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.

To ensure your brand has its best Black Friday/Cyber Monday yet, our team of retention and subscription experts have compiled some of the best strategies from leading eCommerce Shopify stores and brought them together below!

By implementing these strategies, your team can set yourself up for success on the busiest shopping event of the year – and boost AOV and LTV along the way.

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Play #1: Optimizing Your Shopify Subscription Program Before Black Friday/Cyber Monday 

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, our team of experts highlights 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.

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Play #2: Running a Successful Shopify Black Friday/Cyber Monday Campaign to Capture New Subscribers 

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are the largest holiday shopping events of the year. During this high-traffic online shopping occasion, Shopify eCommerce brands see an increase in site traffic and sales—that is, with the right acquisition strategy. 

Alongside new first-time purchasers, the most effective way to drive revenue growth on Black Friday and Cyber Monday is by running a successful campaign that captures first-time subscribers. By converting new subscribers during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, your brand sets the foundation for recurring revenue throughout the holiday season and into the new year.

In this article, our retention and subscription experts unpack tested, winning strategies that will help your eCommerce business run a successful Black Friday & Cyber Monday promotion to capture new subscribers and increase your DTC recurring revenue. 

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Play #3: Creating High-value Black Friday/Cyber Monday Offers for Existing Subscribers

While many brands focus on acquiring first-time customers during BFCM, top-performing Shopify brands will also prioritize offering high-value deals to their existing customers, ensuring strong conversions when the holiday season arrives.

To avoid sale-related churn, ensure that your subscribers – aka your most valuable customers – receive the best deal on your product.

In this article, our retention and subscription experts unpack 8 tested, winning strategies guaranteed to increase AOV and LTV from your existing customers and ensure that your eCommerce business has its most successful Black Friday/Cyber Monday yet.

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Play #4: Aftercare Strategies to Retain Your New Subscribers & Boost LTV Following BFCM

After months of planning, the last thing you want to see is a high churn rate for those new first-time customers and subscribers you spent months working to acquire.

Unfortunately, churn is inevitable – but with an airtight aftercare strategy, you can reduce holiday-related churn to engage your new customers before they even consider churning.

By setting up aftercare strategies for BFCM early, you can maximize the value of your newest subscribers while preventing your team from playing catch-up after one of the year’s busiest shopping events.

In this article, our team unpacks exactly how your brand can implement an effective aftercare strategy for BFCM. 

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Play #5: Promotion Best Practices for Subscribers During Black Friday/Cyber Monday

During these significant sale periods, it can be challenging to retain subscribers if they see a better deal or one-time sale offered to first-time shoppers or non-subscribers. They may opt to cancel their subscription or, worse, churn altogether.

To combat sitewide sale-related churn and as a best practice from the experts at Stay AI, you should always ensure that your subscribers – your most valuable customers – receive the best deal on your product, no matter the occasion.

In this article, we’ll walk you through how to approach subscription discounting during sitewide and holiday sale occasions to keep new and existing subscribers happy – and avoid sales-related churn.

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Play #6: Top 100 Black Friday Deals and Sales from Stay AI’s Favorite Shopify Brands

We love celebrating and supporting the awesome DTC brands in our community, so we pulled together a list of the top 100 Black Friday DTC sales you can shop from Stay AI merchant brands. Check ’em out here!

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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 – our team analyzed 300 #Shopify subscription programs to bring you winning BFCM strategies guaranteed to give you the revenue boost you’re looking for this year, all in one convenient (and free) 2024 Ultimate BFCM Playbook.

During Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM), which happens to be Shopify’s largest eCommerce event of the year, increasing sales from existing customers can be challenging. 

While many brands focus on acquiring first-time customers during BFCM, top-performing Shopify brands will also prioritize offering high-value deals to their existing customers, ensuring strong conversions when the holiday season arrives.

In addition, during large sale periods like Black Friday/Cyber Monday, it can be challenging to retain existing customers and subscribers if they see a better deal or one-time sale offered to first-time shoppers or non-subscribers.

To avoid sale-related churn, ensure that your subscribers – aka your most valuable customers – receive the best deal on your product.

In this article, our retention and subscription experts unpack tested, winning strategies guaranteed to increase AOV and LTV from your existing customers and ensure that your eCommerce business has its most successful Black Friday/Cyber Monday yet.

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How to Boost Subscriber Retention and LTV During Black Friday/Cyber Monday

#1 – Surprise & Delight with Exclusive Banner Ad Deals

Adding a banner ad directly within the Customer Portal is an excellent way to alert subscribers of upcoming or new product announcements and offers. Here, you can alert customers of new one-time add-ons, such as a cross-sell or upsell, or any other number of discounts, deals, and surprises your team may have up their sleeves.

Reward your most valuable customers with early access to BFCM promotions before they hit the general public. Using the banner ad, feature the products with applicable promotional offers, and make sure to link the most popular product to enable that two-click purchase. Then, optimize your upsell carousel to feature all of the products with a special discount so subscribers can quickly add those to their upcoming orders.

Here are a few strategies and examples from some of our favorite brands that leveraged their banner ads to keep subscribers engaged during BFCM last year:

(A) Offer Early Access, Subscriber-exclusive BFCM Deals

Clean Skin Club ran an awesome subscriber promotion for Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2023, offering their most loyal customers early access to incredible discounts. Each discounted product featured in the banner ad is accessible for a one-click add-on via the upsell carousel.

(B) Offer a VIP Loyalty Discount that’s Better than Your Sitewide Sale

During major market-wide promotional periods like Black Friday/Cyber Monday, your customers are likely browsing offers across multiple brands. To keep them in your corner, it’s up to you to surface the most captivating deal. Last year, UCAN offered subscribers 30% off their next order during the entire month of November – an even juicier discount than the 25% listed on their website.

(C) Show Subscriber Appreciation with a Free Gift – No Purchase Necessary

If you don’t want to provide additional or deeper discounts to subscribers during promo periods, we highly recommend offering a free gift with purchase instead. With this strategy, you can delight your subscribers with something to show appreciation and enhance their brand loyalty. Implementing this tactic during sales seasons will strengthen your connection with your subscribers and foster a sense of community, reinforcing a positive perception of your brand.

Last BFCM, Truvani ran an awesome Black Friday promotion that included a free shaker bottle with each new order. For existing subscribers, no purchase was necessary – they could add-on a free shaker bottle to their upcoming order using the Customer Portal banner ad.

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#2 – Promote Exclusive Offers with an Add-on Carousel

Leveraging a dynamic add-on carousel, customers can easily add one-time products to their next shipment, bumping up their AOV and LTV. On Black Friday/Cyber Monday, you can leverage your in-portal Add-on Carousel to feature exclusive deals or limited-time SKUs, and then announce and reinforce these offers with an enticing banner ad announcement.

A) OLIPOP

OLIPOP uses their banner ad to promote the return of their limited-edition, seasonal Crisp Apple flavor. Subscribers could add this limited-time discounted upsell to their next subscription order directly within the Customer Portal in just a few clicks.

In less than a month, OLIPOP saw 30% of Crisp Apple sales attributed to add-ons directly within the Customer Portal – contributing to their overall subscription growth strategy.

(B) Loverboy

This past summer, the Loverboy team implemented some of their summer flavor faves into their Add-on Carousel, including the Spritz Variety Pack, Blueberry Lemon, and more. As a result, the team saw a 248% increase in add-on revenue with these seasonal favorites in the past three months.

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#3 – Unlock Higher AOV with Strategic Cross-sells & Upsells

Too often, subscribers are overlooked when it comes to new promotions. If you’re not considering your subscriber cohort for cross-sells and upsells, you’re missing out on a cost-effective, untapped opportunity to maximize AOV and recurring revenue.

Here are a few strategies your brand can utilize to boost AOV this Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Let’s take a look at a few examples from some of our favorite Stay AI merchants –

(A) MoonBrew

MoonBrew delights subscribers across the customer journey with upsell promotions and gifts across orders using Quick Actions and ExperienceEngine. For example, MoonBrew subscribers can receive 20% off on certain add-on items, such as their MoonBrew Hot Cocoa, as a surprise upsell when they enter their Customer Portal. MoonBrew also surprises subscribers with a free tea storage container that appears as a Promotional Offer Email (once eligible) that alerts them of their special offer and directs them to their portal to redeem it.

These surprise and delight tactics keep subscribers engaged, reduce churn, and have the added benefit of reminding customers about the brand every time they’re in their kitchens – building affinity over time. By A/B testing different offers like this and discovering what’s most effective for increasing LTV, MoonBrew quickly identifies which offers and incentives work best across specific subscriber cohorts. Just 30 days after switching from their previous subscription provider, MoonBrew witnessed an impressive 72% increase in recurring revenue. 

(B) Lifeboost

Our friends at Lifeboost A/B tested upselling subscribers on two different coffee variants – a pumpkin spice blend and an espresso blend. The promotion was a massive success, with Test B, the espresso option, receiving a 45% higher acceptance rate than Test A.

With an advanced promotions builder like Stay AI’s ExperienceEngine, you can test a wide range of discounts, add-ons, and gifts to your subscriber cohorts – including cross-sell and upsell offers. You can either create these promotions manually within the Merchant Portal or leverage our proprietary AI to A/B test several cross-sell or upsell opportunities. Either way you utilize it, ExperienceEngine is built to help you discover the highest-converting offer to share with your wider audience.

(C) Aura Bora

Here, Aura Bora announced the launch of their new Honey Pumpkin flavor, and gave subscribers an upsell option to add it to an upcoming order with a Quick Action CTA:

By implementing these cross-sell flows – in addition to using other revenue-driving features from Stay AI, the Aura Bora team has seen an incredible 128% growth in monthly subscription revenue.

Pro Tip: If your brand has a large product catalog, you can easily use ExperienceEngine’s smart A/B testing capabilities to test several cross-sell or upsell offers to narrow down which offer converts best with your subscribers – and enhance the subscriber experience. For 8 A/B testing strategies that leverage ExperienceEngine, read more here.

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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 – our team analyzed 300 #Shopify subscription programs to bring you winning BFCM strategies guaranteed to give you the revenue boost you’re looking for this year, all in one convenient (and free) 2024 Ultimate BFCM Playbook.

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Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are the largest holiday shopping events of the year. During this high-traffic online shopping occasion, Shopify eCommerce brands see an increase in site traffic and sales—that is, with the right acquisition strategy. 

Alongside new first-time purchasers, the most effective way to drive revenue growth on Black Friday and Cyber Monday is by running a successful campaign that captures first-time subscribers. By converting new subscribers during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, your brand sets the foundation for recurring revenue throughout the holiday season and into the new year.

In this article, our retention and subscription experts unpack tested, winning strategies that will help your eCommerce business run a successful Black Friday & Cyber Monday promotion to capture new subscribers and increase your DTC recurring revenue. 

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Strategies to Successfully Capture New Subscribers during Black Friday/Cyber Monday 

Strategy #1: Offer Flexible Bundle Options

Bundles are a great way to increase AOV, especially around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We’ve seen brands succeed using high-priced bundles that include limited-edition products or complimentary add-ons. These entry bundles create high initial orders, and then brands can roll those customers into subscriptions. 

But beyond the traditional bundle, we recommend build-your-own bundles that offer increased flexibility, personalization, and value for customers looking to try several new products, and who will appreciate the added small discount for buying multiple products. Increased flexibility in your bundling offers also makes customers much more likely to stick around for a subscription. 

Here are a few different bundling strategies we love from Stay merchants – 

(1) Trial or Starter Kits that Roll into a Subscription

Hook customers by offering trial kits that seamlessly roll over into a full subscription, sprinkled with personalized tips and exclusive sneak peeks. Bundle everything your customers need to get started, then leverage workflow automation to switch buyers to a regular subscription shipment after the trial period ends.

Tenzo uses a trial-to-subscription offer to ensure first-time matcha makers are fully equipped to make their matcha before rolling into a simpler restock subscription.

(2) Build-Your-Own Bundles

When items are bundled, customers feel like they’re getting a sweet deal, even if the discount isn’t massive. With build-your-own bundles, shoppers can customize their bundle exactly how they want, whether it’s different sizes, flavors, or delivery cadence. The more they can customize, the happier they’ll be — and much less likely to churn.

When customers have different size, flavor, and frequency options, they need a more customizable bundle for exactly the shipment they want — and to easily adjust when their needs change.

Grinds makes it easy for subscribers to choose specific flavors and quantities of their caffeine pouches so that they can create exactly the variety of flavors they want each month. This flexibility contributed to Grinds’ 22% increase in three-month retention rate and 48% surge in subscription revenue.

Pro Tip: Be sure your bundling strategy fits your audience. Large bundles with a high price tag may not be the right call for every brand. While they can increase AOV in the short term, they can also lead to churn if subscribers start feeling like they can’t justify the recurring cost. A bundle-builder can be a good solution since your consumers can create their own bundle with a price point they’re comfortable with. For more strategies around bundling, click here.

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Strategy #2: Create Winning Welcome Offers & High-Converting Buy Boxes

Optimizing your welcome offers and buy boxes are just a few of the many ways you can entice new customers to subscribe. By exposing customers to your subscription program’s value at a glance, you can encourage them to opt for recurring orders over a one-time purchase.

Graza, aka DTC’s favorite olive oil brand, is serving a buy box that’s as smart as their internet-loved squeezable bottles. With a subtle nudge toward quantity, Graza arranges their quantity options to make bulk buys extra tempting — marrying free shipping with sweet savings.

The drop-down delivery frequency menu puts options right at their fingertips so they can tailor their delivery schedule to their unique needs.

For 8 additional high-converting buy box examples from top Shopify eCommerce brands, click here.

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Strategy #3: Offer an Exclusive, One-time Subscription Discount

The least complicated way to run a successful sitewide sale on Black Friday/Cyber Monday that captures new subscribers is with a boosted subscription offer that increases your usual subscription incentive or discount offer by stacking it with an additional, one-time discount code.

Last year, our friends at Vita Coco leveraged an in-portal banner ad to announce and offer a subscriber-exclusive discount on customers’ upcoming orders during BFCM. Take a look:

For a detailed breakdown of how to create one-time subscription discounts during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, read more here.

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Strategy #4: Offer an Exclusive Subscriber Discount by Updating Your Selling Plan

The second approach your brand can take to offer new subscribers a greater deal is to change your Selling Plan to a higher discount (ie. 30% versus your usual 15%), and once the promotion is over, change it back to 15%. The caveat here is that subscribers who first purchased during your sale will be grandfathered into that 30% deal indefinitely.

This option is great if you want to offer new subscribers an indefinite rate at your current promotional discount. However, if you ever intend to switch these subscribers back to your typical subscription discount (ie. 15% off), you would need to implement a workflow or two that could end up being a nightmare depending on the size of your SKU catalog.

For more information on updating your Selling Plan around Black Friday/Cyber Monday, read more here.

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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 – our team analyzed 300 #Shopify subscription programs to bring you winning BFCM strategies guaranteed to give you the revenue boost you’re looking for this year, all in one convenient (and free) 2024 Ultimate BFCM Playbook.

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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.

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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.

Check out these 9 high-converting subscription buy box examples from some of Shopify’s top DTC subscription brands.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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