Either way, you need to have product-market fit and some element of loyalty that will translate into a strong subscriber base. This way, you can not worry so much about that initial AOV and can have some confidence in a pretty tight payback period that you can manage (90 or 120 days).
In this article, we’re covering the strategies and considerations for growing your subscription program from the bottom up. Here’s how to get your first 1,000 subscribers!
Developing your first offer as the basis of your subscription strategy
Your offer will vary depending on what you’re selling. But every brand should start by building a program based on the product’s AOV and how people are using it in their lives.
For most brands, that translates to an offering similar to:
A welcome gift that comes with a first purchase
- A low-priced/ discounted offer to get them to try the product.
- A trial offer that rolls into a monthly subscription
- A starter kit or bundle
| Remember: These attractive offers will draw in new customers, resulting in higher churn but a much lower acquisition cost. |
If you’re starting from scratch in building your subscriber base, you can harbor less concern about higher churn and more about product-market fit and the messaging around your product.
You just want potential customers to try the product.
You want your creative up-funnel to work properly and resonate. Are your ads driving people to a landing page and getting them to make that first purchase?
Building your marketing funnel around your first subscription offering
In most cases, you will use a landing page to drive traffic to your site or individual products.
It doesn’t matter what that page is— a listicle, a video storefront, or a social proof page jammed with press, reviews, and testimonials— there should be three components to attract loyal customers and drive them to your offering.
- Product/ brand education
Social proof
Commerce optimization
The first layer, product and brand education, helps to build excitement and initial interest around your products. You want to get them to the point where they’re asking how to get it for themselves.
Social proof simply gives credibility to any claims you’re providing.
It should be reassuring that anything you’re saying is accurate and trustworthy, but it should also be forceful enough to drive those visitors even further down the funnel.
Once they’re confident that the product is for them, you can push them into that commerce optimization layer. This could be any one of those initial offers—a trial kit, a discount on the first purchase, etc.
Don’t worry too much about messaging in those first marketing iterations
The goal of any ad creative is to get viewers pumped about your products to the point of purchase if not also recommendations to others.
But messaging shouldn’t be your primary focus when you’re first building out your subscription marketing strategy.
Instead, spend more energy on sharing the problem and your solution, sharing statistics, and showing comparisons of your products with competitors… If your product is tied to a celebrity, lean on that.
This is your opportunity to experiment with everything you have.
Growing your AOV with upsells and cross-sells
We see a lot of success from brands that utilize a build-a-box program. Active subscribers like the gamification element of these boxes.
They can mix and match products and customize their box each month.
The benefit for the brand is that these boxes help to preserve your AOV.
For instance, say a customer subscribes to four flavors but doesn’t like two. They go into their portal and cancel those two flavors.
Suddenly, the order went from $100 to $50.
If they’re using a bundle with some sort of parameter, they would need to swap those flavors out for two others.
Aside from bundles, you should always push cross-sells and upsells within your funnels.
If you’re using ExperienceEngine, the AI automatically determines whether a customer subscribing to product A would also be interested in product B and tests those upsells.
Drawing in new subscribers with a high-perceived-value gift with purchase
When we started to build Super Coffee’s e-commerce and subscription program at Lunar Solar, we bundled in backpacks, t-shirts, and other soft goods with a 75-90% gross margin with a case of coffee.
The T-shirts didn’t cost much, but they have a perceived value of around $25. This can be really effective in drawing in loyal subscribers.
A/B test with big swings, not incremental changes
Brands often think that A/B testing and optimizing offers involves incremental changes—altering pricing, changing the colors, or changing the messaging.
You might see incremental lifts with those changes, but the reality is that the big swings and the complete reconfiguration of offers are going to make the real difference.
This is scaling your subscriber base from 0 to 1000. Strategies start to change once you’re scaling beyond this level. Those early days are just about nailing the landing experience and getting people to try and be excited about your products.
In the next stage of growth, it starts to become more about the actual contribution margin on your cohorts.
