TRANSCRIPT
SPEAKERS
Mariah Parsons, Noah Rahimzadeh, Chase Alderton
Mariah Parsons 00:02
Hello and welcome to retention Chronicles, a podcast sponsored by Malomo, a shipment tracking platform that helps ecommerce brands turn order tracking into a profitable marketing channel. On this podcast, we welcome leading DTC brands and experts to chat about all things customer retention, and E commerce. We absolutely love highlighting all the amazing things that our customers are doing in the post purchase space. If you like what you hear, be sure to check out our website go malomo.com. Maybe you'll even be featured on this podcast someday in the near future, who's to say to help us continue to bring new guests and information to you. Please be sure to subscribe to this podcast, wherever you like to listen. On this episode of retention Chronicles, we're joined by Chase Aldrin, partner Marketing Manager at recharge, the leading subscription platform, Chase shares, brilliant takeaways with us. And one of those takeaways is that retention starts at the beginning, not at the end. So if you want to know what all of that means, be sure to listen. During this episode, you'll hear about us discussing programs, subscriptions and best practices. You know what if you're starting your subscription? Where do you look to first as well as enhancing current subscription programs that are already out there with segmentation and personalization, as well as driving the most value out of your subscription model, and so much more. Hello, everyone, and welcome to retention Chronicles. Today we are joined by Chase and Noah thank you both for being here. Chase is from recharge. And if you are a listener of retention Chronicles, you'll know Noah is also known as a member of our Malomo team. So thank you both for being here. Chase, let's have you kick it off with your intro. Tell us who you are.
Chase Alderton 02:05
All right, my name is Chase Alderson. Thank you for having me here. I'm really excited. And I am a partner Marketing Manager at recharge. So recharge is the leading subscription billing platform for Shopify merchants. We eat sleep and breathe subscriptions. That's all we do. And I'm pumped to talk about more today. My personal role and partner marketing is working really closely with our agency in our tech partners. So excited, obviously, to talk through the rechargeable limo integration, but just kind of telling stories, talking about highlighting merchants, and when merchants are successful using both of our tech. It's an exciting field. And it's exciting opportunity to talk through all those awesome merchants.
Mariah Parsons 02:43
Yeah, we're so excited to have you here and subscriptions that comes up time and time again. So having you and recharge on the call. We can't wait to hear what you have to say. But before we get into that, no, I do want to give a quick intro in case we have any new listeners here today.
Noah Rahimzadeh 02:57
Sure, yeah, I'll keep it super brief. Thanks for I think a lot of our listeners have heard me give the deeper intro before so if not, feel free to go back to past episodes that I've joined. But yeah, as Mark said, I'm known for him today. And I lead our partnerships function here at Malomo. So worked really closely with our technology and agency partners to provide cohesive experiences for our clients. And I actually am super excited to be back here with Chase, I think the first time we ever met, I joined him for a quick episode of his podcast that they recharge called hit subscribe, which I also highly recommend. But we were at the charge X conference in Santa Monica hosted by hosted by recharge and Chase was kind enough to offer me 15 minutes to hop on the podcast. So I highly recommend going back and checking out that episode as well as the rest of the hit subscribe stuff because it's really, really compelling and excited to sort of return the favor and have him on hours this summer.
Mariah Parsons 04:00
Yeah, it's gonna be a ton of fun. And so to kick it off, obviously, retention Chronicles it's in the title, but we kind of like to gauge what retention means to each of our guests. So Chase, can you tell us what retention looks like to you? You know, kind of define it a little bit in your eyes what you see it being like?
Chase Alderton 04:20
Absolutely, it's, it's an awesome question, because I could literally talk about this for an hour. So I'll try to keep this a little shorter than that. But subscriptions are an entirely different animal. So most most ecommerce businesses you're looking at selling one time, you try to get them to come back. And there's a kind of a little bit of a retention function in there to keep that person around the brand for as long as you can. Subscriptions naturally lend themselves to retention. So there's a there's a bit more of a built in function that already exists there. That's not to say that it works easily and it's simple. I am on kind of a personal mission over the last year or so to really kind of change the the identity around retention thinking that retention starts truly at the beginning. It's not at the end, if you are building a flow for your customers, retention should be something that you start about before you even acquire customers. So there's obviously there's a lot of ways that you can acquire customers, there's a lot of pathways a customer can take to becoming a customer. It's not just a one stop shop hit a landing page purchase you're over. So thinking through, what is the customer going to do when they see my ad, that's part of retention. Because if it's a terrible ad, or if it's just a one shot, one stop shop thing, that's not a good look for retention, long term, everything we do with subscriptions is about lifetime value. So it's a function of average order value in duration that you stay subscribed to the actual product. So So thinking through how do I keep this person around as long as possible, really does need to start at the beginning. So from ads to landing pages, to checkout experience, to emails to upcoming notification, upcoming order notifications, to a customer portal to even all the way through when a customer clicks a button that says I want to cancel, there are options. And there are ways that you can actually retain them after that. Even including things that you can't really control like credit cards, so credit card failures and credit card purchases. So there's a lot of different ways that retention kind of plays into Subscriptions. And obviously Malomo knows a lot of that stuff. But it's it's I had the thing that I tried to really talk about recently is flipping the script pretension doesn't start at the end, it starts at the beginning.
Mariah Parsons 06:22
Yeah, no, I think that's a great kind of script to follow. And I hope now that that's starting to be more recent, but at least hearing you say it is a little bit it goes it's a little bit counterintuitive, right? Because you think retention is at at the back end of things. And so following that line, if retention is starting at the beginning, how exactly, you know, if if a brand isn't doing that isn't looking at retention, in the beginning, say a customer has a bad experience, whether it's a credit card failure, any of the few that you mentioned, how can a brand then remedy that so that they have better retention, even if they started, you know, their strategy, not necessarily focusing on retention in the beginning,
Chase Alderton 07:12
I think it's a more complicated answer than than just a one line thing, because I think retention has a strategy for each piece of the customer experience. And that's kind of a big thesis that I have is that a customer experience should feel really, really entwined, it should feel really organic. But a retention strategy at the front before anybody ever buys anything is going to be significantly different than a customer who's already purchased three times. And it's going to be significantly different than a customer who is looking to cancel after their seventh order, because they just have too much product or whatever it is. So So I would analyze each of those individually. Starting from let's let's use like an onboarding quiz as an example. So there's, you know, four or five questions, whatever it is, what do you like? Well, how can we help you what kind of brand whatever it is? I went through? One for organic wine the other day? It's you know, what kind of wine do you like it? Is it or is it red? or white? Is it a blend? What kind of flavors? Do you like? All those kinds of things? That's an awesome way to get you going retention wise, because then they have all that information. And so when you start to cancel, then they can say, Okay, well, are you not looking for your specific things that you recommended? Do you want? You know, we're coming into winter? Do you want a little bit more of a darker red, more bold wine? Remember, you're coming into summer? Do you want? You know, I know you said you like a lot of red wine? Do you want to make the switch that to white ones that have cancelling. So each piece of this is really truly different? And I think that there's an opportunity to really dig deep into every single piece and figure out what's the best way? Or what's the the way that we can touch the most people and figure out how to actually stay longer?
Mariah Parsons 08:38
Yeah, no, I love that distinction
Noah Rahimzadeh 08:40
there. I, I'm really interested to hear more about the idea of like retention starting up front. I feel like to Maria's point, you know, brands might be starting to do that. But I would imagine chase in your experience, like that's a relatively new concept. I think historically, you know, brands have been hyper focused on acquisition. And then they reach a point now, where acquisition starts to slow and they start to figure out like, oh, wow, we really need to figure out how to monetize our current current existing customer base and grow sort of through that channel. So I love to I love the idea of like thinking about retention from the very beginning of the customer lifecycle. And I know you mentioned quizzes are a great sort of example of that. Are there any other examples that you have top of mind that sort of help facilitate retention from from early on?
Chase Alderton 09:41
I don't know if it's necessarily measurable, but I'm a huge fan of education. So I think that that having a why having admission on your page having a look, here's why we do what we do. Here's you know, X Company X, here's, you know, not only what we sell, but why we sell it, why we think it's a huge issue. I think that's really, really big. coffee brands usually do this We will. So there's there's usually some sort of like, you know, we couldn't find the exact coffee we wanted, you know, we're here. For Fairtrade, we're here to make sure that, you know, everybody gets the cut of all that. I think the why upfront is really important. But I think also providing education. So keep sticking with the coffee brand, something along the lines of like, you know, our coffee is from XYZ region, wherever it is, here's why that's super important coming from the region, you know, the, it's, you know, we're recording this episode in July. So here's, you know, the tasting notes, you'll hear you'll taste based on the July temperature and the weather and the climate of that region. Here's why we think this is super cool. You know, it was packaged by this guy, or this family, or whatever it is, we've been partnered with this family forever. All of that kind of stuff really digs you into the brand. And it really sinks teeth into like, that makes a lot of sense. That's really cool. That's why I want to stay. The other side of the coin is always like, if you just want coffee, go to Amazon or go to Starbucks right around the corner. But if you want the experience, if you want to feel connected to a brand, you want to feel connected to what you're actually purchasing. Education is a huge way to do that. And it's not a salesy education thing, it's more of like, cool, you're interested, let me give you some more information. Here's why our coffee is awesome.
Noah Rahimzadeh 11:07
Yeah, that's, that's super cool. I think, you know, in our roles and partnerships, there are a lot of similarities in that not everything always ties back to like direct revenue, right. But you know, that by, you know, helping out a partner, or providing educational content that makes your partners better, that's probably going to come around and benefit your business. I think that this is a very similar concept, right? Like, you can't always measure things that that drive value for your brand and your business. That doesn't mean that they're not things that you you should be doing. Right. And I think a lot of times we get caught up as, as you know, startup business pros and figuring out how to always tie things back to revenue. The reality of the situation is you can't always do that, right? There are things that you just have to do that, that add on a bunch of value to your customers. And anytime you're doing that, I think it's a it's a net, for your brand. And for your you know, or your Sass company, frankly,
Chase Alderton 12:07
spot on. Yeah, education, content, all that marketing stuff is tough to track to a certain extent. But I think it's super valuable as you get further and further into the pipeline and your sales process into your retention strategy, all those kinds of things. If you don't have that content built, you're essentially just shouting at people saying, Hey, you should stay here, because because of this thing, you got to have that stuff built beforehand.
Mariah Parsons 12:29
Yeah, and I think that's a great point to distinguish to have. Yes, there's that like community building that education that doesn't necessarily have metrics that you can tie to it unless, you know, you're told that Oh, I love this story. And that's why I really loyal to your brand. And and I think that ties really nicely into subscription, and making sure that you are communicating with your customer of like, why a subscription is beneficial to them. And so it might not be you know, whether it's the story that you're telling, or being super communicative around, Oh, these are the benefits that you're getting as a subscription cons, customer, whatever that looks like. I think that's super important. And that just goes back to what you're saying about, it's all about the experience, right? Like you can go to, you can get coffee or another product most products pretty easily right from just other convenience stores or wherever. But I think that shifts in getting things that you really value and brands that are doing really important stuff or make you feel special. It's not it's not just an everyday occurrence. It's kind of like a little bit of a of a treat, or you know that, you know, this is this is a product that you're getting, or a service that you're getting that you know about. And it isn't just like a random purchase. Right. And so I think that segues nicely into talking about subscription and retention. And so, Chase, my question for you is, what do you think that what do you think is important when a brand is starting to build out their subscription program? What do you think that they should be most focused on? I know, we had Jenna. She is great. She came on one of our pot or one of our webinars with a couple other great partners. And she had said that, you know, for a couple of different things, like one of the most important things is maintaining their subscription program. And so and doing it right and communicating with them. So what would you say, in addition to everything that we talked about and how subscription lends itself to retention? What do you think is the most important there for building out starting out that? That subscription process?
Chase Alderton 14:43
So definitely say education? We kind of already talked about that, though. So just kind of making a note to double down on education. I think without taking a step back, there's there you're very rarely going to find a company selling a product that is truly unique. There are competitors everywhere. Everyone's going to be selling very similar. things, even if you are like coffee brand, you think everything's super unique and special. There's a lot of people doing fairly similar things. Yeah. So the education around why you're different is a is a huge, huge point to drill in there. Secondly, I think having a very clear value prop and understanding why what you do is important is unnecessary. One of my one of the favorite kind of verticals, or products that are sold on recharge, is something really simple and easy, like laundry detergent pods, or like dishwasher detergent pods. I use those things every single day. And I'm sure most people do as well, maybe not laundry, maybe the laundry is every three days or so. But having that clear value prop of like, look, we know you need this stuff. And we know that the world is shifting towards more environmental approach. Why would you continue to get in your car, drive to a store, purchase these things in store from a giant, large, massive brand that doesn't care about you? Here's what we do in our brand, you know, we produce, you know, XYZ, it's sustainable, it's organic, and whatever it is, whatever the actual value prop is. And here's why it's convenient. I think that's the piece that people miss is that price is usually a good indicator of why you should buy something. But obviously most people will look for for cheapest price, I'm guilty of filtering all the options by filter low to high, so I can see what's cheap. But I think convenience is a piece that people miss. So yes, you can discount it, but you're probably going to find something cheaper on Amazon. So it's not always price that will do it. So I think finding why it's convenient finding why it makes sense in very, very clearly communicating that is absolutely paramount here. Why should I buy your product versus someone else? Why should I buy laundry detergent pods from you? Why should I buy dishwashing detergent pots from you? Well, it's this it's that it's you know this thing, we'll ship it to you on your timeline, it doesn't need, you don't need to buy 60 of them at a time we can package something up that makes sense for you based on how much you use them. That is what really ends up being convenient, what keeps people coming back, because everyone who needs them. So instead of going to the store every month, just wait for the shipment to come in make sure it's convenient.
Noah Rahimzadeh 16:57
Sort of following up. Curious, from your perspective, I think we've talked about this a little in the past Chase. You know, after that education is sort of taking place and especially for the products lend themselves really well to subscription, right, like you said, you know that you're going to use these things, you know, you're going to run out of them and you know, you're going to have to read up on them. Especially in cases like GE you recommend or what what do you see in terms of best practices in terms of like when you offer the subscription verse, letting them try the product, get comfortable with it, get educated on it, and then sort of move them into the subscription? Like when does it typically make sense for brands who lend themselves well to a subscription program? You know, move customers to that. And I'm sure it's a I'm sure the answer is it depends. But I'd love any, any sort of insight around that
Chase Alderton 18:01
the best in the worst questions always end up with the answers to a macro perspective of how I think it might work. But again, it depends on on what your product is. But now you're kind of hinting at segmentation. So I think that that customers will do what they want. And there's a lot of different segments that people actually hit when they come into your products. So don't try to force them all into one singular bucket, and segment based on where they are. That's the term that always confused me when it started was like meet your customers where they are. It's like what does that mean, I'm online, they're sitting at their desk, I don't know what that means. But meeting them with where they are means if they're not ready to commit to a subscription, or if they're not ready to buy 38 laundry detergent packs from you right now, selling the 12 pack, see what happens. It's not as Why try to change their behavior if they're comfortable doing a certain thing. We've seen lots and lots of brands who struggle with actually getting people on subscription, but they have customer repeat purchase rates of 12 1314 times. So they're clearly purchasing month over month over month over month for a year plus, but they're just not uncomfortable to subscription subscription. So meet them where they are, there are definitely options. And I think education, again is a huge piece on that you guys are gonna hate me for keep saying education by the end of this podcast. But there are options for you to say, you know, segment people and say, Hey, I see you have purchased three times, we'll give you a 10% discount if you want to just subscribe. There are options for that. But there are also options to hit people, right as soon as you hit the landing page and say, hey, subscribe right away, people will get the value prop and they'll understand that people unsubscribe or there's the other total other side of the coin was people who do 1215 just singular purchases over and over again. So again, it depends and I hate saying that. But meet customers where they are figure out what they want, segment them into the appropriate, you know, channels of where they're coming in, what they're actually looking for, and then talk to them individually. Like they're all valued customers. They're all they're all valuable. They're all giving you money. It just depends on how long you can keep them around and increase your lifetime value.
Noah Rahimzadeh 19:58
We had I think was the last podcast where I won 800 BTC? Yes, correct. Okay, so I yeah, I just I checked that out, I think last week, or maybe earlier this week. And it's just the last episode. So if anybody wants to go back and listen, super interesting, and some hot takes in there. And I think one of them was he really liked the concept of subscription only brands, Chase, to me, it kind of sounds like you don't necessarily believe that that's the best path, right? Because there are always going to be customers who may not want to subscribe, but they want to buy on their terms. Have you seen? You know, what are your thoughts on that? Have you seen subscription only brands be successful? And is it something that I would imagine would be advantageous for recharge to have a lot of subscription or may not be a recommended best practice? So could you talk about any insights you have on that?
Chase Alderton 20:54
Many times am I allowed to say it depends.
Mariah Parsons 20:58
I'll keep a tally.
Chase Alderton 21:01
It definitely works if that's your business model. But there are also opportunities to do one time products and to do you know, just purchasing items. So one of I think it kind of more depends on on your subscription type, what you're offering, if you're doing some sort of curated box, where you know, you're pulling in three, four, or five plus items, whatever it is, every month, it doesn't really make a lot of sense for you to just buy one mystery item one time, like that's a subscription box. That's the point of what you're trying to do. So there's a lot of valid validity there that yes, you should be subscription only. That being said, really awesome example is Jamie Tang, founder and CEO of bokksu. So they have a Japanese snack box. Danny is Japanese, he curates all of the items himself. So it's a really cool way to get snacks that he grew up on when he was kid in Japan, they put all these really cool things in boxes, I never know what any of them are, because they're all in Japanese. But you get all these kind of weird, cool grab bag of items, then what they do is they have a side store where if you like a certain one of them, you can go into the store and buy, you know, I want a box of this thing, not subscription, but I want you know, a full box, it gives me 24 of you know, whatever that product is. So, again, it depends, it depends on your business model. I like the blend idea. But I'd never say no to anybody who says subscription only is the way to go. Because it depends on what you're trying to actually achieve.
Noah Rahimzadeh 22:23
Love the box who call out their longtime customer more or less and using recharge and Malomo to sort of build upon their subscription offering in the post purchase experience as well. So it's a great call out Chase.
Mariah Parsons 22:39
Yeah, and I think as we talk about segmentation, very, very hand in hand with that is personalization. And so you've said it Chase, you know, meeting customers, where they're at. And so what have you seen and how brands can actually go about doing that and like personalizing making sure that they I know we talked about quizzes. But are there any other things that stick out to you about, you know, how you can use personalization? I know ribeye, also their great tech partner of both of ours. So can you talk about kind of how that plays into this whole conversation about segmentation and subscription, making sure that you kind of have different paths to each of your customer profiles?
Chase Alderton 23:26
Yeah, absolutely. So Klaviyo is awesome for for segmentation, any sort of form or any sort of data you're collecting can put be pulled right into Klaviyo. That will segment itself and then you can set up email flows for each of those individual segments. So if it's a singular purchase, someone comes through and says, I just want this one thing one time, you can determine, you know, should we wait for them to buy a second time before we start to hit them with a couple subscription offers? Do we wait, you know, three or four times whatever it is, again, personalization, because you're not going to try to upsell someone who's not buying a product that's on subscription. So you have to make sure that's personal. The flip side of that is a partner like ribeye, so cross sells and upsells. There are tons and tons of opportunities. But keep using the same example. So let's go back to coffee, coffee is a really easy one. But you know, Hey, I see you bought this bag of coffee for personalization. You might also like this bag of coffee, because this is a super cool brand that's, you know, maybe a sister brand or it's from a similar region. Maybe it's just like a special order or something like that. That's a cross sell. So it's something like hey, you like this thing. You might also like something across from that. The upsell is, you know, Hey, I saw you bought laundry detergent pods. We also have a laundry detergent pods in a stack of 58 Would you rather buy 58 of them and we'll give you more of a discount. Rather than, you know, the 24 that you're buying. Or you know, hey, you have this you know this coffee, we have the premium version of this coffee that was Double Roasted or whatever and I'm not a coffee snob so I don't know all the coffee terms but you know, buy this one. It's a little more expensive, but it's going to be better. You're going to have the tasting notes, all that kind of stuff. So personalizing where people are at you're not just going to shove bunch of offers out and just pull all your customers and say, let's try to cross sell and have them buy this other coffee. And you'd likely never also do the upsell. One reason I had tried to buy this more expensive one, but I think in the right case with the right segmentation with the right flows in place, that stuff works really, really well. I don't want to quote a wrong number. So I'm not going to actually put a number on it, but I know they're awesome ribeye stats, want to say that, actually, I'm not even gonna say it. But there are awesome opportunities for you to say, you know, your cross sells and upsells, you present them easily. And there is a certain number of uptake on there, that's significant. So definitely check it out.
Noah Rahimzadeh 25:34
How do you see it? How do you see the cross sell and upsell components fitting into the subscription model? It makes a lot of sense to me. And I think, you know, I think I have a high level understanding of this. But for for the listeners. You know, it makes a lot of sense to me for one time buyers, right? Like they come they buy, they buy the 36 pack and you hit them with with offer, what around that time they're gonna run out. Right? Or they buy the one coffee and you send them an email we paid are for offerings that they may like other coffees that they may like based on what they purchased previously. But how does that sort of fit into the subscription model.
Chase Alderton 26:24
Another good example is a brand called Teach Hanley. So they are men's facial care men's skincare. And they have it started actually as a box with everything included. I think they've since broken it out. But I can double check that. But they have like a like standard daily face wash, they have an AM. So you just put on the morning they have a PMS you're supposed to sleep in. And then there's like a scrub for the actual shower. So you can break those out. Not going to actually quote exactly what they do. Because I don't want to, you know, butcher that but take that as an example. So maybe you have a customer coming onto your site looking for a face wash. That's an awesome opportunity for a cross sell with subscriptions. So maybe there's some sort of landing page that's, you know, build out your morning routine or build out your facial care routine. And it's saying, Hey, we know you like this thing we know you like to scrub or we know you like to wash because you bought it 234 times because we've segmented and CLEVEO and we know how many times you've purchased, maybe you should try the am because it has sunscreen and SPF and it's good for this and it's moisturizing and below that kind of stuff. Side note you can also segment type of skin if you're doing some sort of like onboarding quiz at checkout. So you can say is your skin oily is your skin dry is your skin this or that whatever it is. So then you can suggest and you can say we have this am serum. That's great for all the things that you just said you need to do. You'd like that we have this Pm. Also we have this travel scrub that you can bring in showers when you travel. It's a little tiny twofer here, that's an awesome way to kind of build out more subscriptions, that's all cross sells. That's not nothing upsell, you're not trying to get into kind of bed or anything. So you just cross sell the heck out of it. And you essentially build out your morning routine. Now you have this facial carry routine, I was only looking for facewash. But now I have a total I wash my face in the morning, I do am in the morning for sunscreen throughout the day. I do the scrub when I shower at night and I do the PM. So I go to sleep and I wake up and repeat the whole thing.
Noah Rahimzadeh 28:10
Yeah, that's that is a fantastic example, as you were talking to that I was thinking about what you said earlier, in terms of how you sort of quantify LTV, and how you think about a OB plus type, description or time to follow right customer lifecycle. I think the the example you just gave sort of hits on both, right? It's increasing. It's increasing, it could be right because it's the box gets bigger, presumably a OB Groasis. But it's also a long gating the time that the customer is utilizing the products meaning or more time in the customer lifestyle, and just overall enhance the bigger metric, which is that's a perfect example. Would you Would you agree with that?
Chase Alderton 28:59
Yeah, absolutely. And then to hit on retention, bringing it full circle again, then you maybe hit a point where you know, maybe if someone stops using the pm and you can say okay, so retention was we can pull the piano up for sure. And you can just keep your three you don't have to cancel the whole thing. Or maybe you're going out of town, maybe you're skipping an order for whatever it is you have too much quantity, maybe you just skip, you know three of them, but you still need the pm or you still need the am or the watch or whatever it is a lot of opportunities here retention wise, it's not just an all or nothing cancel the box or you're fully subscribed.
Mariah Parsons 29:28
Yeah, I think that's a great use case. And that's a great question now that you asked, because it is maybe a little bit more of those cases where if you're not exclusively thinking about it, you can quickly you know, like gloss it over. But Chase that's a great example with the cross sells and I think to what falls under cross sells upsells and segmentation personalization is also in the post purchase experience. So Chase, can you talk a little bit in a little bit more about why You see, like segmentation personalization look like in the post purchase space, kind of, if there's specifics that you see work really well, in terms of like segmentation and clay, VO to I mean, you've kind of hit it all on the head. But I'm curious if there's specifically details for post purchase that you've seen work really well.
Chase Alderton 30:21
So this, this may be a little bit of a stretch to try to get here. But I've one of the coolest things that I'm seeing now with a lot of brands post purchase is all of your, all of your transactional touch points. So all of the things where it was like, you know, your credit card was run, it was successful, it was paid, or all of the things even the step before where it's like, Hey, I know you're on subscription every month, your your orders about to be charged in one week, if you want to make any edits, make the edits. Now before we ship you the next box. Those are all transactional touch points. turning those into relational touchpoints, I think is a huge, huge trend we're seeing and this is all post purchase. So you have an opportunity to get in front of your customers email, open rates are not fantastic right now. Nobody really wants to open all that stuff. But if there's a thing that says, you know, Hey, your subscription, I subscribe to magic spoon is a like a breakfast, healthy breakfast cereals. Awesome, really highly recommend on a side note, but one of the things they do that's really cool is they send you the email, it says you know, Hey, your orders coming up in one week, make any changes you want. By the way, education, education, education, here's why this is super cool reminder, you're getting your protein here, it's more fiber, looky before throughout the day, it's not sugar. So you're really educating them on on more than just you know, him extra credit cards up to date purchase this thing give us money, when they will stop talking to you. They do things they put cross sells and upsells in there as well. So they do like, hey, we have a new flavor coming out. It's only available for existing subscribers. Do you want to try it? If you do, here's the pre populated link will already take you to the checkout. It's a one click purchase, done and done. We're good to go. I have chocolate chip cookie coming to my house in the next week. And I'm pumped about it because it's a new flavor. And I haven't tried it yet. Just stuff like that turning those transactional touch points into relationship. touchpoints is a new trend we're seeing. It's all post purchase. It's all new signs all across cross sell upsell. But there's a lot of opportunity to get in front of your customers on an email they're going to open regardless, it's free retail, it's free landscape for you to just hop in and be able to say whatever you want more education, more insight, here's why the company is cool. We're going to give me this extra thing, whatever it is, that's unused real estate that everyone should start to use. And really know before you jump in, that's the basis of Malomo. Right? Like, that's your your shipping page. I don't know if you were going there. Like that's the point. You guys found this real estate that's unused that everybody goes to all the time tracking pages, and you know, put a bunch of stuff on there, you know, here's yours. No, here's why it's super cool. Here's your education, here's all this kind of stuff, in addition to the tracking. So it's it's not like a landslide idea. It's not a crazy new thing that everyone's doing. It's just shifting customer perception a little bit and taking advantage of where you can.
Noah Rahimzadeh 32:59
Yeah, I think you totally hit on it, Jason. I was gonna hop in and just mentioned that all of the sort of touch points like the crucial moments post purchase, that are likely to have customers highly engaged, right? You just laid out a great list of those. I would argue that you know, there's four or five others that are super low hanging fruit, just related to shipment tracking, right like order created order, order, sorry, order placed order created in at the warehouse or with a three PL order, pick, packaged and shipped, order out for delivery ordered delivered, like each one of those touch points has a hugely, hugely high open rate. And not only is it a great place to update customers, obviously on where their packages and when they can expect it. But it's also a great place, going back to education again, to educate customers on what to expect when the package arrives, how to make the most out of that package. taking that one step further. We're talking about subscriptions a lot on this this episode. Obviously, it's a great place both in the transactional email that's again, highly engaged with but also on the tracking page that we're taking them to, to talk about the benefits of the subscription program, or to highlight if a customer is already in that subscription and sort of going back to the segmentation aspect, right? We don't want to push them to subscribe. They're already subscribed, but we do probably want to highlight other products they may be interested in or upselling them on larger packages based on their consumption. So on top of all of the great touch points that you mentioned, post purchase. I think that there's an additional sort of set of those all related justice shipment tracking that can provide highly engaged and personalized experience through not just Malomo but in tandem. I'm with our other partners like recharge and rebind that we've been talking about throughout,
Chase Alderton 35:04
I'll even throw one more at you, that is kind of counterintuitive, the actual package showing up on your doorstep, it's the only 100%, open rate touchpoint, you're gonna get, because it's the final product, it's the only thing, it's the only time you can't guarantee everyone's going to open the shipment email, you can't guarantee they're going to open the order confirmation, or the tracking or any of that, when the box comes. They're opening that box. And again, there's opportunity for education, there's opportunity for cross sells and upsells in there, and we don't have to go through the whole list again. But that's the that's one of the best best ways that people are missing is that box gets there, keep the process going. Keep them back on the customer loop, put them right back in the beginning, what's the next thing you're gonna buy? What's the next cross sell upsell? We're
Mariah Parsons 35:42
gonna offer you? Yeah, yeah, that's a great.
Noah Rahimzadeh 35:46
So sorry, we're I just wanted, I want to jump in really quick before antastic boy, and it made me think Chase like we don't have, we don't have any technical integrations with three pls. There's really not much we can do. Like from a third party logistics provider standpoint, right now, in terms of like sending updates based on their pick package and shipping of products. However, we partner with them, because we have a really cohesive story around exactly what you just talked about, like our emails are going to be opened at a super high rate, but the packages that they're putting together to your point, and, and providing personalized experience for in the package itself, or on the package itself, is the only 100% open rate. So we'd like to stay really close with them to understand, you know, the Whiplash is in ship ops of the world, like, what are best practices around that, because a lot of times they can give us creative inspiration on what we can provide our clients from electronic messaging standpoint as well.
Chase Alderton 36:49
Yeah, and I know, we're still got a little more to talk through, but tying the whole thing together, like that's customer experience, going back to the beginning, the whole thing is relevant, every single piece of everything is relevant. And it's not to kind of threatened or to make the sound like it's a big Mount Everest that you have to climb. But every single piece of this is important. And, you know, it's just depends how much of this customer experience you want to try to control and provide on the box. It's such a random crazy thing. The color of the box matters. You know what, what it looks like when it shows up on your door matters? Is it a brown box? Or is it a bright orange box like box? So there's a lot of different options here. And they all play a part in customer experience.
Mariah Parsons 37:27
Yeah, that goes right back to like kind of the intangibles the things that you might not measure. But yeah, it makes an impact. And I love chase that you kind of phrased it as like transactional messages or becoming relational. And so that was like, right. In the beginning, as we started talking about this, and you mentioned magic spoon. We had Chandler from their team come on, and actually talk about those limited edition. Kind of like cross sells. So I think that's so interesting that you mentioned that as well as, as a consumer, I've had them too and magic sweet is great. But I love that it's kind of we're kind of shifting the, how we talk about post purchase. And that I think before, ecommerce really had their boom, it was more of a luxury of, you know, like, Oh, you have beautiful order tracking. And now more people are catching on in that, oh, this is a space like that there's real estate on these order tracking pages on these transactional messages that isn't being capitalized across the board. So that's how you can really stand out. And so we've mentioned a couple of ways how to do that, obviously. Malomo recharge, rebuy clay do. We've mentioned so far. But are there any other technologies that you would include or recommend to brands to also have when it comes to building out their subscription process, making sure that they're really meeting those customers where they're at.
Chase Alderton 38:50
I'm glad that organically we got to bring all those up. Those are some of my favorites. The only other one that I want to shout out and highlight is Gorgeous. Gorgeous, just past Zendesk for most downloads on the Shopify store. So that's super, super cool for them, shout out to them. But I think customer support is something that I don't have a ton of experience with, but I know is insanely important, because I've gotten orders before and they've been wrong or they've been late or delayed and that customer support is a huge piece of that. So again, have a unified customer experience. Ideally, you don't want anything to go wrong, but if something does, having someone there or having some sort of process in place to be able to say you know, you know, whatever went wrong, we're happy to fix this or we're happy to track it, whatever it is. Again, great touch points that are you hope are not used. You hope people aren't reaching out to talk to customer support. But awesome ways to again, provide more education provide more detail, drive them to different landing pages. There are when you do it right opportunities for cross sells upsells. And again, gorgeous, you know, shameless plug, integrates really well three charts, so any changes you're making on gorgeous dashboards will work right on the recharge dashboard as well. So everything works well. Customer Experience is clean and neat. There aren't any problems there. Gorgeous is the only other one I bring up
Mariah Parsons 40:00
Yeah, that's great. I think that's a, that's a very important, very crucial, I think anyone, everyone's a consumer for something and you hit it right on the nail on top of the head, like, it is so crucial. Of course, you don't want to have to go to customers or something. But when you do, because it's inevitable for whatever reason, having a really efficient and a really seamless, integrated platform that helps you and your team, take care of that customer is, you know, it's a differentiator when it comes down to it. And so I know we're almost out of time to wrap up, but I wanted to ask you, obviously, recharge, you guys are growing, expanding. And so I wanted to give you the opportunity. I know, we've talked about a couple exciting things that are on the horizon for recharge. But before we wrap it up and ask you to give some resources, I wanted to ask is there anything exciting that you'd like to share any more details that you guys have going on, that you'd like to share with our listeners?
Chase Alderton 41:01
Yeah, the big one is, has been a long time coming. So we are launching bundles, which is super exciting on our side. Again, it's you know, without getting into too much product talk, it's just another way to deliver an awesome customer experience. So what bundles is, is the ability to essentially build your own box. So something like a protein bar brand, where they have you know, 30 different flavors, whatever it is, the customer can come onto your site, have an option to see all of your boxes, their all of your flavors and say, you know, I want to have this one of this, six of this, and three of those. And I don't know what that math is. But you know, here's now your box of all the things you just ordered. And we'll ship you that custom creative, you know, your own unique subscription box, you can tweak it, you can customize it in between the customer portal. But that's an awesome update that we're releasing soon. That's been a long time coming. And again, it's it's not to plug recharge and say that we're awesome, even though we are but it's it's provided customer experience, it's another way that you can you have a lot of variants of a product that you have a lot of options for things, build your own box, puts bundles together and keep driving support for customers.
Mariah Parsons 42:04
Yeah, I would say too, I mean, like that, that's that just shows that recharge, really you're taking you're meeting those customers where you're at, and you're, you know, it is kind of you know, whatever it is you want to say it's a plug but it's it's kind of like you're the product stands behind what you all stand for. And so that's why I'm very excited for you all that that's on, you know, that's finally coming to life. And I think a lot of brands who work with recharged will be very excited for it as well.
Chase Alderton 42:31
Thank you, we're pumped about it.
Noah Rahimzadeh 42:33
And when when Mariah asked that question chicks, my mind went to the SMS offering that you also just launched. So I know that's, that's the word to and I actually you guys have Mad Love on a podcast of yours on the hip scribe podcast recently. And I check that episode out, they're a joint client of ours. So I actually pulled up their tracking page. First thing that you see there, when you open up their tracking page is of course, subscribe, subscribe to the subscription program. But right below that they have a banner that says take take me to the text or take this to text and a link to get on the SMS list. Like driving. One it's awesome that you're now offering SMS I think the joint value prop of SMS and subscriptions tied together as is super clear view on the same thing about that feel free but also like capturing these critical moments in post purchase experience like we talked about when the customer super excited about your product is just a fantastic opportunity right to to bring more value through your through your subscription program. And I'd also say that you know, Mad Love and other beauty agencies probably lend themselves super well to bundles because I don't wear makeup myself, but I imagine those who do are have unique tastes and and with all of the different use that I'm sure madlib offers, being able to pick and choose what's best. For each individual I'm sure would be really valuable that our customers as well.
Chase Alderton 44:13
Yep, lots of different options there, it opens the door for a lot of cool things. SMS truly is just another way to get in front of customers and just keep that communication keep that relationship communication going. You can you can offset all of your notification emails with SMS. So there's one way to just kind of replace them that way. Because SMS usually has higher open rates and higher receiving rates. But to me, it's just another avenue for better customer relationships. You know, you can send texts, you can send easy things, or SMS is built into recharge, so it's no additional cost to us. We've run out of money for each individual text you send. So again, super beneficial, awesome to see a lot of merchants pulling that into their stores. And the best ones with the best customer relationships are starting to take advantage of that.
Mariah Parsons 44:55
Yeah, for sure. It makes a lot of sense. Thank you for sharing to both of you. Um, So excited for recharge and just partnerships in general. I mean, I always love learning from our partners. And so I know, I know we have some exciting things on the docket for our partner programs in the future. But this has been incredible. And the last question that I will ask you, Chase is resources that you would recommend. So that can be in the subscription space, specifically, or just in general, you know, where do you find valuable information,
Chase Alderton 45:31
recharge plug, I want to shout out our state of subscription commerce report comes out at the beginning of the year. So we're kind of right in the middle right now. But awesome data in there, we essentially analyze every single business every transaction every single year. And then we draw a lot of conclusions based on that. So there's a lot of things based on average order value and verticals and lifetime value and duration of subscriber, a lot of different things in there that kind of really do paint the state of subscription commerce. So that's a really cool resource to check out. As far as just kind of like networking and talking with other people. I'm going to shout out Brandon amorosa with electric. Oh, coming up really awesome, super nice guy, but tons of detail on there. And he's putting out newsletters and content. And I don't know how he has a job other than also putting in as much content as he does. So shout out to Brandon. Follow that guy. LinkedIn, Twitter everywhere. You can smoke. I
Mariah Parsons 46:24
love that. Yeah. I'm sure he'll be happy and throw that recommendation, right. But this has been so much fun. Thank you for coming on the podcast. I know Noah and I were very much looking forward to it. So thank you for joining us, our listeners are going to refer are going to be provided with a ton of value. I'll make sure I link those resources as well for them. But truly Yeah, we love recharge and everything that you all do for your merchants.
Chase Alderton 46:54
Thank you both so much. Really enjoyed being here. It's a blast.
Noah Rahimzadeh 46:58
Thanks, Jase. Thank you, Maura.
Mariah Parsons 47:02
I hope you enjoyed that episode. As part of our fact check today. Chase was mentioning some stats about cross sells and upsells from ribeye. I really tried to find them. But what I could find was from a case study that they have on their website, so you can go check it out if you'd like. And with one of their merchants, they saw a 21% increase in POV 17% of their overall sales from wherefrom were attributed to ribeye and one in five. One in five of the product recommendations that were surface were from ribeye. So those are some pretty fun, fun facts and the only part of our fact check for today.