Crafting Compelling Offers For Ecommerce Subscriptions

You're Making These 5 Mistakes With Your Subscription Offers Your offer is the first impression subscribers get—and if it’s off, they’ll walk away or churn fast. Here are 5 common mistakes you might be making, plus how to fix them: 1 Mistake: Deep Discounts with No Strategy 🔄 Fix: Use discounts as part of a larger value-driven plan. Highlight long-term benefits, like a discounted trial paired with exclusive perks for ongoing subscribers. 2 Mistake: Overcomplicated Sign-Up Process 🔄 Fix: Simplify! Reduce friction by offering one-click sign-ups and clear pricing. Confusion kills conversions. 3 Mistake: One-Size-Fits-All Offers 🔄 Fix: Personalize offers based on customer needs. Create tiers or bundles that cater to different preferences, making the value clear for each group. 4 Mistake: Freebies That Don’t Align with Your Product 🔄 Fix: Align your free gift with your subscription’s purpose. For example, a fitness subscription should include branded workout gear—not a random tote bag. 5 Mistake: Focusing Only on Acquisition 🔄 Fix: Design offers that promote long-term value, like rewarding subscribers for milestones or upgrading plans. Acquisition is important, but retention is where you win. A great subscription offer is clear, compelling, and aligned with your audience’s needs. Get it right, and you’ll attract subscribers who stick around for the long haul. 💡

Here is something we are trying with a client of ours… Step 1 - Customer places an order Step 2 - This triggers an automation that sends them an email letting the reader know that they are two orders away from unlocking a reward Note, this is a subscription-based business model, so our goal is to keep people subscribed for a longer period. We found that those who kept their subscription for 3 renewal periods tend to stay on for a significant period after. So our focus is getting people to that magic number of three. Step 3 - Customer places a second order Step 4 - Triggers an email that clearly lets the reader know they are 1 order away from a reward Step 5 - Customer places third order Step 6 - Triggers an email that delivers two things. The first is some sort of discount towards their next order for the reader. The second and more important reward that is delivered is a discount code that is more than the welcome series offer that the reader can send to a friend. Now, ensure this discount is only valid for first-time purchases to prevent the same person from using it themselves What this does is allow us to leverage existing customers’s (who we know love our business based on how many times they purchased) network with a focus on then acquiring a new customer. The great thing about this is that, assuming the friend of the customer buys, we are able to save a bunch of money on ad spend to acquire a customer, while at a discounted rate, who has a high likelihood of demonstrating similar purchasing behaviour to that of the original customer who triggered the automation in the first place. The reason we interlaced two incentives is because we needed the purchaser to also have something for themselves as well as for a friend, and we didn’t want them to feel misled leading up to the giving of the discount with the comms in the build-up emails.