Colorescience® is an award-winning skincare company with a mission to help its customers prevent skin damage. The company uses only 100% pure and natural minerals, antioxidants and botanicals. Plus, their clinically-tested ingredients maximize results for future skin health.
Those who use Colorescience products can do so knowing they’re not doing unnecessary harm to their skin. Yet, is Colorescience’s online purchasing options doing harm to the company’s bottom line? We could test that.
The Problem: Incentive for Subscribing Is Missing Emphasis
Discounts and offers are known to increase transactions. And while increasing one-time purchases is important, increasing subscriptions can have a positive impact on LTV (lifetime value) and a company’s bottom line.
Colorescience visitors have the option to purchase products once or to subscribe to receive products every 45-100 days, depending on the timeframe they choose. By subscribing, Colorescience offers customers up to 15% off. Unfortunately, this isn’t clearly emphasized on the page, resulting in a lack of encouragement for customers to subscribe.
The Control
Our Hypothesis: Emphasizing Incentives & Promotions Will Motivate Customers to Subscribe
According to the Baymard Institute, showcasing incentives and discounts on product pages is important. Yet, it must be clear and consistent to positively impact visitor purchasing behavior:
“In effect, seeing a product was discounted served for many subjects as a strong incentive to consider the product more closely. As one subject said, seeing the discounted price of a bag, ‘I’m a sucker for that, I always fall for that, if it says $128 and then says $69, because then I think I’m getting a sale.’ However, when the presentation of or messaging around discounts and special offers is unclear or inconsistent, subjects during testing became confused, frustrated, and mistrustful of the site.”
Through our research, we’ve found that defaulting to a subscription option encourages users to consider purchasing a subscription. This also doesn’t negatively affect those wanting to make a one-time purchase.
The Potential Fix: Default to Subscription vs. One-Time Payment
Emphasizing incentives is a great motivator for inspiring visitors to transact. Setting the default purchase option to subscription vs. one-time payment can also encourage users to consider subscribing. Plus, by emphasizing the incentive offer, visitors will see firsthand the benefit of subscribing. As a result, Colorescience could see increased subscriptions and LTV.
The Variation
As you can see in the variation, we would emphasize the subscription savings by adding copy next to “Subscribe & Save”. We would also set the purchasing options to auto-select subscription vs. one-time purchase.
What Can Cro Metrics Test for You?
Every element on your website should be tested for the best business outcomes. Something as simple as a checkout option could improve your bottom line. To learn more about our experimentation programs, send our team a message.