Grove Subscribe and Save

Building new incentives for repeat customers.

Project Goal

Test a new retention framework that offers discounts on recurring orders.

Background

Grove is a sustainable home and body care ecommerce platform that enables subscriptions to products we all use like hand soap, household cleaners, pet products, and face cream. People love Grove because of its product selection and commitment to reducing plastic waste and carbon emissions. Most customers use Grove as a subscription service in the following way:

• Customers subscribe to products.
• Grove builds a recurring order based on those subscriptions, typically monthly.
• Grove automatically ships your order to you.
• Customers save time and get sustainable necessities on their doorstep. Hooray!

Grove has proven over time that customers are very responsive to gifting. Giving away free products at the right moments in the customer lifecycle helps acquisition, retention, increasing order values, increasing order frequency–just about every key metric.

The Problem

In such a competitive sector as ecommerce, the company was under consistent pressure to show higher subscription rates and retention measures. While not all customers are value shoppers, we heard repeatedly in user interviews that everyone appreciates getting a good deal and being rewarded for loyalty.

The Big Idea

Given the customer input and competitive landscape, we built conviction that offering ongoing discounts on subscribed products would make customers happy, and happy customers generally shop more. The Subscribe and Save program would offer an initial adoption discount on a first-time purchase, plus an ongoing discount as long as the customer stays subscribed.

This meant important changes to the Grove UI and big backend system changes. Given the scale of changes, it took multiple facilitated sessions, design reviews, and alignment conversations to progressively gather buy-in from key stakeholders across the business.

Here is an early illustrative flow used to align engineering and merchandising stakeholders on pricing updates and the need to store customer selections on the backend.

By looking at the overall flow from a high level, we understood most customers would interact with subscriptions on the product details pages (PDPs) and in their carts.

I iterated heavily on the UI on these key pages, testing multiple versions with Grove customers and random shoppers, focusing on comprehension of the discount scheme and subscription mechanics. Here are a number of product detail page versions, trying to balance constraints such as legal disclosures, discounting, and visual hierarchy.

Below are multiple cart tile versions trying to understand the needs of the unsubscribe action and the right amount of selling savings on the tile itself.

One interesting challenge was how to differentiate a currently subscribed product from a product a user intends to subscribe to, but hasn’t actually purchased yet. We solved this with a checkbox on the cart tile that both signals a multi-select choice and differentiates it from an subscribed product in cart. A separate icon and text treatment is used to signify subscribed products in cart and provide subscription management option on tap/click.

The Results

We launched the Subscribe and Save experience as an A/B/C test to several customer cohorts with two different pricing configurations. Across all cohorts, we saw a statistically significant lift in multiple KPIs such as the number of subscribed products per customer, units purchased per order, and order frequency. This indicated the program was very successful in altering shopping behavior.

Unfortunately, there was not a pricing configuration that added to bottom line margin. For this reason the Subscribe and Save had to be rolled back. Even though this didn’t have the business impact we had hoped, I believe the otherwise outstanding performance is an indicator of a strong understanding our customers and an excellent rollout across multiple development teams.