5 Strategies to Drive Sales With Your Subscription E-Commerce Website
It's clear that over the past few years the subscription e-commerce space has exploded. Pioneers such as Birchbox paved the way for a reinvention of what's a fairly well-established business model. Companies are now popping up in every conceivable niche to deliver unique products for specialized markets, from live bait to novelty Japanese snack foods.
As this space continues to grow, we've seen companies emerge as success stories while others fade once their initial novelty wears off. Although a number of factors influence the success of a subscription e-commerce company, five strategies are used by some of the leaders in the space to drive sales and customer engagement:
1. Incentivize email subscriptions. You can't always get the sale right away, so go after the second best thing on the web — a consumer's email address. Even that, however, can't be as easily obtained these days as in the past. Simply hitting your visitor with a giant pop-up box asking them to subscribe to your newsletter isn't a strong enough motivator for most people.
Successful companies, such as Birchbox, have found ways to offer value to potential email subscribers in the form of incentives. These incentives are often focused around discount codes to help drive the shopper to eventually sign up for a subscription. Aside from coupon codes, getting customers on a mailing list ensures you have the ability to both remarket to them down the line and assign them an identity as a visitor, enabling you to tailor some of your web experience to other behavorial analytics you can gather.
2. Use social proof. A key driver in conversion is gaining the trust of the prospect. One element to establishing trust is proof that you've delivered your goods/services to past customers who have been delighted by the results. Demonstrating such "social proof" through customer testimonials is a great way to gain the trust of your visitors. The more "real" this social proof (e.g., using videos or photos instead of just text), the more influential in driving conversion. Take CogniTea, for example, which has sourced customer testimonials and customer photos via Instagram to demonstrate social proof and build trust with its audience.
3. Give the gift. An often overlooked opportunity in the subscription e-commerce space is positioning your product as a "gift" option. As we enter the holiday season, this concept is even more relevant. People aren't always shopping for themselves exclusively, and paired with the often difficult process of finding one specific gift for someone they care about, a "subscription sample" relevant to that individual's interests could be a great alternative to a traditional gift. ConsciousBox has prominently drawn attention to its gift option without distracting from its core message by dropping in a call to action right below the navigation bar. Such callouts are particularly well-suited for testing methods such as A/B testing to determine if they actually drive additional sales.
4. Sell the story. Many subscription e-commerce companies source products from multiple vendors or from partners that meet specific criteria. It's likely that your visitors are interested in not just your brand, but the larger niche/industry that you fill. They're also likely to be more engaged with options they're presented with in your niche and will likely respond to the story behind why a particular product or brand was added to a subscription. One company that puts such emphasis on how it sources its products (although all products are white-labeled) is NatureBox, which has a entire page dedicated to telling the story behind its wholesome food products.
5. Open the vault. Many first-time customers might not only be experiencing your brand for the first time, but also the entire concept of subscription e-commerce. For many, they don't necessarily know what to expect when they receive their first "box." In addition to a clearly written "How it Works" section, sharing insight on some past boxes you've delivered can help customers better understand what to expect when signing up for a subscription. SumoJerky prominently features some of its latest beef jerky samples on its homepage as a way for customers to get a sense of what to expect in their next order.
Although finding the right niche and product partners will far outweigh any on-site design/marketing tactics to drive sales, the above examples are options to experiment with that can ultimately help a great selling product sell even better.
Ross Beyeler is the founder and managing partner of Growth Spark, a provider of strategy, design and technology services.