boosting customer retention with skio's new feature: surprise & delight banners

Customer retention is super important for any successful subscription business, but keeping your customer base engaged and excited about purchasing can be hard. The reality is that the average email open rate hovers around 50% or less, making it difficult to keep your customers returning to your brand in a way that matters.

We're thrilled to introduce a feature that can boost your customer retention: Surprise & Delight. With Surprise & Delight, we're introducing a new way to reward customer loyalty and boost your retention rate. Customers agree with us too: according to CrowdTwist, 67 percent of consumers said surprise gifts are important to their buying experience.

Customer Retention in Focus

The Surprise & Delight feature tells your customer about the arrival of a gift that awaits the by banner, email, or SMS message.

This feature is a huge game-changer when it comes to nurturing customer relationships. It's not just about random giveaways. It's about fostering a sense of value and appreciation. By seamlessly integrating free products and exclusive discounts at specific order milestones, Skio empowers you to craft a subscription experience that becomes increasingly rewarding the longer your customers stay your customers.

A Personalized Post-Purchase Strategy

We’ve made sure to keep this new feature customizable so you can build a retention strategy that works for your brand. Some examples of how our surprise & delight feature can be set up includes:

On order 2 (the first recurring order) offer subscribers a free trial pack for another product in your catalog
On order 3 offer subscribers an extra 10% off
On order 6 offer subscribers an extra 20% off as a thank you
On order 10 offer subscribers a free product that pairs well with their subscription product (like a classic punch card)

Here’s an example of how a Surprise & Delight alert would appear to your customers. Alerts can be delivered as banners, emails, and SMS messages.

The Power of Post-Purchase Engagement

A good subscription strategy goes beyond the initial transaction. It hinges on what happens after the purchase is made. This is where our Surprise & Delight feature shines. By strategically offering one-time discounts and free products based on order counts, you can turn routine interactions into moments of delight that increase brand loyalty.

Why else is post-purchase engagement critical? To proactively fight customer churn. Most brands wait to reach the cancel flow step to stop churn but by that point it's often too late. Once a customer has made up their mind, the chances of saving them drops drastically.

Instead, fight churn proactively by using targeted surprise and delight actions and gifting a customer a free item before they even think of unsubscribing.

For example, a cosmetics brand can gift repeat customers of a face serum product with a new moisturizer for free on their fourth order. With Skio’s engineer-built conditional rules, the brand can target subscribers who are subscribed to the face serum and, for example, spend at least $60 a month on their products.

The effects are massive for increasing retention: not only does a loyal customer receive an unexpected gift, they're also introduced to a new product that they have never tried before. Discovering that they love it, they’ll update their subscription order and include it in their recurring bundle.