Subscription work done for you | Building Subscription Prescription & The Cancel Page | Ecom Community in Utah
Joined August 2019
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What a clean, focused subscription brand.
@Ancestral does an incredible job in making the subscription option obvious, onboarding you to the program, and making updates clear.
This is my video series where we do breakdowns on how brands are acquiring (PDP), onboarding (email) and managing subscription experiences (portal).
Check it out, or access our free resources at thecancelpage.com
A less aggressive offer usually means stronger retention. Bulk subscriptions and starter kits bring in the right subscribers, not just more of them.
Give up 10% of acquired subscribers to keep the rest 10% longer and the math compounds in your favor.
Watch churn in the first 7 to 10 days, not just month one. Those people are cancelling before you ever prompted them about a renewal.
If that number is more than a couple points, the offer is probably too good to be true, or you shipped a three month supply on a one month renewal.
One of my biggest AI unlocks is when the chat starts to lose the thread, ie something seems to be getting more and more complicated with where it's going... stop and ask it why.
"Why are we doing this? It seems more complicated than it should be."
AI asking itself why it's doing something usually uncovers an unnecessary assumption that has it down a rabbit hole.
If you're going after subscribers while also doing a sitewide discount that subs can't match for BFCM, you're doing it wrong.
Best offer should be on subs. Either the biggest discount you have on the site during the sale (Save up to 50% off with subscriptions - 30% everywhere else) or leverage big subscription bundles as your biggest offer.
Single digit monthly churn is the baseline I give every brand. 15% usually means something in the program is off, unless you are scaling hard and accepting it on purpose.
If that is you, leave the offer alone and work the post-purchase levers: onboarding, billing reminders, cancel flows, dunning, win backs.
Matthew Holman 💊 retweeted
Here’s the difference between a basic billing reminder and one that actually is churn proof:
BASIC SUBSCRIPTION BRAND:
- “Your order is processing”
- Still firing out of your subscription platform on the default template
- Manage subscription button sitting at the top of the email, pretty much asking people to cancel
- Same generic reminder sent to every subscriber regardless of order number
- No mention of what’s actually coming in the box
- Reads like a bank notification
SMART SUBSCRIPTION BRAND:
- “Here are the benefits you are getting”
- Rebuilt in Klaviyo so they control the whole thing
- Manage subscription button buried at the very bottom
- Split by order number, because someone on order 2 needs a completely different message than someone on order 6
- Free gift front and center in the hero
- A visual gift roadmap showing what unlocks at order 3, 4, 5
- Reads like a reward
Same email... but a COMPLETELY different customer reaction.
Optimize this one email correctly and you’ll see your churn drop dramatically.
Is your churn good, or bad?
Is subscription biz is good enough to survive?
How do your numbers compare to competitors?
These are the questions we cover in this week's dose, and I've got two main points for you to ponder:
1. Churn needs to be single digits to work long-term
2. Churn is more about where you are and where you need to be than anything else.
Read on (or listen to the podcast linked in the article) to find out how you stack up and where to go next to lower it.
Let's dive in! newsletter.thesubscriptiondo…
Is my churn good or bad? It's the question I get on almost every call, and the benchmark reports can't answer it for you.
Tomorrow's Dose covers how I actually grade churn: aggregate first, then cohorts, then the first ten days, with your growth rate and vertical changing the answer at every step.
Subscribe now to get it in your inbox tomorrow:
Matthew Holman 💊 retweeted
liverecover is now VYG Conversations.
it started as cart recovery. now it's programmatic conversations for any business: send a conversation by api, a real person handles it.
next: human decisions. vyg.ai/conversations
Matthew Holman 💊 retweeted
seriously...
this is the most insane dashboard in eCommerce/DTC ever
100% free cdp and data hub (what GA used to be but way better)
the UI is sick, but can connect MCP to claude and never open app again
this is the future of commerce
come help me design it 🤝
sign up @ vyg.ai now
You have 50,000 subscribers and you are launching a new product. That is 50,000 people already waiting to buy it.
Treat the launch as a retention SKU before an acquisition SKU. Boosting LTV on customers you already paid for is cheaper than building a new funnel from scratch.
Scaling is a seesaw. New customer losses sit on one side, repeat margin from older cohorts sits on the other.
You can only lean into acquisition as fast as prior cohorts are paying you back. Fix retention first and the gas pedal gets a lot safer.
Matthew Holman 💊 retweeted
Agree. Every single time, adding a free gift and featuring it in the billing reminder and other places increases the retention against the control. This is an undisputed fact. The question is whether the increase in retention covers the COGS of the freebie and whether the freebie itself drives long-term retention, past the billing cicle it's featured in. If the above is true then bingo – this freebie is worth its weight in gold.
Curious what adding a free gift on Order #2 does for a subscription brand?
🎁 Free Gift Recipients: 77.9% rebill rate on Order 2
❌ Holdout Group: 70.4% rebill rate on Order 2
Given their COGS on the gift, it is well worth it.
(Also, the recipients will rebill more times)
I’m on here!
I gave up $1,000,000 this year to launch this.
No, I’m not exaggerating.
Before this year, I was cash flowing the heck out of The Starters.
We were on a strong trajectory to clear $1M+ in earnings in 2026.
But while it provided a great lifestyle, something was missing.
I knew we weren’t living up to our potential.
After all, if I was taking all our profits instead of re-investing them… how could we?
So I thought bigger. And we went to work.
I dropped my salary to $0.
Every dollar went back into building the platform for a bigger vision.
A year later, it’s here.
The Starters is no longer just a freelancer marketplace.
We’re the human brilliance platform: the place where the best e-commerce expertise lives, and where brands go to learn, get advice, and hire.
See what we built 👇
Subscription teardown series is back!
Tackling @im8health this week going over their offer, post purchase, emails, and subscription portal experience.
End to end - let’s go!
Stop asking if your LTV to CAC is 3:1. Ask what month your accumulated margin per customer pays back CAC.
For most consumable brands that needs to be month three to six. Bootstrapped with little cash? Closer to two or three, and grow only as fast as that window allows.
Matthew Holman 💊 retweeted
Greg’s right, and there’s a version of this most ecom brands are missing..
meta killed the facebook groups API in 2024, so for 2+ years, the biggest pile of unfiltered customer discussion on the internet was unreadable at scale.
with Muse, it’s back.
Join the groups, and you can pull what your whole category is saying in real time for creative strategy.
i ran it on creatine, through the lens of @damccormick13’s Create:
- 24 groups, 8.7M+ members
- 6 real objections (kidney fear, “bubble guts,” ozempic muscle loss)
- how to cross-check against what customers actually say
- 6 personas, each with a marketing move
- 10 diverse ad hooks built on real market language
full teardown 👇
Dose #219 is live.
Why the 3:1 LTV to CAC benchmark misleads subscription brands, and the three numbers to track instead
Every subscription brand we talk to or work with wants the same thing:
To know how other brands (especially in their space) are scaling.
The "golden rule" many are chasing is a 3:1 LTV to CAC payback ratio.
But it's a myth, and in this week's dose we dive into why with Jon Blair from Free to Grow CFO. It's an incredible interview talking finance and payback and cash flow.
Like most numbers, it all comes down to what your business can make work. Not how you can use another brand's numbers as your north star.
Let's dive in: newsletter.thesubscriptiondo…
