NEW DATA: Promotions Boost Subscription Conversions 25 Pct

The subscription commerce business is growing in the United States, and it is all thanks to one consumer segment: the “subscription curious.”

Subscription curious consumers have emerged during the 16 months since March 2020. The roughly 167 million U.S. consumers designated as such are signed up with least one type of subscription service, and many of them signed up within the past year to avoid shopping in physical stores. Many have since grown to enjoy the subscription commerce experience so much that they are now constantly on the lookout for more. The average subscription curious consumer now has 3.4 subscriptions at any given time, up from just 2.5 in February. This trend has occurred even as subscription sign-ups among other consumer segments has come to a halt.

Capturing subscription curious consumers’ attention is thus more critical than ever to succeeding in the subscription commerce industry, and the June 2021 edition of the Subscription Commerce Conversion Index, a PYMNTS and sticky.io collaboration, details just how subscription service providers can go about doing so. We surveyed a census-balanced panel of 2,025 U.S. consumers to learn about how and why they use subscription services to determine which specific subscription features they find most important and which will convert them from curious browsers into loyal subscribers.

PYMNTS research identified three key strategies that businesses can employ to win over more subscription curious consumers, with one of the most important being cross-promotion. It is common for subscription service providers to send out special offers and other promotions to subscribers in an effort to drive new sales. Subscription curious
consumers are the most likely to purchase the items featured in these promotions when they are sent from third parties rather than their current providers, even if their products or services nevertheless complement those they receive from their current providers.

One example would be for a chocolate subscription service to send a cross-promotional email to a consumer with a coffee subscription, offering a discount on a monthly gift box that included both coffee and chocolate products. Half of the consumers receiving this type of promotion wind up purchasing the products they feature either most of the time or every time they receive these promotions. It therefore falls on subscription service providers to ensure that they are doing the most they can to tap this cross-promotional potential.

This is only one of the three key strategies that subscription service providers must know about if they hope to optimize conversion among the subscription curious. The new Subscription Commerce Conversion Index explores the other two strategies and other key trends that providers must understand to drive conversion.

To learn more about the state of subscription commerce in the U.S., download the report.