Integrate your subscription platform to grow customer lifetime value
Take your subscription offering to the next level by creating a fully-automated experience for your customers that delivers on their expectations and turns them into long-term brand advocates. An automated subscription experience helps turn first-time buyers into loyal repeat customers, simplifies the process for subscribers to change and manage their shipments, and streamlines proactive communications. Use Klaviyo to segment your audience and then send targeted messages that meet them where they are in their journey with your brand.
Before you proceed, if you have not done so already, integrate your subscription platform or replenishment app with Klaviyo if it is separate from your primary ecommerce platform. Start by searching the full list of Klaviyo-supported integrations for your specific integration, and follow the guidance linked to complete the setup.
Know your audience
Audience analysis is key for a business's marketing strategy, and subscription businesses are no exception. Before you begin automating your subscription business, spend some time considering your business offerings as well as how your customers and potential customers interact with your brand.
Key considerations:
- How are potential customers finding your brand?
- What benefits do subscribers get?
- Who is subscribing to your products or services?
- How often do customers need your product or service?
Build strategic segments to grow your subscriber base
Now that you’ve given some thought to your audience, begin building segments based on the different groups of current customers, potential customers, and even former customers that you can target with automated messaging.
For example, Nani is a health and wellness brand with a subscription business for their line of skin care products. Customers can subscribe for monthly shipments of skin care products so they never run out. Nani has created 3 distinct segments to help send targeted messages based on their customer’s status with their subscription service.
Interested
The interested segment is a group of prospective customers who have shown interest in Nani’s products but have yet to purchase.
Showing interest might look different from business to business. For Nani, it might mean that they have engaged on social media, visited a product page, or even put an item in their cart but have not completed a purchase.
This segment helps subscription brands:
- Invest more communication into an already interested audience.
- Target prospective customers with product articles and informative content to build trust and encourage purchasing.
- Gather more information and build a relationship through the acquisition process.
À la carte customers
The à la carte customers segment is a collection of all customers who have purchased products outside of your subscription service.
By creating this segment, Nani's goal is to convert these customers into long-time subscribers and improve LTV. These customers have already experienced the product and need to be encouraged to regularly receive it.
This segment helps subscription brands:
- Send messages tailored to customer purchase history.
- Communicate the value of signing up for a subscription service.
- Send personalized recommendations and incentives to increase LTV.
Subscribers
A subscribers segment is a group of all customers currently signed up for your subscription service.
Nani knows that this audience doesn’t need to be convinced to buy into the value of the product and can focus on retaining and further delighting them.
This segment helps subscription brands:
- Target subscribers with opportunities to add more products to their subscription.
- Inform subscribers of new product offerings.
- Send relevant updates related to subscription services.
- Request product reviews and seek brand advocates.
Note: Prior to texting any subscribers, you must first collect explicit consent and understand compliance. Head to our Help Center for more information on collecting consent and abiding by local SMS regulations.
Strategize along your customer journey
At each step of the customer journey, it’s important to give your customers the information they need to build a relationship with your brand. For the purposes of your subscription business, let’s simplify the customer journey down the following steps: acquisition and consideration, conversion, expanding LTV, inspiring advocacy, and cancellation. Fostering your relationship with your audience well throughout each of these stages of the journey leads to greater engagement and optimized marketing spend.
Acquisition and consideration
At this step of the customer journey, browsers are likely to browse around, gathering all the information they can before moving forward with their purchase. It’s important to make this information as accessible to shoppers as you can while also collecting pertinent information about their lifestyle to recommend the best items for them. You can accomplish these goals by asking their preferences through a form or a quiz and through your welcome series.
Strategies for this phase:
- Use a Klaviyo popup form that asks a few questions or use a third-party quiz platform, like Typeform, to gather information about your customer’s needs. Then, target these different audiences with strategic marketing flows split by the given preferences.
- Create a welcome flow to introduce your brand, and highlight what makes your brand unique and all the benefits of your subscription business. Consider adding a discount or offer to new subscribers to accelerate the marketing journey.
Conversion
The next step in the customer journey is conversion. Sometimes, getting someone to go from a casual browser to a new customer or à la carte to a subscription shopper just takes timely communication. Let’s dive into some ideas to capture those customers who you’re having trouble converting.
Strategies for this phase:
- Create engaged segments to better group your potential customers by level of engagement with your brand.
- Target interested profiles with specific messaging that conveys the value of your subscription or provide a discount to sweeten the deal and get them to commit.
- Target your à la carte shoppers with specific messaging aimed at getting them to convert to your subscription. This audience already sees value in your product but needs specific marketing as to why they would benefit from a subscription.
- Set up browse abandonment flows to target shoppers who view pages related to your subscription service.
Expanding LTV
Personalize your communications with your à la carte customers and subscribers. At every step, you’ll want to let your à la carte customers know about your subscription program and your subscribers know about new or exciting items to come.
Expanding LTV strategies:
- Send personalized messages based on segments to ensure the right next step for expanding value is given to the right audience.
- Use show/hide blocks to deliver dynamically different experiences for each of your segments. In flows, you also have the option to split a path based on someone's profile properties.
Inspiring advocacy
Let your long-time customers know how much you appreciate them and how crucial they are to your business. The easiest way to show them you care is to communicate with them directly.
Advocacy strategies:
- Create an anniversary flow to let your customers know how much you appreciate their business. You can create tailored messages depending on how long they’ve been a customer.
- Use flows asking for feedback to gain insight into how to improve your product offering and make your customers feel appreciated.
Cancellation
Communicating with your customers well through the cancellation process is crucial to both managing your brand presence and gathering helpful insight as your customers move on.
Cancelation strategies:
- Capture a cancellation reason from your replenishment app or by setting up a cancellation flow to gain valuable insight into why your customer is leaving. Use this information to inform your future retention strategy and improve the experience. For example, you can re-engage canceled subscribers when your products or services update to address their reason for canceling.
- Retarget previous customers on social media to remind them about your brand or give them an offer to return.