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, skin care, and wellness products. 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.
• Grove automatically ships your order to you, typically monthly.
• Customers save time and get sustainable necessities on their doorstep. Hooray!

The Problem

In such a competitive sector as ecommerce, Grove was under consistent pressure to show higher subscription rates and retention measures. We heard repeatedly in user interviews that customers love getting a good deal and being rewarded for loyalty, especially when there are alternative stores. This was backed up with site metrics that correlate discounts with increases in virtually every measure that we track.

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 lead to increases in acquisition, retention, and order sizes. 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 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.

Iteration and Testing

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.

Subscribe and Save A/B Test Launch

We launched the Subscribe and Save experience as an A/B 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.

Due to a number of business factors including CAC and margin, however, the company decided not to roll out Subscribe and Save to 100% of customers.

Subscribe and Save 2.0

Still, nearly everyone agreed that Subscribe and Save was the right experience and by several measures customer behavior trended in the right direction. After about 6 months, significant changes to acquisition strategy, and new leadership, we revived the Subscribe and Save program.

For this round, we involved marketing partners to help tell the story of Subscribe and Save via email and advertising. An interesting challenge here was to design UI that translated to other marketing channels so the program appeared cohesive.

Below are three iterations of the new Subscribe and Save Identity applied to product tiles, followed by an image used for launch.

The Results

This version of Subscribe and Save has become the default Grove experience. Given optimizations across the business, we have delivered customers a program that aligns their interests (savings on planet-friendly products) with Grove’s needs as a business. With strong design process from ideation to iteration, testing, and development, we were able to bring this feature to life.