Subscription businesses are a win-win situation for both sides: customers get a recurring delivery of their favourite product and merchants get to retain existing customers month after month. However, shoppers still crave personalisation. They want experiences geared around their wants and needs and expect real-time communication with the brands they buy from.
Keeping customers in the loop and giving them the power to control their subscriptions with a tap of the finger is crucial if you want to stand out and secure more sales. The solution? SMS messaging. Almost 100% of people will open a text message compared to just 20% of email subscribers - it’s difficult to argue with those numbers.
How do you attract customers through messages? Here’s how you can leverage SMS messaging to secure more subscription sales and keep current customers happy.
What is SMS Messaging?
SMS messaging is essentially sending marketing messages to customers via text rather than email (which is the most common form of communication). This means you can communicate with customers in real-time through short, snappy messages that land straight in the palm of their hands.
Texts are inherently brief and you can use shortcodes to convey information quickly. For subscription businesses, this provides an opportunity to stay in touch with subscribers throughout the month and provide a personalised experience.
How to Improve Subscription Sales With SMS Messaging
1. Make subscription reordering frictionless
You might have noticed an explosion in the number of subscription businesses of late.
Consumers can get everything from the essentials like razors, nappies, and toilet rolls to slightly more out-there goods like apocalypse survival gear, alternative meats, slime, and tea towels delivered on a monthly basis.
If you can imagine it, it’s probably available in a subscription box.
This means that if customers have a bad experience with you, there are plenty of other places for them to go and get their subscription kicks. The subscription process should be as slick as February’s slime delivery. Shoppers don’t want to be tasked with remembering when they need to replenish their box or manually reordering each month.
Use SMS messaging to make the reordering process as frictionless as possible. Customers can get a text sent straight to their phone that reminds them to reorder (something that’s not going to get lost in their overflowing inbox).
Blueprint number crunches your Shopify data to recommend the most effective reorder prompts and sends branded checkout links that are pre-filled with a customer’s unique shipping and payment information for a one-click experience. Book a demo to find out more.
2. Allow customers to easily customize their subscription boxes
No two customers are the same.
One customer might prefer a mild selection of cheeses each month, while another might go ga-ga over smelly blue.
Giving shoppers the chance to customise their subscription boxes means you can provide a unique experience based on their likes and dislikes. As a result, you’ll retain more customers and secure new ones just as easily (who doesn’t want a delivery of their favorite cheese, or wine, or beauty products, or whatever every month?).
Giving customers the chance to change or customise their subscription via text message makes it a quick and painless process, but it also puts the power back in their hands.
Blueprint’s flexible subscriptions mean you can send personalised messages to customers based on their past orders and obtain feedback about their subscriptions. On top of this, you can encourage them to share any changes they’d like to make to their subscription directly through text message. Customers can also seamlessly skip upcoming orders without churning.
Daring Food integrated Blueprint into their ReCharge subscription so that customers could skip or delay their monthly subscription. They also incorporated a post-order check-in message that allowed new subscribers to share their experiences and report any feedback or issues. This led to a 71% increase in customer LTV rate.
3. Provide two-way support
Understanding your customers’ needs is crucial in curating an enjoyable subscription experience (remember, there are plenty of other places they can go if they come up against friction).
Two-way support gives you the chance to listen to subscriber feedback and, more importantly, act on it. Doing this through SMS messaging is more likely to reach customers in a timely manner, which means they can share their thoughts and opinions before it’s too late.
Blueprint’s customer feedback feature creates a two-way conversation between brand and buyer that effortlessly enables customers to share feedback on how they use a product, their flavour preferences, and other important information to improve their subscription experience. The ability to tackle issues before customers leave strengthens retention rates, creates happy customers, and builds trust - all of which are crucial in maintaining a successful subscription business.
Drinks brand Ghia created a hotline experience via SMS for their subscribers. Customers could chat one-to-one with the Ghia team and allow the brand to answer real-time questions and offer tips and tricks on their products. Every customer that participated in a two-way conversation had a 32.2% increase in LTV, with every text message sent generating $2.68 in revenue.
4. Keep communication consistent
It’s easy to think that once a customer has subscribed they’re with you for life. In fact, with so many options available today, it’s important for merchants to keep customers engaged long after they’ve signed up as a subscriber.
Text messages allow you to check in with customers throughout the month to keep communication consistent. As well as encouraging feedback and opening up a two-way dialogue, you can share fun tidbits of information and content related to their likes and interests.
Ghia uses Blueprint to share playlists with their most loyal SMS subscribers, which keeps them engaged and loyal to the brand.
Secure More Subscriptions With SMS Messaging
Today’s instant gratification culture means text messages are one of the quickest and easiest ways to connect with customers and deliver timely information. Providing the opportunity to customise or delay their subscription or ask questions and tackle queries in the moment will strengthen retention rates and create an enjoyable experience for customers.
Blueprint integrates with leading eCommerce subscription platforms - including Recharge, Bold and Smartrr - to enable subscribers to flexibility manage their orders via SMS. Book a demo today to see it in action.
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