If your product doesn't fit the bill of something people want on a subscription, there is no amount of discounts or perks that will turn it into a subscription business.
To a consumer, your subscription is one of many. If it's not fitting into a routine and serving as a convenient feature first, you're fighting an uphill battle from the beginning.
The best ways to make a subscription great: exclusive flavors/scents/colors, priority access to new variants, better pricing (10-20% off), access to people/events through the brand, and access to a closed community.
One thing I'm surprised more brands don't do is generate affiliate revenue of their own. If you're Brooklinen selling sheets, why isn't there a post-purchase email with all of Brooklinen's favorite mattress, standing desk, lamp, and sleep aids?
A customer who comes in on the right first-time offer is worth 2x more than one who came in and bought 1 full-priced product.
The best subscription programs sell convenience AND access. Convenience subscriptions are still not as sticky as ones that unlock access — which is why so many brands focus on building community as part of their retention tactic.
Their first purchase was a well-merchandised introduction to the brand — they tried a variety of the top-selling flavors with enough to supply the household and let everyone figure out their 'flavorite.' That's how you hook a subscriber.
How to ensure that subscription is truly a convenient play for the customer, not something to help you, the merchant, lower your CPO. That mindset shift changes everything.
Taco Bell launched a 'Netflix for Tacos' subscription — the cohort of customers who use their loyalty program saw an increase in AOV by 35%.
Do you know what increases customer LTV? Participation. Whether it's running clubs, dinners, parties, or digital surveys — invite your customers to participate. The more they participate, the more 'in' the brand they are.
Change return processes to improve cash flow. Incentivize gift cards over refunds — give 10% more value on a gift card. If they come back with a $100 gift card, your COGs might only be $30. That's better than sending $100 back out.
The future of DTC referral programs will go toward tapping into customers' address books of their 10-20 closest friends, and making it easy to earn social capital — not dollar capital.
Segmented quarterly rewards: if a customer spends over a threshold, send them a gift in return. Or apply a store credit automatically to their next order — they don't need to remember a coupon code.
Instead of shipping someone a pop-socket for spending $X with you, host a party or dinner with your top customers. Chances are they have similar interests and would make new friends amongst each other.
A Gen-Z celebrity beverage brand had a subscription rate of ~5%, whereas normally I'd expect 15-25%. But they had a very high repeat purchase rate — their audience values convenience over commitment.
An effective subscription program needs to be designed around the customer, not around the product you're pushing. Do the unscalable for the best experience. Retention stays high, and when someone talks smack in the comments, your customers will defend you.
10% off of gross revenue for a partner brand, especially with good margins, is a steal compared to their paid channel cost per order. A good retention program takes care of customers further than just its own brand.
Your existing customers are really who will be your true partner in any product launch. It's their dollars, their reviews, their word of mouth, their earned media content, and their excitement that's going to propel growth in the early days of a new product.
Your 'KPI' with building community should be: 'How can I get my customers to become friends with each other?'
The best way to keep existing customers engaged and acquire new ones is by launching new products. New flavors, new scents, new colors. You might be one scent or one color away from unlocking an entire new audience of customers.
92% of users engage with your store's push notifications. I'm sure in 10 years we'll wish we all took advantage of this.
Mobile apps are for your super consumers — curate an experience that feels like they're a part of Club 33 by Disney.
Blank Street Coffee's subscription model is genius — it's like a gym membership for coffee. Free cold brew every 2 hours, $1 espresso drinks, free delivery over $5. When each shot is $1, that $5 threshold means multiple drinks.
On average, 30% of revenue is driven from subscriptions for brands that offer it. Knowing every month that you can rely on 30-40% of your revenue to just come in is really nice.
Brands offering subscriptions grew 26% faster and were 14% more profitable than those that didn't. You get all the ingredients: more reviews, more word of mouth, more content, more social proof.
Only 17.5% of brands generated any revenue from subscriptions. Over 80% don't offer any kind of subscription at all. That number should be a lot higher.
Just because the industry average for churn in your category is X%, don't let yourself just be at that average. Your churn might be a byproduct of a broken pipe, not because it's 'normal.'
If it's hard for a customer to skip shipments, swap products, or cancel their subscription without getting frustrated, you're churning higher than you need to be, your customer service inbox is getting full, and you're exposing yourself to chargebacks.
Focus on taking care of those who have supported you first, before going out to hunt for new customers. Those customers will reward you.
There is research that demonstrates a higher customer lifetime value and propensity to spend with a brand after having a customer service issue resolved. The resolution creates an 'ultra peak' moment.
I truly think in 5 years, as retention becomes a more competitive landscape, people will wish they had an app installed on people's phones and could send push notifications instead of just emails.
There are really only two types of subscription businesses: you sell a consumable product people use on a regular basis (coffee, protein bars, pre-workout), or you sell something that requires scheduled replenishment (shower head filters, humidifier parts).
Hint gives 17% off subscriptions (weird number). Black Wolf Nation gives 25% off. Olipop gives 15% off. Amazon usually gives 5% or 10%. A standard discount of 10–20% off the one-time purchase price is the norm.
One of the biggest mistakes I see new DTC brands make is not focusing enough on customer service. Live chat, seamless exchanges, returns, replacements, a helpful FAQ, and 24/7 support should be table stakes if your brand is doing more than a few million in sales.
Here's my beef with referral programs: why should I get a janky URL, remember to send it to a friend, only for them to get a worse deal than the actual on-site promotion for new customers? And I get rewarded with $10? For most brands, the referral discount is worse than the new customer promo. That's criminal.
Uber gave people a free ride for inviting someone — about a $16 acquisition cost. Buffy offered a $50 Amazon gift card for referrals. HelloFresh gave referred friends $40 off their first box. Lululemon gives fitness trainers 10–20% off, understanding they'd wear only Lulu when teaching.
Nielsen found that customers who came through a referral channel were 4x more likely to convert. If your average website CVR is 3%, your word-of-mouth traffic converts at 12%. Referred customers also have higher LTV and higher AOV — the recommendation from a friend means they're already bought in, not just sampling.
Customer Experience is NOT Customer Support. CX should be part of the core founding team. The right CX leader optimizes every touchpoint: manufacturing, ingredients, packaging, ads, emails, support, social media comments. CX is the modern-day brand director.
Your CX team has access to the most critical data that can rapidly improve your brand. They're in the trenches every day listening to real feedback. They know — often before anyone else — when something is working and when it's not.
Nothing makes people hate a brand more than realizing that the returns process completely wastes their time and loyalty.
The mobile app gives you real estate on your most bought-in customer base. This means share of home screen, higher conversion rate, better analytics, and the ability to create custom experiences for your most engaged customers.
Being omnipresent with your offers — showing up in email, SMS, and on paid social — is a more holistic way to retain customers. Retention isn't just email and SMS. Retargeting ads with custom offers for one-time vs. repeat customers are part of the playbook.
Always tie post-purchase surveys to an incentive. You're asking for someone's time — they should get something in return. These survey responses are invaluable. You'll always get insights that make you think, 'Wow, that's why people love our product?!'
Develop 'macros' — common responses to frequently asked CS questions. Train your agents on surprise and delight resolutions like offering a discount when something goes wrong to win back customer trust and loyalty.
Turning existing customers into affiliates through a refer-a-friend program is the fastest and cheapest way to scale without paid ads. Once the flywheel works, it's one of the most powerful growth engines that exists.
For try-before-you-buy programs with a 14-day trial, brands typically see returns initiated in 7–10 days. For 30-day trials, returns come between 14–20 days post-delivery. The potential to double or triple basket size typically outweighs the inventory lag.
KITH made headlines by NOT offering discounts in their loyalty program. They realized discounts weren't the most enticing offer — instead they made highly desirable offers while protecting margins.
An under-rated place to look for affiliates is within your own customer base. Turn customers into affiliates by offering exclusive access, free gifts, exclusive discounts, or a percentage of revenue from every sale they drive.
The second order rate was higher because people got to taste more of the product, which increased the intent to buy again.
Automatically apply a discount for your top 1% or 2% of customers. Tell them you value them so much that you're going to automatically apply it to their next order — no actions needed.
Prioritize routine over demographics. Consumers, especially millennials and Gen Z, seek products that fit seamlessly into their daily lives. Aim to become a product customers keep using, not just one they purchase once. Figure out how to go from 'nice-to-have' to 'need-to-have.'
Clearly communicate how long a customer needs to use the product to see results. Mentioning that results are noticeable after three months encourages subscription-level commitment.
Use subscription models and recurring revenue to offset the high customer acquisition costs during BFCM. Subscription vs one-off purchases leads to higher LTV.
Customers are more likely to stick around if they have more control. Offer flexibility around delivery frequency, product swapping, pausing, or skipping a month. Having options that replenish too soon is actually net negative and will cause churn.
Subscriptions don't work for everything. High AOV products with no routine schedule (mattresses, luxury apparel, appliances) and products that don't solve a replenishment problem aren't subscription candidates. No one needs a subscription to bath slippers every week.
The best subscription items are things people frequently consume: beauty products, vitamins, Jolie shower filters, sleep gummies, bodywash, dog food. It has to be something regularly consumed where a subscription model makes sense.
If you notice someone hasn't made another purchase 30 days after buying your consumable product, offer a discount to return and buy. That 30-day window is critical for retention.
Your best customers should feel like they walk the red carpet with you every time you launch something new. They should feel invited, a part of the brand, get the opportunity to try it first, and buy it first. Do these exclusive launches in specific channels like SMS, Instagram Close Friends, or a mobile app.
Subscription written as 'Autoship' increased the opt-in rate when I tested it back in 2017. Small copy changes on the purchase options can meaningfully shift subscription conversion.
For subscriptions, if someone tries to cancel chocolate colostrum, add a step to downgrade to unflavored colostrum versus cancelling the whole thing.
Create a small group of your best customers to seed product to. They will always post in your support, feel extra special to receive a gift, and remain lifelong evangelists.
Focus on an introductory offer that can scale into prospecting channels with huge reach. Examples: Everyday Dose's starter kit, Hint Water's 36 bottles for $36, AG1's starter kit. Once the offer works, build funnels that lead to it.
Loyalty program members generate 12-18% more revenue per year than non-members. The program gives customers a reason to come back and consolidate purchases with you.
At Hint Water, Sam's Club was $14.98, website $22.99. We created a $1/bottle offer — 3 cases for $36. Better deal, we got customer data, they tried 3 flavors, and shipping 3 cases was most cost-efficient.
For new customer offers, aim for AOV 2-3x your normal for high-consumption products. Pack in assortment, enough units for the household to try, and optimize shipping by bundling.
One-time purchase with no discount is your anchor price — it exists to make subscription look like the obvious move. Monthly subscription at 10-15% off is your on-ramp. Quarterly at 20-25% off gives better margin per shipment and lower churn.
Your cancel flow should get the same level of CRO attention as your best-performing landing page. You'd never build a checkout page with one step. So why would you build a cancel flow with one step?
Flip the traditional subscription layout. Lead with the 90-day subscription as your primary CTA instead of burying it at the bottom of a dropdown. Quarterly-first is the move for most brands.
Your promotions should drive subscription, not compete with it. If your sitewide sale offers 30% off one-time purchases but your subscription only saves 15%, you're incentivizing the wrong behavior. During promotional periods, the subscription offer should always be equal to or better than the one-time offer.
Every new product launch is a winback touchpoint. Between days 30-60 after a subscriber cancels, your best lever is product, not price. 'We just launched X — want to try it?' gives them a reason to re-engage that has nothing to do with discounts. A new product is a fresh start, not a rehash.
If you're a product with high-consumption habits, your acquisition offer should include a variety of flavors, colors, or scents. You give yourself the highest probability of getting that second purchase when the first order is a sampler, not a single SKU.
As a subscription brand, you're trading guaranteed recurring revenue and a higher valuation for not having to pay 'rent' on ad platforms to acquire each order. But the exchange is you MUST create genuine value: exclusive drops, priority access to new variants, better pricing, free shipping, community access.
Häastens hand-delivered a care package to my apartment just for being a past customer. It kickstarted my TikTok career because I posted about it. That's 'surprise and delight' done right — spend COGs on your existing customers and let them create the content for you.
The best subscribers at a beverage company had 3 things in common: 1) Their first purchase was a well-merchandised variety intro to the brand. 2) 85% made a second one-time purchase before subscribing — they did NOT subscribe on purchase one. 3) They came in from content that told the brand's founding story.
Subscriber cohort analysis is massively underused. Dig into why certain subscribers lasted longer, had higher LTV, or ordered exclusive products on top of their subscription. The common threads across your best cohort become your acquisition playbook.
Amazon Prime has just over $19 billion in annual revenue from over 200 million subscribers. The key to their growth: unlocking more and more access. The best subscription businesses with the highest retention unlock access to their customers, not just convenience.
Pre-DTC, consumers hated subscriptions because of scummy retention tactics from gym memberships, cable companies, and telecoms. If your subscription cancellation process feels like those, you've already lost. Make canceling easy, or you're the brand people warn others about.
The subscription journey formula: First purchase is a variety pack. Second purchase guides the customer to pick their favorite. Third purchase encourages subscribing to that variant with a discount and membership. Build lean-in subscriptions (excited to get the box) not lean-back (forgot they signed up).
Clubhouse's referral model worked because it catered to vanity and social capital, not dollar capital. The future of DTC referral programs is tapping into customers' address books of their 10-20 closest friends and making it easy to earn social capital — personalized URLs like drink.haus/sharma or coupon codes with your name.
Mack Weldon's automatic VIP program: spend over $200 and you automatically qualify for benefits like free shipping and early access. No enrollment required. The customer doesn't have to do any work.
The Pill Club includes surprise goodies in each monthly birth control subscription box. Subscribers get excited to see what's inside. If you have subscribers, you have leverage to go to another brand and say 'Let's put samples of your product in our box.'
Speed Society charged $9.99/month and gave members access to discounts from tire, wheel, steering wheel, and carbon fiber companies. The savings outweighed the monthly fee immediately. A subscription that aggregates partner discounts creates value beyond your own product.
I wanted to run a deal at Hint: 'Subscribe to 3 cases of water, get 3 months of Spotify on us.' The hard cost to Spotify is virtually nothing since it's a digital product. It gave $9.99/month back to customers spending $48/month — so it felt like spending $38. Bundle digital perks with physical subscriptions.
For product launches, give existing customers early access before the general public, with a discount. If you're using Tapcart, give it to app customers first to also drive installs. Your existing customers' dollars, reviews, word of mouth, and excitement propel early growth.
Blank Street Coffee's subscription pricing is genius UX: $12/week sounds so much better than $48/month. The psychology of weekly framing makes the commitment feel smaller. If you're pricing subscriptions, think about the smallest time-unit framing that still feels honest.
Hint's new flavor launch bundle strategy: instead of selling just the new flavor alone, bundle it with existing favorites. It keeps AOV high (3 cases instead of 1), reminds customers of your full product range, and hits the free shipping threshold. Everyone wins.
Predictable revenue is the #1 reason subscriptions exist. Knowing exactly how much money is coming in next month — money you don't even have to think about — changes how you plan, hire, and invest. Everything else is secondary.
Your subscribers are your 'high rollers' — use them as a data set for product launches, sampling, and surveying. As long as you keep high rollers happy, you're building a moat no competitor can easily replicate.
If you understand when a subscriber is likely to churn and implement a surprise & delight program at that moment, you can reduce churn significantly. The intervention has to be timed — random gifting doesn't work. Targeted 'at risk of leaving' gifting does.
Products within routine maintenance — AC filters, shower head filters, water filters — are perfect for subscription because the alternative is remembering to go buy it. Convenience isn't a feature here, it's the entire value prop.
A portfolio company 5x'd its subscriber base in one year starting from a 4-digit subscriber count. For every customer, they make about 2x their CPA in LTV. But for subscribers, that's closer to 5x LTV against CPA. Subscription revenue is 'cheap' revenue — no CPO tax to get those people to purchase again.
Subscription perks that actually retain: free shipping, always-on 20% discount, access to new products 7 days before everyone else, mystery items from the catalog with every order, exclusive content (great for celebrity brands), faster customer support with a dedicated number, and subscriber-only SKUs for color or scent variants.
Just because you think it's 'convenient' to have your product on a scheduled delivery doesn't mean consumers see it that way. You're drinking your own Kool-Aid. You need subscription benefits they can't get on Amazon from either your exact product or a close competitor.
Send surveys to subscribers constantly — by email, text, or Instagram DMs to everyone who tags you. You'll immediately hear all the things it would take to extend LTV, directly from your subscribers.
For most brands, the referral discount is worse than the actual on-site promotion for new customers. You're asking a loyal customer to jump through hoops like a circus monkey, get a janky URL, only so their friend gets a worse deal than a stranger would. That's criminal.
Buffy nailed their referral program: refer a friend to buy Buffy, get a $50 Amazon gift card. It served a customer need — who doesn't want a free gift card to Amazon? That's a $50 CPA, which is genius math.
Retention marketing has 10 levers: email, SMS, mobile apps, retargeting ads, loyalty/membership programs, educational content, reminder content, surprise-and-delight discounts and gifting, VIP experiences, and tech tools to predict churn. Most brands do 1-2 well. The best execute across all of them.
If you're running a sitewide sale during the holidays, subscribers may want to cancel and rebuy at the discount. Update your subscription app's cancellation flow to let people apply the current promotion to their existing subscription instead of cancelling. Cleaner for cohort reporting and shows customers you're not leaving them behind.
Recharge's data shows subscribers spend dramatically more on LTV: Food & Beverage subscribers spend 226% more, Health & Wellness spend 190% more, and Home & Pet spend 216% more than one-off purchasers. Health & Wellness subscribers buy 224% more products on average.
If you offer subscription, you need a dedicated Subscribe & Save landing page that explains benefits, answers FAQs, sells the product, and includes social proof. Your customer service team can link to it, emails can point to it, and search engines can index it. Great examples: Perfect Snacks, Hint, David Protein, Divi, Salud.
$1M in one-off sales isn't nearly as valuable or durable as $1M in recurring subscription revenue. The subscription business is worth substantially more to investors and acquirers — and gives you more leverage when accessing lines of credit, cash advances, or revenue-based loans.
When I asked my mom about subscriptions, she said she wishes brands gave her reminders over text message for upcoming shipments or notifications of an expired card. Right now everyone uses email for that — not enough people use SMS for subscription management.
Send a second plain text email from your Head of Customer Experience asking for feedback. If positive, ask for a review. If negative, you create an opportunity to build rapport — look up the Service Recovery Paradox. Customers who had a problem resolved become more loyal than those who never had a problem.
After BFCM, push new customers to participate in other brand assets — SMS list, Facebook group, Discord server, local events. Use dynamic banners in Klaviyo that display graphics encouraging email subscribers to join SMS when they haven't signed up yet.
Unless your business model is a marketplace or you have multiple SKUs/variants/flavors, no one truly cares for a loyalty program. The points from your shampoo or foot cream company aren't a priority. If you analyze incremental profit vs. the time and investment, it's rarely a great result. Platforms that turn customers into a community or ambassadors have much better ROI.
Gruns offers a two-person subscription option because they realized gummies get split between partners or roommates. If your product naturally gets shared, design a bundle for that behavior instead of fighting it.
The perfect introductory offer has three ingredients: an assortment of variants to sample (flavors, scents, colors), built-up AOV with a discount, and convenience to the customer. Without enough variants, you can't drive enough sampling for someone to find something they like.
Oura Ring sells a $7 plastic ring sizing kit. Warby Parker does at-home try-on with 5 glasses. These custom 'middle of funnel' programs bridge interest and purchase for products people need to experience before buying.
Ensure your BFCM offer doesn't encourage subscribers to cancel their subscriptions. If subscribers get 10% off each order and your Black Friday deal is 30% off for one-time purchasers, they'll cancel and reorder at the bigger discount.
Get into AMEX/Chase credit card portals with offers and global CPA-style affiliate deals. If you're going to build an affiliate program, do it right — get into PR listicles, round-ups, features, and CC portals — otherwise it's a waste of time.
Brands leading with quarterly (90-day) subscriptions are seeing better LTV, lower churn, and faster payback on paid acquisition than monthly defaults. Monthly isn't wrong — it's just not the only answer anymore, and for a lot of brands, it's not the best default.
The average American now has 4+ active subscriptions. Every new subscription isn't just competing against other brands in your category — it's competing against Netflix, Spotify, their gym membership, and the dog food. Subscription fatigue is real.
Treat subscription as its own product, not a feature toggle. It needs its own acquisition strategy, its own landing pages, its own creative. Checking a box and adding 15% off is not a subscription program.
The right subscription cadence depends on your product and your customer's actual usage pattern. A shower filter like Jolie that naturally needs replacing every 90 days? Quarterly. A beauty product with unpredictable usage? Let the customer pick their own cadence.
How you handle the subscription exit might matter more than how you handle the entrance. Nobody starts a subscription program thinking about the exit — but that's exactly where the money leaks.