Jason Billingsley and I are always on the hunt for ecommerce trends and innovations. And one of the areas Jason will be covering in Thursday’s webinar Ecommerce Innovations: What’s Now and What’s Next is loyalty programs. (There’s still time to sign up!)

Subscription options for consumables is not necessarily a new concept, but certainly an underused tactic of online retailers.

It’s far more common to see e-tailers offering tiered pricing (discounts on quantity) to increase basket size. But customers don’t always want to order a case lot of something — who has room for a year’s worth of coffee in the cupboard? Others don’t have the cash-on-hand to pre-purchase items.

Subscriptions are a great way to:

• Maximize lifetime customer revenue for the item

• Save customer time, storage space and money
• Build long term service relationship with customer
• Potentially sell more/different items over time

How Online Retailers Are Using Product Subscriptions

I first noticed Amazon using subscriptions on select consumables a while ago. The program is called Subscribe & Save, and Amazon has a directory of items that qualify.

• Offers 15% discount

• Choose from 1, 2, 3 or 6 month delivery intervals
• 2 calls-to-action (blue boxes) - hard for shoppers to miss
• Customers are only charged when items leave warehouse
• Email notifications are sent before reorder, customer can modify order if necessary
• Customers can cancel anytime

I just don’t understand why every product on Amazon is a wedding or baby registry candidate…

Coastal Contacts, Drugstore.com and Walgreen’s allow customers to select their own delivery schedule.

Walgreen’s and Drugstore.com allow auto-refill on prescription drugs, but not on all the other product they carry that would also make for great subscriptions like baby formula, diapers, vitamins, razor blades, pet food, shampoo and so on.

Offering Incentives

Amazon gives 15% discount on all Subscribe & Save items. Nutrica offers a free box of vitamins — even if you cancel your subscription, just for giving it a shot. Doctors Foster and Smith offer the 10th shipment free in its Catered Pet program.

Communicating Value

HGH1000.com combines tiered pricing with subscription and provides a chart that shows the price savings on automatic re-orders vs. one-off shipments for each tier. Strikeout prices are effective, as are big, bold or red discount prices, “you save X% or $X” etc.

Purity Products uses % savings and “Best Value!” messaging:

You can choose your delivery interval from the cart, and you find a surprise free gift:

Helping Customers Choose Frequency

Nutrica sells vitamins and supplements, so it’s easy to let customers estimate their expected daily use and select the right monthly program.

Psoriacream gives recommendations based on the severity of one’s psoriasis problem.

Customer review content that addresses product life would be helpful for first-time buyers. For example, how long does a shampoo bottle last long-haired women who wash their hair 3-4 times a week vs. short haired men who wash every day vs. a couple who shares a bottle? How long does 2 lbs of coffee beans last someone who drinks 2 cups a day?

A tool could also be programmed to ask the customer a few questions about their lifestyle and then recommend a frequency. This would depend on the product, whether it’s worth it to program such a tool or not.

Another idea is to use “customers who bought X chose Y delivery time” similar to reviews — one could see that out of 25 customers who subscribed to refill razors, 18 selected 1 month refills, for example.

Some products like mascara should be replaced every few months for hygienic reasons - even if there’s product left in the tube. What an opportunity for pricey makeup stores to gain repeat business — many customers are not aware of that or need to be reminded.

Subscribe is a Call-To-Action

Some retailers have programs, but don’t show it on the product page. That’s a head-scratcher for me…

Others, like Green Mountain Coffee, are just very subtle about it. The “Recurring Delivery” option is near-invisible, and once you add the item to cart, there is no further announcement that you can subscribe to the product.

Since subscriptions bring more money than single purchases, why are they not treated as valuable calls to action?

Alternative Payments

Cenestra Health uses PayPal subscriptions for recurring orders, which may ease the fears of customers who don’t want you to charge their credit card on a regular basis.

Usability Issues

Tabletools.com allows you to order a variety of flavors of a product in whatever quantity you want, as described below. However, it’s asking a lot from its customers to enter the details in the middle of checkout. Shoppers must remember the names of the flavors after they’ve navigated from the product page unless they open up a new tab to check out - otherwise they’ll need to call the order in.

Subscription Program Tips

• If you’ve got a program, flaunt it on your product pages - don’t bury it deep in your site or use near-invisible links

• Link to program details from your product page, preferably without leaving the page (AJAX or pop-up window)
• Clearly communicate shipping charges, billing dates, cancellation policies, pricing policies (are prices subject to change?), how customers can update billing information, shipping address or subscription preferences in your details
• Communicate the benefits (savings and convenience) of subscribing
• Remind customers of health and safety reasons for replacing products regularly, if applicable
• Select realistic delivery options suitable to your product. Don’t force customers into 1, 2, 3, 6 months just because Amazon does it
• Help customers figure out their best reorder schedule. This can be done through customer reviews, questionnaire tools or historical repeat purchase data
• Create a section where customers can browse all products eligible for subscription
• If you use cross-sells, recommend eligible subscription products
• Send a reminder email shortly before you fulfill a repeat order, remind customers they can modify their order (and remind them of their login name or password!)
• If a customer didn’t opt-in for subscription, ask for permission to send a reminder email in X months instead. Customer may not want to commit to transaction but may still be interested in a friendly reminder in time
• If using the above tactic, send the email with an incentive for repurchase and several similar items, should the product ordered not have been satisfactory, customer can choose something else
• Consider “{product} of the month” clubs — get creative. They don’t have to be gifts for other people, and they don’t have to be consumables, either.

Facebook recenly released a guidebook for businesses titled: Facebook Insider’s Guide to Viral Marketing. Don’t get too excited about the title, just because you set up a Fan Page for your business and buy a few social ads does not mean you’ll unleash a profit-virus, or even make a ripple in the pond. But the guide does help you understand what Facebook has made available for you and how to get a Page all set up.

Considering the price (free) it certainly isn’t a bad idea to put one up. Especially since any of your fans can set up a page on your behalf without anyone knowing it wasn’t you, so it’s a good idea to be the first out of the gate so there’s no confusion and you can control your introductory message and the way your Page functions yourself. Other users of Facebook could still set up unauthorized Pages, but at least the early fans won’t be usurped by the unofficial Page.

Get Reviewed on Facebook

Unlike Facebook Groups and Sponsored Groups, Facebook Pages are like people — they can add applications. One application that is useful for online retailers and other businesses is Reviews. Reviews can only be added to Pages, not individual profiles, so you won’t find it in your regular applications search, but you can view the application page through the link.

Continue Reading:
Get Your E-Store Reviewed on Facebook »

The Second Annual Retail Welcome Benchmark Study put out by Premiere Global Services and the Email Experience Council recently examined the subscription practices of 118 of the largest etailers. The study reports that 72% of the major online retailers send welcome emails immediately after a customer signs up for an email subscription.

Being curious, I decided to conduct my own welcome-email research using the 100-some retailers on our Shopping Cart Buttons List. I wanted to test how many welcome emails I’d get and examine their content. But rather than signing up for email subscriptions, I registered for a customer account on each site. I also specifically opted-out of email promotions to make sure each welcome email was in response to the registration. The registration process itself was quite enlightening, and I will be reporting my usability observations in an upcoming post.

I was able to successfully register for 89 accounts and received 33 welcome emails within 24 hours, or 37%. After reading each one I took a tally of how many emails used different tactics such as:

1. Branding in Headline: 88%

It’s a good idea to include your company name in the sender field, the subject line or both. If the customer wants to spot your email among all the rest, you want to help them find it faster. Because some customers may scan either the “Sender ID” or “Subject,” it’s best to include your name in both. Be sure to configure your outgoing email so “Your Name” appears instead of customerservice@yourname.com as this also makes for easiest scanning. I don’t see any reason not to put a company name in the subject line, and found I Delia’s “It’s time to log in” subject a bit bizarre…

Continue Reading:
Welcome Email Usability Tips for Online Retailers »

Zaz Lamarr hearts Zappos. She really does.

On her personal blog Writing, Cooking, Life, Zaz gives testimony of exceptional service from an online retailer back in July:

“One bright, extraordinary note in all of the sad stuff of the last few weeks - in May we had ordered several pairs of shoes from Zappos for my mom. She’d lost a lot of weight, and her old shoes were all too big. She had a whole new wardrobe of clothes in pretty colors, that fit, so I wanted her to have some pretty shoes that fit, too, when I took her up to Oregon to stay where her sister is. Out of seven pairs, only two fit. Not bad considering she’d never been this thin, so I was winging it, and the return shipping is free.

The rest were here waiting to be returned. Because of various circumstances - lost label, my mom being hospitalized and me being away, the shoes were never sent back. There’s a time limit on the return of 15 days. Remember this. When you do a return to them, they pay the shipping, but you have to get the shoes to UPS yourself. Remember this, also.

Continue Reading:
Good Customer Service Still The Best Word-Of-Mouth Marketing Strategy »

Last post I covered some ways you can use Twitter for ecommerce marketing. (Remember that Twitter can be an inexpensive form of mcommerce as users can subscribe to mobile text alerts). As promised, here are some Twitter Do’s and Do Not Do’s based on Ma.gnolia’s experience using microblogging for customer support.

(If you’re not in the know, Ma.gnolia’s about the best lookin’ social bookmarking site on the web) Here’s a summary of Ma.gnolia’s Product Manager Todd Sieling’s presentation at BarCamp Vancouver:

• Make each tweet worth reading - no poly filler
• Speak softly unless the house is on fire (remember Ma.gnolia’s subscribers are receiving tech support and system updates)
• Tweet responsibly, too many tweets will make your subscribers tune out
• Be creative, but not at the expense of clarity
• Follow everyone who follows you - except spammers
• Read your community’s tweets and glean whatever you can from what they’re saying

Continue Reading:
Twitter Marketing Do’s and Don’ts: Interview With Ma.gnolia »