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Last updated:  August 16, 2022

With the last full month of summer upon us, it’s time for those within the ecommerce community to begin ramping up for the holiday season. As such, we are excited to make a number of new features available to you that will have your store ready to make this holiday season, the best holiday season yet for your ecommerce store.

Increase AOV and LTV with Bundling and Build-a-Box

Our new bundling and build-a-box features give merchants the ability to set-up different “box” types with varying levels of discounts or pricing structures. This allows for customers to personalize and build an assortment of products together of their choosing. Merchants can create these products as one-time purchases using the products from their existing assortments and not necessarily have to enable subscriptions for their business.

Let’s now talk about the difference between bundling and build-a-box. Bunding is when a customer selects a set number of products to purchase from an assortment you create. The benefit of bundling from a consumer’s perspective is that a sliding discount will be applied to the order based on the number of products that are being ordered in the bundle.

Say that you are a brand that sells athletic socks. Your bundle offer could be if a customer purchases 3 pairs of socks they get 15% off, if they buy 4 pairs of socks, they get 20% off and so on and so forth. Bundling incentivizes customers to purchase more items from you so they can get a more attractive discount from your brand. And as a customer when you subscribe to a “bundled” product, you can change the assortment of the products in future subscriptions (so you could change the colors of the socks that you receive for example).

Bundle

On the other side of the spectrum, when you enable build-a-box for your ecommerce store, you will be offering the box for a set price for a defined number of items. Going back to our athletic sock example above, if you were a sock brand that charged $17 per pair, you could offer an “athletic sock drawer refresh box” of 5 pairs of socks for $65 (a savings of $4 per pair). The customer would personally select the specific 5 pairs of socks that they wanted for the box (instead of the box being pre-populated with specific pairs of socks). As a merchant you can create a different sized box for your customers (i.e. you could have a 3 pair build-a-box, 5 pair build-a-box and so on and so forth).

The build-a-box and bundling features are great ways to increase your AOV by giving your customers a discount on ordering multiple items from your store.

Prepaid subscriptions

As a merchant, it is becoming increasingly more important that you are able to predict your cash flow month-to-month. Knowing this, we are excited to introduce a new “prepaid” subscription offering that will be beneficial both for you and your subscribers.

This new feature allows a customer to buy a prepaid amount of a particular product that gets shipped on a different frequency. In some cases, a subscriber may want to pay for an item up front and not worry about getting locked into a long term subscription that they will need to remember to change (i.e. skip an order, gift the subscription to a friend or cancel the subscription) in the future.

Say that you are a remote worker who loves a particular coffee brand. You are going to be relocating to a new location for the next quarter to work remotely from. You can prepay for your coffee subscription to be delivered to that address and not need to worry about trying to find that coffee in your new location and remembering to change the address/cancel the subscription when you move back home. Furthermore, you can select how often you want that coffee shipped to you (i.e. every month, every two weeks, etc). Alternatively, you can prepay for an annual subscription and select the cadence that you’d like it shipped to you. With the holidays coming, this could be a great feature for you to enable for your store to position it as an item that your customers could gift to a family or friend.

It’s simple to enable the prepaid options when setting up a Selling Plan. All you need to do is check a box and once that box is selected, additional fields are exposed for billing frequency.

Prepaid subscriptions

Transactional SMS

It’s no secret that customers are on their phones more than ever. And in order for our merchants to create and deploy a frictionless customer experience, we’ve made it so merchants can enable transactional SMS messages to be sent to customers based on certain triggers. These engagement points allow you to begin to develop a stronger relationship with your customers in an effort to grow customer loyalty.

The triggers that have been enabled for you to be able to send notifications to your customers include when a subscription has been created, or when a subscription is upcoming, is skipped or canceled. These flashpoints are important parts of the customer experience and journey that can now be reinforced with these transactional SMS messages.

Transactional SMS

‘In order to set these messages up, we require that you set up a Twilio account (so that way you own your number and Twilio account) and authenticate your account within Upscribe to enable them. Customers can only receive the notifications if they have opted to receive them within the Upscribe customer portal. We make it easy for you to be able to send the messages to those subscribers that have opted into receiving messages from you. We populate templates by default but give you the ability to customize the copy that a customer sees in the different texts.

After a customer has received the message, they can reply with quick actions. These quick actions include:

  • “N” to charge their next order to now
  • “S” to skip the next order
  • “C” to cancel their order
  • “Stop” to unsubscribe from the transactional messages

Manage next order

Offering subscribers the ability to manage their next subscription order by adding products to their order is a surefire way to increase your average order value (AOV) and customers lifetime value (LTV). And with our new “manage next order” feature, we are making it simple for subscribers to add one-time products to their next subscription shipment.

Let’s say that you subscribe to receive shampoo on a subscription every 60 days. However, you realize that on your next subscription shipment, you also need conditioner around the same time that your next order of shampoo will ship. Instead of placing a separate order for the conditioner on the website, you can now go into your subscription and add a one-time order of conditioner to your next subscription shipment. Additionally, you can now easily apply discounts to upcoming subscriptions orders, either with discounts from the brand, gift cards, or rewards from loyalty programs like Smile or LoyaltyLion for example.

These small but simple features make the customer experience that much stronger for your subscribers. Additionally, these examples are ways that you can increase the LTV and AOV while also increasing your brand loyalty (thanks to deploying a frictionless experience for the customer). In today’s hyper competitive ecommerce landscape, these are winning strategies to implement.

Just like everything that we do at Upscribe, these features allow you to deliver a stronger customer experience, while growing your business. Not yet an Upscribe customer and want to learn more about us? Sign up for a demo today.