Moments Strategy Guide

Awtomic Moments are a very powerful tool that can help you build a loyalty program that helps retain customers, mitigate churn and automate winbacks, all in a way that feels personal and tailored to your customer. This guide will help you get started with creating a Moments program to achieve your business goals.

Keep in mind, your Moments should evolve as you reach your goals and learn more about customer behavior. It’s a good idea to review the performance of your Moments regularly to see if there are any new levers you can pull to continue driving improvement to retention.

In this guide, we’ll teach you how to:

• Understand your data and make a Moments plan
• Increase your average order number
• Reduce time between orders
• Increase long-term retention
• Increase Average Order Value
• Mitigate Churn
• Automate Winbacks

Understanding your data

The best way to get started is to answer a few key questions about the current state of your retention and churn. You can do this by opening the Awtomic dashboard in the app.

1.) What are your biggest dropoff points?

There are two places to analyze the data on this. One is the Retention per Cohort chart:

Looking at this example, you can see the biggest jumps in churn happen between the first and second month and the second and third month. Once people get past the third month, much fewer churn. This indicates that with a monthly order frequency, then between orders 1 and 2 and between orders 2 and 3 are great places to offer incentives to stick around.

The other chart we’ll look at is the LTV per subscriber one:

In this example, you can see the average subscriber spends less over time. This likely means that people are more likely to pause or skip after the first 4 months, or perhaps their average order value goes down after the 3rd or 4th order. This means that after the 4th order could be a good time to re-engage and provide more incentives to try items or place future orders.

2.)What is your average order value

This is an easy one - you can check out the AOV charges widget on the dashboard to the average amount subscribers spend per order:

This is a good benchmark to see if we can improve this value by helping customers try more products during the duration of their subscription.

3.)What is my current churn rate

You can see churn rate by hovering over any month on the churn rate graph:

This will also be a good benchmark to see if we can reduce churn.

4.)What are my most common churn reasons?

The “Churn by Churn Cause” chart is a great one for understanding trends around why people are canceling. You can hover over any section to see what the reason is.

In this example, the three most common reasons are “No Need” “Budget” and “Too Much.” That probably means a few things:

• Shoppers feel they’re spending too much on the product
• They’re getting their shipments before they need them or are ready
• They felt that they ordered too much or weren’t able to finish before their next shipment

The good news is, there are ways to address these reasons. Discounts or more subscription benefits can be great way to address budget issues, and sometimes too much product or not needing product can be fixed with more education on how to manage subscriptions effectively. More on these strategies below.

5.)How many customers are currently paused?

This is another easy one - this widget shows the number of paused subscribers you currently have, so our goal will be to reduce this number and/or keep it from growing.

Setting up Moments

Now that you have a good handle on your data and the opportunities, you can start building your Moments program. You can create as many Moments as you need to, and adjust things over time as your goals change.

Moments can be edited, but also archived so that you can do experimentation and change your strategies. When visible Moments are archived, only people who previously earned the moment will be able to see it so you don’t have to worry about confusion over things disappearing.

Below, we’ve outlined some of the business goals you may have around Moments and what we’d recommend. We’ll use the example data above to define an example Moments program below.

Increasing Average Order Number

Most brands have an average order number of around 3. Each incremental increase to this number can have an incredible impact on the revenue of the business.

In the example data above, we saw that the biggest drop-offs happen between orders 1 and 2, and 2 and 3. Let’s try to get more customers past their 3rd order to increase the overall average.

• A gift after order #1 that incentivizes order #2: People LOVE free things. If you let your subscribers know that canceling their subscription after their first order means they’re walking away from something free, a higher percentage of them are likely to stick around. This doesn’t have to be something big - it can be a sample, some small swag, or a product you’re trying to run down inventory of.
• A discount after order #2 that incentivizes order #3: We know that budget is one of the big reasons for canceling, so let’s offer a small discount between order 2 and 3 to get folks over the fence and see if we can reduce that churn reason. We’ll hope that once we help customers build a habit around using our product they will stick around.

Reducing Time Between Orders

In general we do want people to get their subscriptions when they need and want them, otherwise we’ll increase our churn for reasons like “no longer need” or “too much.” However, sometimes when people pause or skip, they go beyond their ideal refill period. Here’s a few strategies we can implement for getting them back sooner:

Skip triggered education: Not every moment has to offer a reward, you can use it as a key point for communicating with customers. Skipping is not a bad action - it can be a very positive engagement that makes the customer feel empowered to control their subscription. Usually when people skip, it’s because they don’t need the product yet. This is a great time to tell them they can edit their frequency to match their needs better. If they do this, they’re less likely to need to skip in the future, or forget to skip and then come and cancel because they have too much. Here’s an example email you could send the first time someone Skips:

“Did your next order come up too soon? You can edit your frequency so in the future it comes right when you need it!

To do this, manage your subscription, press “Edit” next to your current frequency, and select the frequency that works best for you based on how much you’ve used the product so far.”

Subscriptions are supposed to be convenient! Let’s make sure it’s working for you.”

Increasing Long-Term Retention

Your long term subscribers are your most loyal fans and VIPs. You can use Moments to recognize them and make sure they feel like VIPs - and show folks who are early in their experience with your brand what they can gain when they stick around. Our favorite long-term retention strategy is to create a reward that sticks. There are a few ways to do this:

• Create an indefinite discount when a customer reaches a certain number of orders, spend or time as a subscriber. I’ve been a member of a wine club for a few years now. One of the things they did was give me a higher discount after I’d been a member for a year. There have been times I’ve thought ‘I really should cancel’ - but that discount was enough to make me stop and think I’d have to re-earn it if I canceled and wanted to start again later. This, of course, works best for customers who already love your products and know they’re likely to buy again in the future, but it can be very powerful. Make sure Moments like these are visible, so customers can see what they have to look forward to.
• Give them a gift that they get on a recurring basis once they hit an important milestone Similar to above - if there’s something valuable and free you can give customers after they hit a certain point, make them feel special and do it! It could be a free sample product, or your top selling product, or some “extra’ items (EG: 5 extra filters with every future order). Again, people love free things, and it’s a great way to set your VIPs apart from the crowd.

There are other great ways to use Awtomic to make members feel special. If you haven’t yet, check out our Add-ons functionality to give members access to exclusive products, or give them special discounts. You can also use our Shopify Flow integration to apply special VIP tags and use that to gate access to pages, content, email campaigns etc.

Increasing Average Order Value

Many of your subscribers already love and believe in your product. They are 60% more likely to buy something than a new customer. Don’t miss out on helping them discover more products and so they order more over time! Here are a few great ways to do that.

• A free gift: Make sure gifts you give work for you! Do you have one product that everyone loves? Make sure your subscribers have tried it by giving it, or a sample as a free gift. In our example data above, we saw that after order number 4 customers were spending less over time. That could be a great time to encourage a boost to AOV with a free gift or two.
• Allow them to add a build-a-box to their subscription: Offering products in a bundle often allows you to extend better benefits and discounts to customers. With Awtomic, you can create build-a-boxes that customers can add via the customer portal. This not only encourages higher AOV, but can be a subscriber exclusive offer that you can tout as a membership perk.

Mitigating Churn

Awtomic is building a platform for churn insights specific to your store based on your data, but in the meantime there are some key indicators that we can use as a way to mitigate churn.

• Communication around Skips and Pauses: Allowing customers to skip and pause is an important part of building trust and transparency, but you want to make sure to keep people engaged if they are not actively placing orders. These can be great points to offer incentives or badges or sometimes even just a clear communication around the value of being a subscriber. One way to really drive engagement is to send a survey and ask for their feedback!
• Offer an incentive around your biggest dropoff point: Looking at our data above, we saw that there was a bigger than normal dropoff between orders 1 and 2 and orders 3 and 4. Placing a desirable incentive at that point using a moment will help you mitigate churn.

Automating Winbacks

It’s never fun to lose an active subscriber, but in the bigger picture of your business, this isn’t a lost customer. They just will take a bit more effort to get to their next order. That’s why it’s important to automate winbacks so we never drop the ball on reaching out to folks to re-engage them.

• Pause Winbacks: When a customer pauses, they are planning to come back at some point. It can help to remind them and provide them a nice incentive to do so. With a Pause moment, you can create this one-time offer for them to make sure they have something nice waiting for them when they’re ready.
• Cancel Winbacks: Similar to a pause winback, a cancel winback can be very effective at changing someone’s mind. Once a subscriber, always a potential subscriber!