Our ultimate checklist includes sustainable growth tactics, quick wins and best-in-class examples you can implement to drive more revenue from existing customers.
For a customer to buy your product again, you need to satisfy a few key points in their mind. Specifically:
- The product fits what they’re looking for
- They can use the product really effectively.
Focus on ‘product enablement’ educational content and send ahead of the customer receiving their order.
Post-order comms builds a level of customer excitement and understanding. Once the customer receives their order they’ll be able to jump straight in and use it. This focus on educational content should continue post-order, which we’ll cover later.
Example
Huel do a great job here with their pre-delivery video’s. They even link over to a starter guide you can download here.
All customers have completely unique repurchase rates, based on different volumes of product purchased, different usages, and different requirements. It’s therefore misaligned to send all customers the same cadence of reorder comms, and will result in lower conversion.
Instead, you can use Relo to analyze Shopify order history data to predict exactly when each customer will reorder - on a per customer and per order level. You can then connect this data to send the right SMS and email flows, at the right time. This level of personalization extends to every customer, and has a significant impact on overall conversion.
Enabling a great customer repurchasing experience is a sum of all touch-points ahead of that customer being ready to reorder. A key touchpoint is using SMS to communicate with customers, as well as email. Both channels should be used in harmony and play off of each other.
- SMS is great for short-sharp communication and informational snippets.
- Email is great for long-form storytelling and graphics.
Example
Build SMS and Email into the same customer journey seamlessly with Klaviyo.
Enabling a great customer repurchasing experience is a sum of all touch-points ahead of that customer being ready to reorder. A key touchpoint is using SMS to communicate with customers, as well as email. Both channels should be used in harmony and play off of each other.
- SMS is great for short-sharp communication and informational snippets.
- Email is great for long-form storytelling and graphics.
Example
Here’s how Puresports customers reorder seamlessly via a custom Magic Cart landing page:
Packaging is often overlooked as a vehicle to increase repurchase rates, despite it being a key tool for education and brand awareness. This is especially true for brands that are selling on marketplaces like Amazon, where they don’t have control of the customer data to retarget.
In addition to the usual education content, one of the highest impact tactics is to add a QR code onto the packaging that heads over to a repeat order checkout for easy repurchasing.
Example
Seed do a great job of creating an awesome unboxing experience with easy QR code reordering under the product:
Most first-time customers are incentivised to purchase via an initial discount. Therefore, it’s important to resist the trap of over-discounting or you’ll never see the full value of a customer during their lifecycle.
Instead, there’s an opportunity to test out non-product discounts and savings in the form of free shipping and bundle offers. This still offers value to the customer to repurchase that product.
Within a product SKU set, there will be a small amount of products that are either repurchased more frequently than the others, or the gateway to other product purchases.
It’s important to identify these hero SKU products and focus all customer acquisition resources to them. They have the biggest impact on customer LTV, and likely also have lower CAC than other products.
Example
Here’s a snippet of Aaron Ordendorff speaking about how they do this at Common Thread Collective.
Repurchasing starts with good product usage. Therefore, investment needs to be directed towards great educational content at the point of delivery.
Video’s, tutorials, instructions, and guides all go a long way to helping a customer use their products really effectively and prime them to buy again.
Example
Form Nutrition do a great job of this on their site, with editorial quality content on how to get the most out of their products and education on the industry.
Transactional comms are often overlooked, but they are the most opened and read emails of the entire customer lifecycle. Not only are transactional comms viewed the first time (when that customer is likely not ready for a reorder) but the data suggests customers also head back to these emails when they are ready to reorder and are evaluating how best to do so.
A simple, and highly effective strategy here is to add a simple repurchase link within your order confirmation emails. This strategy will create a seamless customer reorder experience.
Example
Daring foods nail this with Relo, adding a simple reorder button filled with the customers last order in all transactional comms (seen here in an order confirmation).
A subscription is an ongoing relationship with a brand. Retention tactics often lose steam along the way and the focus becomes on how cheaply you can acquire more subscribers. The reality is acquiring subscribers means nothing if they churn 1 month in.
Instead, one of the most effective ways to gain new subscribers (and high value subscribers) is to increase the value prop of your subscription through incentives such as a VIP club with exclusive product drops or double loyalty points if you’re a subscriber. These incentives don’t diminish the product value and help acquire the right subscriber that sticks with you.
Example
Beauty Pie use their membership model to great effect to gain subscribers. For £10/mo you are part of the club, and have access to their products at discount rates:
There are only a few specific pieces of information that subscribers need after ordering from you already to convert to subscription. The aim of the game is personalization, ease and speed.
Relo makes it easy with Magic Cart. This is a mobile-first optimised landing and cart page in one - personalized to every customer with pre-loaded subscription cadence and 1-click Shopify checkout.
Example
Here’s how Homethings make it really easy for their one-time customers to start a subscription with Relo:
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Discounting is both a blessing and a curse. When gaining subscribers, you need a mix of volume and quality. By over-discounting the product, the experience loses its value and customer acquisition will reduce.
Be careful to rely on discounting the first order, the second order, the first subscription order and so forth - as you’ll end up acquiring a lower value customers and not see the impact on your bottom line until later.
The standard targeting approach is to blanket email everyone who has ever ordered once from your store and then request them to start a subscription. However, this doesn’t relate to their product usage or preference and ends in poor conversion.
A much more effective approach is to look at your historic Shopify data to see the signals of who’s ready for a subscription. Most notably, this is the cadence between orders and the volume of orders of a subscription product.
Relo makes this easy with simple insights that sync with Klaviyo and make customised SMS and email flows easy.
Plant the subscription seed across the site, across all email and SMS comms, and in ads.
This will help continually build the subscription value prop for a customer until the point they’re ready to convert.
A subscription is fundamentally different to a one-time order, and your FAQ’s should reflect this. It’s a much bigger commitment and customers are more hesitant to start one. That said, it’s really important to have standalone or specific subscription FAQ’s so customers know how to easily skip, cancel, or reach out for support.
Example
Wild Nutrition nail this here.
A subscription is just a mirror of a customer’s lifestyle and usage. If someone exercises a lot and purchases protein powder, their subscription needs to vary from the customer who runs once a week. Offer as much flexibility as possible with the cadence of your subscription is key to accommodate and acquire as many subscribers as possible.
Example
Huel to do a great job of this with weekly cadences up to 8-weeks.
There’s a level of education that needs to happen for subscription customers to effectively work out their frequency.
To do this, a simple calculator is really effective that breaks down the usage of your product and aligns it with the order cadence - making it easy for subscribers to select what’s right for them and avoid unwanted churn down the line.
Example
Pact do this really well with their coffee calculator here.
Although subscribe + save web tactics can be really effective, proceed with caution. If your focus is on increasing your subscriber count, it makes sense to default to a subscription offering throughout your site. This means it should be on all of your one-time product offering pages too, along with it’s own stand-alone pages.
Alongside this, defaulting to a subscription purchase on all product pages and cart pages can help drive higher adoption. The only caveat is that this can cause customer dissatisfaction if they have to actively opt-out of a subscription for a one-time order and needs to be looked at on a case by case basis.
Example
Dash drinks make it extremely clear and simple to start a subscription via their slide out cart on each product page.
Some brands believe that once you’ve acquired a subscriber, the best thing to do is never speak to them otherwise they might ‘remember’ they’re on subscription and cancel. No doubt customers are smarter than that, and they’ve subscribed for a reason other than amnesia.
That said, it’s important to build a great customer experience with the right comms at the right time for subscribers. Focus on value add vs value extraction (e.g selling something) and the comms will land far more effectively.
Specifically this is made up of the following:
- Great delivery notifications
- Feedbacks and reviews
Example
Minor Figures do a great job of this via SMS on Blueprint.
The most important comms touchpoint with subscribers is 3-7 days prior to their order being shipped. It’s critical to let them know what’s happening and when, and most importantly give them the flexibility to change it.
Relo makes this extremely easy by adding a no-login Magic Cart - enabling customers to skip, delay, and add to their subscription without ever logging in. This removes the friction of logging in and the stress of cancelling deliveries.
Example
Tropeaka are super communicative with their subscribers to enable a really flexible experience to increase LTV:
It’s important to give customers flexibility across the entire journey, be it changing their frequency or adding a one-time item. Offering the option to edit a subscription at all times - whenever’s convenient for the customer is key to satisfaction. However, customers often have to faff about with log-in details making subs management difficult.
Relo makes it easy by embedding Magic Cart to allow for 1-click subscription management. You can embed this anywhere, whether it’s on a transactional email, in your campaigns, or as a button on-site. One of the regular outputs we see with this is customers logging into their subscription and bringing their order forward; increasing their usage and spend.
Example
Freesoul makes it super easy for customers to manage their subscription without ever logging in. Easy 1-click change of date, swap or add
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A subscription can sometimes be too much for customers - yet they don’t want to cancel. One of the most effective ways around this is adding the ability to gift an unwanted subscription order to a friend. This increases LTV of your current subscriber, and gets your subscription in the hands of another customer for free.
Example: Perky Blenders do this really with their subscription gifting options on site:
The value-prop of a subscription has diminished in-line with the increasing amount of brands that now offer one. Therefore, it’s important to keep your customers engaged and incentivised to stick with your brand.
An effective way to do this is to build a tiered rewards strategy into your subscription model. With each subsequent subscription order, a subscriber receives either points, exclusive products, perks - or some other value.
Tiered rewards not only help to build loyalty through each order, but also reduce subscription churn because of the sunk cost of losing those points or exclusive perks if they were to cancel their subscription.
Another effective way to offer rewards is to add a surprise and delight element to your subscription model. Specifically, adding exclusive products or samples into upcoming orders that customers weren’t aware of. This helps to increase loyalty and increase new product exposure.
Subscription customers have chosen to stick with you instead of all your shiny competitors. Rewarding their loyalty with an exclusive subscription club is the least you can do to show appreciation.
Exclusive tutorials, first-look product trials, product concierge, birthday rewards and free gifts are just a few of the ways you can make your subscribers feel loved. This can be paid or non paid - and perhaps make up the main value of the subscription if executed well.
Example
Wild Beer company nail this with their secret beer cellar
One of the lowest lifts, and most impactful ways to keep subscribers, is to offer dedicated (and fast!) support for subscribers.
This validates part of the reason they would spend more cash with you over a prolonged period of time because they know you’ll always be there with any product questions or shipping issues.
Depending on the type of product you offer, a free returns policy exclusively for subscribers can be a really strong value-prop for increased loyalty.
This helps to break down one of the barriers to continued usage if there are a lot of product variability and decisions to be made.
