Subscriptions: Tips to Increase on Woocommerce

Though there are many options to start and run an eCommerce business, Woocommerce is my favorite option by far (especially for subscriptions). But don’t just take my word on this. According to builtwith.com's latest research, Woocommerce powers 27% of all eCommerce stores online today! It’s the #1 solution to run your eCommerce business.

The best features of Woocommerce are it’s extendibility, options to customize and the vast number of pre-made solutions (plugins) that are oftentimes free. One of the best solutions you can add to your store are subscriptions, because subscriptions often add stability to your business model that oftentimes is hard to have with ever growing advertising costs, seasonality shifts in consumer behavior, and unpredictable shifts in our economy.

If these past years have taught us all one thing, it’s this: we don’t know what tomorrow brings. That's why subscriptions are such a breath of fresh air for us. It helps flatten the ups and downs of your eCommerce business, increases customer retention and lowers your marketing costs over time.

Maybe you've started subscriptions already, but don’t know how to get it to the next level. Maybe this is all new to you and are wondering how you can get started. I'd like to share with you my top 7 tips to grow your subscriptions on Woocommerce that have worked with the stores I help manage.

Tip #1: Product Reviews

The biggest challenge you will need to get past for customers to place a subscription order is trust. If you can get your customer to trust you, you are almost guaranteed the sale. But how do you build that trust?

One of the best options I’ve used to do this are product reviews. User generated content (UGC), a popular marketing phrase, is what can help set your product apart from other stores and help you gain the trust of your future customer and their subscription. If you want to start somewhere, start here first.

One of the challenges I’ve seen getting product reviews has been getting your customers to provide their feedback. The key here is to find the perfect moment in your customer sales journey to ask for the product review (clue: it’s when they are most excited and engaged with your business).

Tip #2: Return Policy

Another great way to build trust with future customers is creating a customer friendly return policy. However you want to put it, a “no strings” return policy can easily boost confidence in your customers if used in the right way. Communicate the return policy as simply and everywhere possible on your site so that way it is not something that your customers have to dig around to find, especially when signing up for a subscription.

The challenge I've seen, and Amazon has seen, with a customer friendly return policy is return fraud and abuse. Now unless you are selling high value and priced products, you should not worry about this affecting your eCommerce business. But returns are something that you should be tracking as part of your month end reporting, and it should not exceed more than 3% of your sales (in most cases) based on my research.

Tip #3: Discounts

Now I understand discounts is a touchy subject for some business owners, but the goal here is to increase the perceived value of the product and how a subscription increases that value. What do I mean? Here is an example:

At iHeartDogs, we incentivize our customers with discounts to purchase in bulk because they will save more in the long run than if they purchase one at a time. This in turn gives our customer the choice in the discount that they want to receive and makes them feel like they got a great deal.

And who doesn’t like a great deal? When we are all facing rising costs of goods and services because of inflation, everyone becomes a deal hunter and is price conscious. To accomplish this, we use Autoship Cloud and Woocommerce Dynamic Pricing.

The challenge with discounts is making sure you are not hurting your product margins to the point that you are not making enough money to help cover things like marketing costs. That’s why it’s so important to test and then test again your pricing strategies by doing A/B tests. Google Optimize is a free option to get started with your tests.

Tip #4: Support

Your support team will likely be the first touch point your subscription customers interact with post-purchase. And if it isn't, it probably should be. Why is that?

People like to interact with people. Yes, bots can help answer questions your customer might have but how many times have you looked for ways to bypass a bot to reach a real person (I know I have)? Why? Because your customers' concerns and questions are unique, and you can dramatically increase customer loyalty by having your support team connect with them.

This should definitely be done over email, but I would strongly suggest SMS as well because it’s so effective with cutting through the inbox clutter. In fact, I would look for ways to have an automated discussion started with your subscription customers when they first get onboarded. Not everyone will ask questions, but offering the option will help guarantee that your customers keep their subscription for a long time.

The challenge here is getting your support channels connected to your subscription manager. Autoship Cloud makes this easy with their Zapier integration to over 3,000 applications.

Tip #5: Product Options

You probably don't think too much of the product options you have on your subscription product page, but it can have a significant impact on how many customers choose to subscribe to your product. Let’s take a look at an example here:

At iHeartDogs, we invest a significant amount of time researching and developing how we present our product page. After researching our customer feedback we noticed that customers oftentimes asked questions about how much to give their dog based on the dog’s size. This led us to overhaul the design of our supplement pages and allow our customers to make their purchase by the size of their dog.

We doubled our daily subscription rate on our supplements after this change. That should hopefully get you to start to think about your product options. It can be game changing in terms of how you present things for your customer.

The challenge, like discounts, is researching and testing the right combination of options. The flexibility of your subscription solution will also determine how much you can customize your customers' experience.

Tip #6: Inventory Management

How can solid inventory management increase your subscriptions on Woocommerce? Simple: no inventory, no sales. If your product is out of stock all the time (good and bad problem), you will be losing out on new potential customers signing up for a subscription and existing subscription customers abandoning their subscription as well.

The goal here is to always have enough to meet demand. Ideally your subscription solution let's you review how many units of a particular item you have to fulfill in the coming months. Autoship Cloud makes this easy to manage with their Products by Date Summary report.

Whether it be materials, packaging or a finished product, it’s going to be a frustrating year if you need to import something from overseas. The need to look for alternatives that don’t impact your product margins that much is something you and many other eCommerce businesses are going to need to solve.

Tip #7: Free Shipping

Who doesn’t like free? Shipping can be a barrier to potential customers. You can see a dramatic increase in your subscription business by eliminating that barrier. Let’s look at an example:

At Cannanine, we wanted to add the option for our customers to subscribe to our CBD products. Because the cost of shipping the product is reasonable and our product margins are high enough, we decided from day 1 to offer free shipping to our subscription customers. This led to massive growth in our subscription business and now close to 40% of our monthly revenue is from subscriptions!

Now this is the best case scenario: low cost to ship and high in product margin. But what if your product is expensive to ship or low in product margin (or worse, both)?

This is the great challenge that many eCommerce businesses face when they are not Amazon or one of the other big business competitors. The only way to make free shipping work in this case would be to build it into the price of the product, look for ways to increase your product margin and lower your cost to ship by working with different carriers. Easy right? Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to share some tips on this soon.

Keep Testing, Keep Adjusting, Always Improve

Remember, most people don’t get it right the first time. The great advantage you have with your business that Amazon and our larger competitors lack is the ability to adapt and move quickly. Use that to your advantage with growing your subscription business.

I really hope these tips will help you on your journey and your business. I will be expanding on these tips in the near future and provide more insights from within the trenches on iFixWoocommerce.com.