How Optimizing Your Customer Portal Impacts Your Brand

The customer portal is the heart and soul of your subscribers’ experience. It’s where they’ll manage their subscriptions, discover new products, and make important decisions such as pausing, skipping, or canceling their subscription. And with so much of your subscribers’ experience taking place in the portal, optimizing it can increase retention, boost your LTV, and build excitement around your brand.

1. Retention

Customer retention is at the forefront of any brand’s long-term strategy, and when it comes to subscriptions, it plays one of the most critical roles in the health of your business. 

By optimizing your customer portal to offer an intuitive, seamless experience, your customers will find it easy to manage their subscriptions. This can reduce churn because one, your customers won’t get frustrated with their online experience, and two, they can make adjustments to their orders rather than just giving up and canceling altogether. 

With your Stay Ai customer portal, you can offer your subscribers the option to pause, skip, or even gift their upcoming subscription order. These alternatives to canceling their order entirely can help your subscribers stay longer and boost your retention rates.

2. LTV

For subscriptions, we calculate LTV by taking the average number of cycles your subscribers stay for and multiplying it by the average order value (AOV). An optimized customer portal can increase both the number of cycles and the AOV, making it a perfect way to boost LTV. As we mentioned above, an optimized portal helps with retention. Extending the lifetime of your subscribers will bump up that number of cycles to naturally boost LTV.

To increase your AOV, your customer portal is a great place to make cross-sells and upsells. An optimized customer portal will allow you to highlight additional products they might like with a quick “add to order” option. These opportunities to add onto their upcoming subscription shipment can increase AOV both in the short-term and the long-term as your customers are continually presented with fresh and exciting options.

3. Brand Identity

Beyond customer retention and increased LTV, your customer portal is a reflection of your brand identity. Every touchpoint should reinforce key aspects of your brand from the voice to the look and feel. Stay Ai is built with your brand in mind. You can make adjustments to the look and feel by adding your brand colors. Fonts will be pulled directly from your Shopify theme so the jump from your webpage to the customer portal feels natural and seamless. You can even customize further with CSS. The result is a customer portal that reflects your brand identity and lets it shine through.

As a final note, we’ve focused on the benefits of optimization, but there are also some serious downsides to not optimizing. A bad customer portal experience will not only reflect poorly on your brand, but can lead to negative word-of-mouth and push your target audience right into the arms of your competitors. Make sure you keep this in mind when you’re thinking about making changes to your customer portal experience!