Subscription Show 2020 recap: Freshly's Customer Retention Playbook
This year has been a wild ride for everyone, and at Brightback, we’ve had a front seat to the immense change the subscription industry has experienced. These unusual environmental factors has revealed true winners and losers in the subscription space. Those willing to react quickly to subscriber needs and get ahead of customer churn have emerged with healthier businesses than ever before.
Freshly, the world's largest largest fresh-prepared-meal delivery service in the country, is a Brightback customer and on the leading edge of retention strategy for online subscription businesses. At Subscription Show 2020, I shared the stage (a Zoom room, to be precise) with Freshly's product manager over subscriber retention, Adrienne Bouchie, to discuss the key components of a great customer retention program that works despite uncertainty.
Our discussion covered how to launch a retention program, what KPIs to track, how to set goals for success and more. Adrienne shared these top takeaways with the audience:
1. Start small and test often
To get started, you don’t need to take on a massive reconfiguring of your entire cancel experience. A/B test your existing flow against a variant to validate the incremental lift. In Freshly’s case, they tested their existing online cancel page against Brightback’s automated flow. They started out by testing a portion of traffic before expanding to all platforms.
2. Next, identify which offers work best for your customers AND for your business.
When evaluating what’s working, look at the whole picture of metrics, not just the highest accepted offer. If you looked only at offer accept rates, you may be optimizing for offers that don’t drive the greatest LTV. Your offers need to work for both groups—the customer and the business—to drive the highest retention across your programs.
3. Finally, take time to run the analysis and continue to improve
Because your program shouldn’t set out to completely reinvent your processes, take the time to frequently evaluate performance through each of your testing phases. When comparing A/B flows, check for incremental revenue gained. And from there, continue to iterate on your learnings. Retention strategies should be flexible for customers and your program should be, too.
Want to learn more about Freshly's successful retention efforts? Dive into our slides below.
