The customer portal is one of your most important touch points with subscribers. With Stay Ai, you have a ton of ways to customize the portal, so we wanted to share a list of the most important things to focus on as you’re getting set up to make sure you’re:
Giving subscribers an intuitive experience
Putting your brand’s best foot forward
Taking advantage of opportunities to increase AOV
This article will share some customer portal best practices and examples from some of the top-performing subscription brands that work with Stay Ai.
Best Practices for Setting Up Your Customer Portal
Customize the portal design and copy to reflect your brand elements.
Your portal is a visual extension of your brand, so tailor the styles within to match your brand’s aesthetic. Consistency in look and feel reinforces brand recognition, builds affinity, and enhances the user experience.
We recommend customizing both the design and copy, even down to the text of any error messages that might pop up for subscribers. The voice and tone of your portal copy should mirror your overall brand voice. Whether your brand is friendly, quirky, or over-the-top fun, bring elements of that voice into the various microcopy elements of your portal, like your SMS opt-in button, Get It Now button, Swap button, and more.
Arrange customer portal modules for your audience behavior, growth goals, and retention goals.
All of the modules within Stay Ai’s customer portal can be moved around, using a drag and drop function. Depending on your customers’ typical behavior (which you can access data on via the Executive Dashboard), as well as your business goals, rearranging the organization of your portal from the default settings can improve engagement, AOV, and retention.
For example, if you’d like to increase customer AOV/LTV or highlight new products, you may want to keep the product upsell carousel at the top of the page. But if you don’t have an extensive product line, or are ore focused on customer retention, you may choose to show other portal elements at the top of the page instead, such as a Banner Ad or the Swap button.
In addition to considering your business goals, understanding how your customers interact with the portal can provide important insights. Make sure to review your customer portal metrics in Stay Ai’s Executive Dashboard to see what actions are most and least frequently used. Then, consider testing the arrangement of your portal over a period of time to see how new layout(s) impact the metrics most impactful for your subscription program.
Strategically select the SKUs and number of products in your portal upsell carousel.
Your customer portal carousel provides the opportunity to introduce high-value customers to new products in your catalog, nudge them towards purchasing products that you’re intentionally trying to sell more of, or generally increase the AOV/LTV of each customer by presenting additional products to add-on.
A curated product carousel can drive massive value, especially if your brand offers subscribers exclusive discounts on products purchased through the customer portal.
We recommend a testing out a few strategies when deciding which products to feature in your carousel:
Consider featuring your best-selling products, with a long-standing have a high take-rate.
Consider featuring the products that best complement your best-selling SKUs, that most customers are already subscribed to.
Consider featuring newly released or limited edition products to catch subscribers’ attention.
For example, if the large majority of your customers are subscribed to protein powder, they’ll be more likely to purchase a different type of supplement from your catalog or a protein shaker bottle, rather than a second container of your best-selling protein flavor.
Lastly, remember that putting too many products in your upsell carousel could lead subscribers to feel add-on decision paralysis. We recommend featuring 5 - 7 strategically selected products in the carousel to make the decision process seamless for customers.
Implement banner ads for two-click add-ons.
Adding a banner ad to your customer portal enables you to inform customers of whatever you’d like to nudge them towards actioning on - newly released products, a special sale, seasonal offerings, and more. But even better, Stay Ai’s customer portal banner ads are unique in their transactional ability. From the Stay Ai app, you can link the product of your choice to your banner ad after uploading. When a customer clicks the banner ad, a modal pops up with the option to add the product to their upcoming order or recurring subscription.
As with any ad creative, testing is recommended. Here are a few ideas for how to make the most of your portal banner ad. Test using the portal banner ad to:
Promote a new product launch or new subscription offering
Promote a re-formulation or new variant of a legacy product
Promoted a seasonal or limited-edition product
Promote a subscriber-exclusive sale
Offer a discount on a specific product you’d like to sell more of
Offer a discount on your subscriber’s total upcoming order value as a loyalty reward
Offer early sale access to subscribers with a discount code
Offer subscribers a free gift on their next order with a discount code
Nudge add-on purchases of a specific product without a discount
Announce that a product is back in stock
Feature a product of the month
Spotlight your brand’s loyalty or membership program
Provide product education on your most popular product(s), to encourage usage adoption
Reinforce your subscription program benefits/value propositions, to proactively combat churn
Share any important brand announcements you may have
If you’re looking for some banner ad inspiration, check out this blog post that features 30+ banner ad examples from some of the top brands on Stay Ai. To learn more about how to implement banner ads, check out our Using the Customer Portal Banner Ad article. In the meantime, we’ve dropped a few examples below.
OLIPOP's Customer Portal
Yumwoof's Customer Portal
Bright Cellars' Customer Portal
Harmless Harvest's Customer Portal
