🌴 How this period care company keeps subscription customers
Make it easy to leave but give them a reason to stay
Hey ☀️
How are things?
Today’s email is mostly for those of you running (or thinking about starting) a subscription business. It’s also a good story for anyone building a brand in general though.
Before we get into that, Jonny & I are keen to learn more about the problems founders using the subscription business model are facing.
We’d love to set up a 10-15 minute chat with anyone who’s up for it to chat about subscription struggles. If you’re happy to, reply to this email and let’s chat.
Thank you in advance 🙏🏼
—
Ok, let’s get into it…
Getting the subscription experience right is a delicate balance.
Make it difficult to cancel, customers resent you.
Make it too easy, they might leave without proper consideration.
Few get the balance right. But some do.
One of those companies is TOTM - a period care brand.
This is how they stopped me from pausing or cancelling my subscription 👇
Here’s what to expect today:
📰 Story: How TOTM keeps subscription customers without annoying them
🧠 Insight: Make it easy to leave but give them a reason to stay
💪🏼 DIY: How to keep subscription customers without annoying them or discounting
🔗 Good links: A detailed subscription brand analysis, how to make the most of the post-purchase high and free period care for your workplace
📰 Story: How TOTM keeps subscription customers without annoying them
TOTM offers sustainable period care, delivered to your door.
I’ve been using their service for a few years now and love it but recently ended up with a surplus of products.
I wanted to pause or cancel the service for a while and so signed into my account to do just that.
Firstly, they make it super easy to change the date, cancel or expedite your order.
This builds trust and makes it feel like they’re genuinely trying to make life easy for you rather than trap you into something you don’t want/need anymore.
Secondly, this is the good bit, they offer another option… Donate.
So instead of cancelling or pausing, I chose to donate instead.
I feel good about donating to a good cause and they keep me as a customer.
It’s a win, win.
To date, they’ve donated 120,889 products!
For me, that’s a good reason to keep using them.
🧠 Insight: Make it easy to leave but give them a reason to stay
Making it hard to cancel a subscription is not the way to build a strong business.
Customers will resent you, they’ll tell people to stay away from your service and you’ll waste time dealing with them when they can’t figure out how to cancel. Because they will still want to — and probably even more so!
But making it too easy to leave isn’t clever either. The key is to strike a balance, make it easy for them to leave but give them a really good reason to stay.
💪🏼 DIY: How to keep subscription customers without winding them up
Leverage loss aversion
When people go to cancel, reiterate your value proposition and what they will be missing out on if they cancel. Bonus points for personalising this for different segments. For example, if you’re an accountancy firm with a customer who wants to downgrade, you could send an email clearly outlining which parts of the service they’ll no longer have access to when they downgrade. Then ask them to reconfirm whether they want to continue/cancel their subscription.
This technique employs the loss aversion principle and makes use of the fact that customers often decide to cancel suddenly ‘in the moment’ but haven’t thought it through.
Create value-adding Cancellation Flows
At Waldo (a subscription contact lenses startup Jonny used to lead Growth for) they had a cancellation flow with a series of questions that aimed to understand a customer’s difficulties and sought to solve them by adding value rather than removing it (discounting).
For example:
If they found the contacts uncomfortable 👉 connect them straight to an optician.
If they had trouble with delivery 👉 connect straight to customer service.
If they had too many lenses 👉 one-click ‘delay your delivery for 7 days’.
If they thought it was too much 👉 one-click switch to a more affordable option.
Also, consider what you can give to customers for free in addition if they continue their subscription instead of discounting your core product!
Understand the 80:20 rule.
Know that 20% of your customers will drive 80% of your revenue. Focus your efforts on learning more about the 20% — why did they buy in the first place? Why did they continue after their first box? Who are they?
Then:
A) Acquire more of these people with the messages you know work.
B) Reinforce these messages in your lifecycle email marketing.
🔗 Good links
🔗 An in-depth subscription analysis of Itch Pet (by Jonny)
🔗 How Dollar Shave Club make the most of the post-purchase high
🔗 Champion period comfort, wellbeing and dignity in your workplace
💌 Tell us what you need
We started this newsletter for bootstrapped entrepreneurs just like you, and we want it to be as helpful as it possibly can.
So what did you think of today's newsletter? Reply to this email and let me know what you'd like to see more of.
Thanks for reading.
Keep being an Outlier,
J + K