Keeping subscribers...subscribed!

We can hardly remember the last time we stepped foot in a big box store. With everything from coffee to razors arriving like clockwork, who needs to? We're not the only ones opting to stay home in our pajamas: 1 in 5 online shoppers in the US signed up for a CPG subscription in the last year. Read on for 3 new improvements your team can turn on now for subscriptions...

“Last chance!” reminder email

You already remind customers about their next shipment. But do they see it? Help ensure customers get what they want by sending a 2nd reminder email in case they missed the first alert. To enable:

1. Create and set a new environment variable: 'SUBSCRIPTION_LAST_CHANCE_REMINDER_DAYS.' This is similar to your existing 'SUBSCRIPTION_DEFAULT_REMINDER_DAYS,' where each reminder email will send on x days before the next actionable shipment date.

2. Create a new email template in Contentful with slug `subscription_last_chance_reminder.` See our reference in the Chord Demo space.

Let customers update their own billing

As much as you love meeting customers, you probably don't want to spend that call updating their credit card information. Improve security and save time by having customers update their own subscription payment method:

You can find sample code in our updated starter kit. Here’s a brief developer overview on how to add this to your site:

1. Use the new payment attributes returned in the subscription object to render Stripe’s credit card component.

2. Upon successfully saving the card to Stripe, use the returned IDs to update the subscription by including `payment_source_attributes.`

It's not goodbye, just see you later

Sometimes it's not you - it's them. Whether your customer is out of town or just stockpiled more than they could use, they might not want that next shipment. But that doesn't mean they never want to see you again! Give customers the ability to pause instead of cancel. Setting an optional "resume" date will automatically restart the subscription. Check out the developer documentation for pausing and resuming in our updated starter kit. These include new Segment events for `Subscription Paused` and `Subscription Resumed` so that you can drip email campaigns using your favorite marketing tool. We recommend everyone to go and add this enhancement now!

Give these a spin and let us know how it goes! We'll keep you posted on new features and enhancements like this one, approximately every 2-4 weeks. Want to change what you hear about? Manage your email subscription preferences here.