Let’s imagine you’re a CPG brand, specializing in tea. Everybody loves tea, right? Hot, iced, loose-leaf, bagged, fresh-plucked—you’ve got it all. You’ve built a neatly structured subscription program with a solid conversion rate optimization strategy in place. So, why does your conversion rate leave your cup half-full?

There could be a hundred reasons behind this—you’re unsure about the impact of your strategies on consumers, you don’t have enough rich data to analyze consumer behavior, and thus your tactics aren’t getting the results you want. Hey, it’s a common problem.

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It’s safe to say there’s plenty of subscription demand in the market given that the DTC subscription market in the US alone was estimated at $27 million in 2021, and an active subscriber holds around two subscriptions at a time.

But you don't have to play the guessing game to pinpoint problems. Stick with us and we'll show you how to transform thirsty window-shoppers into loyal consumers forming a line out the (digital) door.

5 Ways CPG Brands Boost Conversions

Instead of dwelling too much on your conversion rate, focus on creating a well-rounded CRO strategy with a few impactful tactics.

It’s difficult to zero in on which strategies you should adopt. So, we’ve done the legwork and narrowed down the five most effective strategies you can leverage to drive real conversions.

1. Understand Consumer Buying Behavior 

You can’t make someone buy a product (or a monthly subscription) if you don’t even know who they are, what they do, and which words you should use to make them take action. Beyond metrics, your CRO efforts need to be largely consumer-centric, which begins by understanding their buying behavior. 

66% of consumers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. Besides helping you understand their interests, deep diving into their buying behavior will eliminate guesswork and help you make data-driven decisions.

Include these strategies and you’ll thank us later:

• Surveys: Create surveys and distribute them via social media, communities, forums, and giveaways. This will help you analyze a mass sample size with close-ended questions and understand broader questions around your audience.

• Interviews: To gather more context on the data you collected with surveys. Ask open-ended questions while noticing your consumers' body language and behavioral characteristics. To encourage consumers to participate, you can give them a small reward like a voucher or a free month's subscription.

• Behavior analytics tools: Apart from understanding potential consumers, you also want to understand the drop-off points for visitors who leave your website without converting. A great way to know where they click, how they navigate your website, which page they bounce off, and other site-related behavioral data is to use a tool like Hotjar.

• Audience research tools: There’s more to your audience than what they tell you. To understand which websites they’re active on, social media they use, websites they visit, podcasts they listen to, and understand their interests better, you can use an audience research tool like Sparktorro and Audiense.

Rodeo also integrates with popular eCommerce tools and gives you an overview of your store metrics and website analytics to help you tailor subscription options.

Once you understand your audience and back up your assumptions with data, create a buyer persona. It’s a semi-fictional representation of your ideal buyer and is a guiding factor in validating your strategies before implementation. Your buyer persona should give you detailed information about the pain points, behavior, and buying triggers of your best buyers.

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2. Create Flexible Subscription Options 

Picture this: it’s a hot summer day. You open the fridge, open a can of chilled soda, and all is good in the world. But the next day, there are no soda cans left. It’s super hot outside, so you don’t want to make a grocery trip, but you also know chilled sodas are essential to survive this summer.

The solution? Subscription.

Come to think of it, consumers don’t buy a subscription for the sake of it. They want the flexibility to get what they want, when they want it, and in the right amount. 

But apart from this, if you’re not letting the consumers choose when they want to order or pause their subscription, edit their preferences, stay subscribed to get rewards but be allowed to cancel the product subscription—you’re not offering them true flexibility.

While enabling and tracking such options on your website is difficult, you can easily do it using Rodeo. It gives your consumers complete flexibility on how they want to design their subscriptions by allowing them to adjust product frequency, delivery schedule, address, billing details, and even combinations of products. 

You’ll watch those one-time buyers convert into subscribers who stick around and cause a significant uptick in your revenue.

3. Leverage Shopify’s Unified Checkout

All subscription business owners dream of creating a global consumer base where subscribers order products from all corners of the world while they sit comfortably in their home country.

But it’ll be hard to convert this dream into reality if your consumers can’t place orders or you can’t differentiate web sales from brick-and-mortar sales in multiple countries.

The solution? Shopify’s unified checkout.

It allows you to manage your entire business and get a bird’s eye view of your inventory, invoices, and consumers. So, while making sales from different sources, you can manage it from one backend to avoid confusion.

This will also enable you to provide more flexible buying options to your consumers, like trying your product in a grocery store and then ordering it online with a 45-day subscription cycle and a specific promo code. 

You will also offer a stellar checkout experience to your consumers because you’ll have access to improved funnel analytics with data to track across multiple touchpoints.

Pro tip: Rodeo uses Shopify’s unified checkout to help CPG brands extend flexible subscription options to their consumers while making things easier for themselves. You don’t have to take our word for it—our customers have seen a 25% increase in conversions after using Rodeo, which leverages Shopify’s unified checkout and 1-click buy button.

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4. Personalize the overall Consumer Experience

71% of consumers expect brands to deliver personalized interactions, and over 76% get disappointed when this doesn’t happen. You don’t want to be a heartbreaker. The crux of a successful subscription program is flexibility allowing customers to create a subscription per their needs and preferences, personalization is central to driving more conversions.

Everything from your messaging and marketing campaigns to your CTA buttons on the homepage and checkout experience needs to be personalized. Even your push notifications and editing options should address consumer needs and make them feel special.

However, this brings us back to our first point. To personalize experiences and subscriptions for your consumers, you need to know them well. Once you have those data and insights, you can use them to tweak your approach and tactics to target the right kind of audience with the right offers to drive conversions.

In their summer 2021 campaign, FabFitFun, a women’s lifestyle subscription brand, allowed consumers to customize their summer boxes fully. They got the option to choose a product from each choice category, personalized according to their purchase history and preferences. They also allowed consumers to forego their subscription box and swap it with credit to choose from their diverse range of eCommerce products.

“Our needs and our wants change day to day, season to season. With the fully customizable box and swap for credit features, we’re able to best serve our diverse membership and they’re able to create a membership experience that is truly unique to them.”

Katie Echevarria Rosen Kitchens, Co-founder and Editor-in-chief of FabFitFun

Rodeo helps you create personalized experiences for your subscribers by sharing transparent insights, sending just-in-time subscription reminders, and offering flexible editing options. 

5. Improve your Overall Shopping Experience

Let’s face it: no matter how good your products are, if your shopping experience is clunky, consumers will bounce. So, more than anything, focus on website elements that contribute to the customer's overall shopping experience.

Follow this 3-step strategy:

• Identify friction points: There must be some elements of your website that are holding back your visitors from becoming consumers. So, identify them using heatmaps, session recordings, Google Analytics, or on-site feedback forms. You can also reference customer support tickets or emails to understand your consumers’ frustration points and take them up as a priority to improve conversions. Problems can include checkout issues, product navigation, chat support, mobile responsiveness.

• Build a hypothesis around the solution and A/B test it: Instead of jumping headfirst into implementing the solution, consider the best way to address the solution and cater to consumer needs. Look for possible solutions, build around them with data,and perform A/B tests with a sample size to analyze your best-performing solution.  

• Implement your changes: After A/B testing, implement the solution that proved to be the most effective and reasonably addressed your consumers’ issues. Again, behavior analytic tools show how these changes are impacting your conversions. You may have to repeat this process to boost your conversion rate, all while improving your brand credibility and consumer experience.

Because we know you can’t offer an amazing customer experience without understanding your consumer’s behavior, Rodeo can A/B test the subscription vs One-time purchases on your stores Product Detial Page. This gives you detailed insight into how your customers buy your products. 

Give Your CRO Strategy a Facelift

The truth is, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy to transform your subscription service into a thing of beauty. What might work for one CPG subscription brand may not work for you.

Use this article to create a data-backed and well-rounded conversion optimization strategy for your subscription business. You’ll soon have customers saying, “Sign me up for more!” 

Rodeo helps you provide convenience and flexibility to your consumers with automation capabilities, customizable subscription options, and rich insights that help you drive sustainable business growth.

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