The Sill streamlined subscriptions to grow LTV
About
Eliza Bank founded The Sill to help bring the joy of plants to more people. Living in New York City, she had no garden center nearby and could only buy plants at her local grocery store. She wanted to make having houseplants easy for people in urban areas, while sharing plant education and biophilic design.
Plants with a brochure and a shipping box
With The Sill’s current subscription program, subscribers select a subscription theme and preferred planter color. Each month, they receive one new plant and planter, cycling through various plants and styles to always have fresh greenery in their home.
“We needed a solution that would support scaling our subscription program to what we knew was possible.”
Dan Anderson
Senior Director, Ecommerce & Engineering
Challenge
The Sill offered a subscription program and an annual membership that included free shipping. As the programs grew, The Sill decided to focus on driving profit and improving the experience for both users and their internal teams. They wanted a subscription solution that could scale the program.
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The Sill’s customer experience team received multiple questions daily from its customers—including issues with accounts, redeeming gifts, and managing their subscriptions. With their previous subscription solution, the customer portal had little ability for customization and didn’t reflect their brand. The Sill wanted to clarify their subscription program and simplify subscription management for their customers.
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Additionally, the previous subscription solution lacked documentation for engineers. When the team wanted to modify something, they started from scratch. The Sill wanted their new solution to have documentation for their engineers.
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As a plant subscription, The Sill needed a way to cap the number of subscriptions they sold, so they didn’t risk selling more than they could fill. They wanted a subscription solution that supported integrations with their tech stack so all program components would work together seamlessly.
Solution
The Sill decided to discontinue their annual membership and implement Recharge to focus on subscriptions. As a DTC company with a major focus on branding, The Sill wanted to customize every aspect of their subscription. With Recharge’s customization capabilities, The Sill designed a customer portal and dashboard that matches their brand voice and tone. The portal simplifies subscription management for customers to easily understand how to update their preferences, whether it’s switching their planter color or pausing their subscription.
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Additionally, Recharge has API documentation and code examples. With these resources, The Sill’s engineering team has easily understood Recharge’s capabilities, saved time in building new additions, and made modifications to the program. For example, they used a Recharge tutorial to create a waitlist for their plant subscription, so they didn’t sell more subscriptions than they could fill.
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Finally, Recharge supports multiple integrations in The Sill’s tech stack. With rotating plants in their subscription, The Sill sends a different SKU to subscribers every month. Recharge plugs into their shipping integrations to achieve their advanced shipping rate logic.
Results
Through migrating to Recharge, The Sill has streamlined their back-end processes and reduced developer time.The Sill’s subscribers have a higher LTV than one-time customers, so they’re motivated to continue building the program. And with subscriptions largely automated, their team can focus more effort on improving their products and services.
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To share their subscription with more customers, The Sill partnered with Hawke Media, a marketing agency that customizes data-driven, performance solutions. Hawke’s team integrated Recharge with Google Analytics to create a conversion goal. They imported that action into Google Ads, and optimized campaigns for high AOV subscription purchases. The Sill is seeing growth in subscriptions, and is continuing to grow a strong subscriber base.
“From an operational standpoint, we needed our subscription program to be smooth enough that a small team could run it, and we can with Recharge.”
Dan Anderson
Senior Director, Ecommerce & Engineering
