Case Study: Recharge Customer Portal Customisation for a Gin Subscription Brand

Brand overview

Garden Street is an Australian alcohol subscription brand using Shopify to power its popular Gin Club website. The company partners with artisanal Australian distilleries and sends customers a high-quality gin direct to their door every one or two months. This is accompanied by a curated selection of tonics, garnishes, snacks and other treats.

The challenge

When Garden Street came to Swanky, it was seeking support with its subscription offering. Subscriptions made up a significant amount of the company’s revenue, but 70% of customers were cancelling their subscription after the first month. Reducing customer churn was therefore a high priority for the brand as it looked to scale.

Eager to maximise revenue from subscribers and make the most out of acquisition costs, the Garden Street team also tasked us with helping to increase average order value (AOV).

How Swanky helped

Garden Street was already using leading subscription payment solution Recharge to manage its Gin Club program. A powerful platform that enables retailers to create dynamic subscriber experiences at scale, Recharge makes a great fit for brands like Garden Street who are looking to accelerate growth and retention.

Confident in the suitability of Garden Street’s subscription tech, our engagement focused on optimising the subscription portal through bespoke development and customisation.

Specifically, we focused on optimisations that would:

• help the brand build trust with customers;
• reduce subscriber churn; and
• increase AOV.

1. Building trust with customers

An ecommerce store should be full of interactions and information that increase trust with customers. Including multiple trust-building factors was a high-priority when customising Garden Street’s Recharge customer portal. Here are a few of the sections we focused on to achieve this.

FAQ section

Building trust requires you to understand what your customer is looking for and then demonstrate your awareness of their needs. One way you can gain a richer understanding of consumers’ needs is through analysing customer support tickets.

When customer support teams repeatedly receive the same questions regarding a product or subscription, it typically indicates that customers need more reassurance around a particular area before making a purchase.

With this in mind, we added an FAQ section to the Recharge portal to reduce any friction in the customer journey caused by unanswered questions or a lack of understanding.

Subscription benefits

Standing out in a competitive market requires clear communication of the benefits you offer to customers. In this case, we wanted to ensure customers understood why a craft gin subscription was a worthwhile investment, over purchasing a bottle of gin from the local supermarket. Notably, it is a curated experience, with no ongoing commitment and the enjoyment of quality gin delivered to your door at no extra cost.

We recognised that communicating these benefits visually would enhance their clarity and effectiveness. For this reason, we worked with Garden Street to create branded bespoke icons that quickly enhance a customer’s understanding.

Product education

Along with highlighting the specific benefits of a luxury gin subscription with Garden Street, we noticed that value could be found in sharing more information about the products in each monthly subscription box.

When a customer shares their craft gin with friends, they also want to share where it was distilled, what tasting notes to expect and which foods it pairs well with. In short, customers want more than a great bottle of gin, they want an experience.

Consequently, we developed a blog section for the subscription portal. Here, an article is shared monthly, detailing information about that month’s gin, garnishes and extras. This adds value to the customer by enhancing the overall subscription experience.

Example article on Garden Street’s gin blog.

2. Reducing customer churn

With an increasingly competitive DTC market and acquisition costs rising, customer retention is a high priority for all ecommerce brands. For subscription-based brands like Garden Street, maintaining long-lasting customer engagement is invaluable, but can be especially challenging.

In order to reduce the number of customers ending their subscriptions after the first month, we applied a combination of industry best practice and learnings from data analysis to inform the UX/UI design of the Recharge portal.

Skip a month

A common and effective strategy for reducing churn is allowing customers to skip a month, or more, of their subscription. Whilst it may seem counterintuitive to your retention goals, offering this option can help prevent customers cancelling their subscription altogether.

In Recharge’s out-of-the-box portal, this skip feature isn’t easy for users to find, often leading them to cancel the subscription entirely.

To remove this point of friction, we customised the Recharge portal, making it easier to skip a month or two. By making this option more accessible to users, customers will appreciate the flexibility being offered, trust the brand and subscription service more, and be less likely to churn.

Churn Buster app

Alongside Recharge, we integrated the Churn Buster app into Garden Street’s tech stack to support and optimise its subscription service. This is a customer retention tool designed specifically to reduce churn through customisation, high data visibility and expert guidance.

Most notably, it allows retailers to implement automated dunning cycles to reduce passive – or involuntary – churn. If a subscription payment is declined, for example, Churn Buster triggers branded, personalised dunning notifications – making it easier for brands to recover more payments, whilst ensuring a smooth experience for subscribers.

Utilising Churn Buster software heightens the impact of other churn-reducing efforts, meaning Garden Street can maximise customer retention as the brand scales.

You can read more about how to reduce churn in our article on subscription retention strategies.

3. Increase AOV

When faced with the challenges of rising acquisition costs and greater competition, ecommerce brands focus on maximising revenue with existing customers. Increasing AOV is a common strategy for this and one that we implemented for this project.

Most of Garden Street’s customers are gin aficionados and want to experience this gin with the perfect accompaniments. Knowing this, we created a suggested add-ons section for the Recharge subscription portal, designed to show mixes and garnishes that pair well with the gin in your cart.

Upselling relevant products at this point in the customer journey is a proven way to increase AOV. Moreover, it is a good example of combining industry best practices with a strong understanding of your customers, allowing you to add value to the user experience.

Portal customisation boosts loyalty & reduces churn

Throughout our work with Garden Street, we were reminded of the importance of building trust, offering flexibility and adding value in the user journey. Customers want to:

• be reassured throughout their interaction with your store;
• easily edit their subscription to suit their individual needs;
• learn about the products they’re receiving; and
• fully understand the benefits of a subscription.

A customised subscription portal is a highly effective way of meeting these customer expectations. It offers you more control over the user journey, allowing you to quickly and easily apply learnings from your customer data to the portal.

Moreover, as data and strategy changes over time, you can easily adapt the design to suit your needs and drive revenue.

Swanky’s subscription experts

Our team at Swanky has supported subscription brands in a number of different industries, including alcohol retailers, coffee brands and petcare companies. We combine our knowledge of Shopify, customer psychology and data analysis to craft subscription strategies that increase revenue and scale with your brand.

Our subscription services have generated millions of dollars for clients. Get in touch today to learn how we can help your brand.