Let’s look at instant subscription order management. In a perfect world for merchants, all of your inventory is synced and customers can text you to delay their shipment by two weeks automatically. You don’t need to do anything. It’s taken care of.
A customer’s subscription utopia
From a customer’s point of view, that perfect world can and should exist. The average consumer subscribes to 4 subscriptions, ranging from pet items, to pantry refills, to health and wellness, to kids boxes. They tend to cover the rooms of their house in products delivered right to their door via a subscription service.
As a result, customers want a lot out of today’s subscription services. Let me give you a real-world example: I’m a self-proclaimed “needy customer”. If my freezer is full of coffee beans, I want to be able to pull my phone out of the back pocket of my jeans when I’m pre-grinding the next morning’s coffee, and delay the next arrival of more dark-roast. Then, I don’t want to think about it again until it shows up on my doorstep, right before I need it and exactly when I want it.
Creating the perfect world for your customers via RechargeSMS
As customers want more and more personalization and customizability with their subscription products, merchants need to find ways to, in a way, read their minds. Take my example above. I was able to text my coffee store to delay my shipment so I didn’t wind up with excess and eventually needing to cancel. My coffee merchant was able to keep me as a customer, because they flexed with what I needed at the right time. What’s more, I didn’t even have to try to remember my log in details for their website or call or email someone to shift my delivery. A simple text was all it took for me to engage with my subscriptions.
Products that fill a need in a customer’s life, whether it be part of a daily ritual like morning coffee or restocking the kids’ coloring craft set, become the expectation and set new lifestyle norms. Customers gravitate toward these products due to the convenience factor, but what are some ways to make that even more of a stellar experience?
Making subscription management that much easier
RechargeSMS just makes it simpler for subscribers to manage the subscriptions they want, when they want them. Subscribers have a lot on their plates and are juggling busy lives, so why not give them the option to make subscribing easier?
Recharge offers a way to meet your customers where they are without having to add extra support hours. In fact, all of our customers using RechargeSMS have decreased their time spent in support. GEM, a daily vitamin brand, for example, saved $60,000 last year this way, just by creating a more streamlined process using transactional SMS.
Your subscribers could benefit from transactional SMS in a few ways:
- Sending a simple text to manage their orders
- Updating the shipping date
- Changing addresses
- Swapping out an item
- Not having to remember log-in details to the customer portal
In fact, according to a study by Twilio, 9/10 customers are already asking to do all these things via text. RechargeSMS allows your customers to engage with you where they spend the majority of their screen time.
RechargeSMS details
So what are the specific capabilities of RechargeSMS? First of all, RechargeSMS is free for all Recharge merchants. Yes, all merchants who use Recharge. All you need to do is install the RechargeSMS app, and you’re good to go!
If you’re unsure if your brand is ready for RechargeSMS, we created this Transactional SMS Readiness Checklist to help get you started.
In a nutshell, texting customers falls into one of two categories: Transactional SMS and Promotional SMS (think marketing texts alerting subscribers to current sales). Transactional texts are what RechargeSMS is all about. These are the texts that have a real customer-order related reason to be sent, ie: a notification that their order will ship in 3 days.
By allowing a subscriber to interact with their order in this way, we are seeing 15 – 30% increases in customer lifetime value.
Enable RechargeSMS today and start letting this be your subscribers’ experience too.
