Subscription Retention

Muscle Innovations operates an e-commerce website that sells health and wellness products. They have operated in this space for several years, and are excited about the long list of tools and applications available in the online space. Most of Muscle Innovations’ products are offered exclusively on a subscription basis. The subscription model is straightforward: Customers get a free sample product for 1 month (they’re only asked to pay the $5 flat fee shipping cost), followed by renewals that take place every 30 days, 60 days or 90 days at the customers’ choosing.

Environment

Muscle Innovations operates a Shopify website. They chose Shopify because it provides all the pieces required to operate an e-commerce website: Web design, shopping cart, payment gateways and inventory are all available as part of a synced system. Muscle Innovations leverages several 3rd Party applications to help effectively operate its business:

• Recharge is leveraged sell and manage their subscription products
• QuickBooks is leveraged to manage its bookkeeping
• Tune is leveraged to manage and pay their affiliates (Muscle Innovations relies on a network of well-established affiliates to generate traffic to its shop)

One of the challenges Muscle Innovations faces is that its data is scattered across multiple systems.

• Order data is only available in Shopify’s out of the box analytics dashboard
• Details about subscriptions, such as the subscription start date, renewal cycle and cancellation date are only available through an out of the box Recharge dashboard
• Affiliate Campaign, Ad level, and commission data is only available through a generic Tune dashboard

This is a common problem that is experienced by e-commerce shops: while relying on 3rd party applications provides quick access to functionality necessary to run their shop, it creates scattered environments of data that make it difficult to gather meaningful insights.

Unanswered Questions

For Muscle Innovations, this challenge results in an inability to answer some core questions about its subscription offering 1) How long does it take for its subscriptions to become profitable? 2) What is their subscription retention rate? 3) What is their subscription Lifetime Value? 4) How do the answers to these questions vary by:

• Product
• Renewal Cycle (30 Day, 60 Day, 90 Day)
• Affiliate Partner, Campaign and AD
• Time (Day, Week, Month)

We worked with Muscle Innovations to address its core problems and provide a sustainable soluton. The implemented solution included the following features: 1) A Warehousing Solution consisting of a holistic data environment including Shopify, Recharge and Tune data 2) A Data Model creating the relationships between major data sources, and core calculations required to report on KPIs 3) A Reporting Environment providing one-click access to key reporting required to track performance and make key decisions