Veloforte Grows with Loop Subscriptions

About the brand and subscription program background

Veloforte is a UK based nutrition brand that offers energy  bars, protein shakes and gut-healthy bars. They have a very strong repeat rate on their Shopify store.

In the initial days, they started getting subscriptions from their most loyal customers. Towards the end of 2022, they saw massive growth in the number of subscribers and were able to gain a substantial subscriber base by Q1’23- A true product-led growth story.

Over 91% of their 20,000+ product reviews are 5 stars. Their products are also used by World renowned athletes.

They had been using the Smartrr app for subscriptions management in the initial days.
Once their subscription programme reached a certain maturity level and had grown tremendously, they wanted more from their subscriptions platform and started looking out for alternatives to Smartrr
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1. Lack of options to customize widget on the fly

They wanted to experiment with different messaging on their subscriptions widget- To improve the conversion rate of subscribers from the PDP.  They were not able to make these changes quickly.

They also didn’t have an inhouse developer so they always had to rely on the Smartrr team to make changes on their behalf. This was a real struggle point

2. Not able to incentivize customers for longer subscriptions

First order churn was a real issue for them. Most of the subscribers were just subscribing to get that additional discount. Because of lack of robust cancellation prevention flows, they were not able to do anything about this issue.

They were not able to engage with subscribers through
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1. Videos when they try to cancel
2. Show upcoming rewards inside the portal to reduce 2nd order churn. 

3. Lack of customization inside the portal and unsatisfactory customer experience

They also had very little control over the look and feel of the customer portal because previously the entire My Shopify account page was taken over.

They got this feedback from their subscribers that it was difficult to manage subscriptions inside their previous portal.

And since their previous app took over the Shopify accounts section, their one-time purchasers also have to go through the same flow as subscribers- This resulted in a lot of confusion.

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4. Platform Reliability

They were also not very happy with the admin portal of their previous app. They had a hard time making changes by themselves or making changes quickly.

One of the first areas of struggle was updated information of subscription product SKUs. Whenever the Veloforte team made changes to product SKUs inside the Shopify admin, that information was not getting updated within the admin settings of their previous app. 

Secondly, they wanted to quickly execute such changes to save up on time.
Without a bulk actions feature, they were not able to do that. 

The Head of Marketing shared a story from the time they were using their previous subscriptions provider on their Shopify store.
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“We had to make some changes to our product SKUs on Shopify. And then to make changes to subscriptions that included those SKUs, we had to reach out to their support team.

We had to wait for 8 hours for a confirmation of the change. Honestly, we would have loved to have a feature where we could just go and make those changes ourselves easily.”

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Overall they were not able to make the subscriber journey unique to their brand and found the previous setup to be pretty rigid.
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They were looking for a platform that could provide in-depth analytics, a better and easier to use admin section, great reliability in terms of performance and support, better cancellation flows and personalized incentives in the form of gifting and discounts.

And they were able to find all of these requirements within the Loop platform

1. Support for Bulk Actions

This is one of the most important reasons why the Veloforte team decided to move to Loop. They understand the importance of this feature - Automates redundant work, saves time and resources of a lean DTC team
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2. Easy subscription operations and inventory management

Within Loop, when a brand makes changes to prices inside Shopify, the new price is automatically pulled in from Shopify. Veloforte felt that no double work was required now while making changes.

They were also impressed by our Inventory settings for subscriptions.

In their case, they don’t usually run out of stock. They have a best before date on their product and sometimes their stock goes past that. So they liked the feature inside Loop where brands can delay or even skip subscriptions in case there is a delay on the quantity available inside Shopify inventory.

This is exactly what Veloforte team was looking for in terms of personalising gifts and discounts to reduce their first to second order churn.
They were also looking to send targeted campaigns to their subscribers based on certain segments.

Since we are deeply integrated with Klaviyo, they could easily create these subscriber segments inside Loop and then setup campaigns inside Klaviyo based on those subscriber tags

4. Powering subscriptions of brands similar to Veloforte

We had recently migrated Just Thrive from Skio and they were happy with their migration move. Veloforte was impressed by the results that Just Thrive had achieved in just 28 days after migrating to Loop.
The target audience of Just Thrive and Veloforte is exactly similar (except for different countries).

They wanted a reference call with another DTC brand of their revenue scale that had migrated to Loop. Our CSM team put them in touch with TruHeights

Just like all migrations done from Recharge and other platforms, we created a personalized migration document for Veloforte team. We connected with them on Slack and updated them daily on each part of the migration process. 

1. Mirroring the custom widget design

The first major task while doing migration was to recreate the existing subscription widget.
The widget designer inside Loop has been built to accommodate both simple and complex layouts.
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Since this was a custom design, our migration team had to use custom CSS feature inside our product.

2. Custom feature development

Veloforte caters to both UK and EU markets. Inside their portal, they show add-ons within the upselling section. Now they want to restrict the visibility of UK product SKUs to only UK based customers and EU product SKUs to EU customers.

They don’t want to mix both the markets when it comes to one-time or recurring add-ons to ongoing subscriptions.

At the time of migrating, we didn’t have a solution for them within Loop. However we take customer feedback seriously and have prioritised this feature within our product roadmap.

This feature would enable brands such as Veloforte to configure add-ons within the upselling section based on geography.

3. Help with discount codes configuration

When we migrated subscriptions from Smartrr, our migration team observed that there was a logical flaw in how discounts were configured. Subscribers were not able to apply the discounts that were available to them because of limitations of the previous setup.

Once Veloforte were on Loop, we were able to fix this issue as we allow brands to configure their own set of rules on how discount stacking should work.

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It's only been 4 weeks since they have migrated and we have started multiple initiatives with the Veloforte team.

1. In-depth Churn Analytics  

They are now able to get much more visibility into their churn numbers with the help of our analytics.
They were easily able to identify the cancellation rate between the 1st subscription order and the second subscription order.

2.Setting up discount incentive in our cancellation flows

After doing an analysis on the cancellation trends, they realised that they wanted to do something about subscribers who had cancelled just after 1st order and selected the reasons “Too expensive to continue” or “Want a different variety or product”

So they created a discount incentive inside Loop for this particular subscriber segment- An  additional 10% off on top of their existing ongoing Subscribe & Save discount.

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When a subscriber went inside the portal to cancel, they were shown this message:

This offer had an acceptance rate of 30%, i.e., 3 out of 10 people were taking up this offer as an alternative to cancelling their subscriptions.

3. Dunning management setup

This was a quick win for the Veloforte team. Within just days of migrating, we setup our automated dunning feature for their store. They are now able to track how much revenue they are losing to failed card payments and also recover that revenue.

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4. Helping hands during an theme upgrade

At Loop, customer support is an ongoing process and we are always a message away to help
So when the Veloforte team checked in with us to see if we could help them set up the widget on a new theme, we were more than happy to do that. 
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