How La Colombe grew their subscriber base by 41% with Ordergroove

La Colombe is a coffee roaster known for their exceptional customer experience. In 2015, they launched subscriptions with the goal of delivering an eCommerce experience that matched the premium feel of their cafés.

While the coffee brand achieved initial success, their subscription experience didn’t grow as quickly as they desired. The reason? La Colombe’s subscription platform made it difficult for consumers to sign up for subscriptions and impossible for subscribers to add additional products to their orders. Moreover, the subscription solution required La Colombe to maintain multiple product catalogs, severely draining internal resources.

To achieve their goals, La Colombe required a subscription platform that could match their ambitions.

Switching to Ordergroove to boost subscriber enrollment and average order value

After evaluating several solutions, La Colombe migrated their subscriptions to Ordergroove. In three months, La Colombe’s subscriber base grew by 41%, and their average order value (AOV) increased by 12%. They also experienced an increase in customer lifetime value (LTV) and a decrease in subscription-related support tickets.

The Philadelphia-based coffee brand attributes their success to Ordergroove’s:

• Subscriber experience that boosts AOV
• Easy-to-use and delightful subscriber dashboard that reduces subscriber tickets
• Superior prepaid subscription experience that extends LTV
• Robust and intuitive analytics to make ongoing optimizations
• Native integration with Shopify that improves subscriber conversion

Driving AOV with Ordergroove’s Instant Upsell

La Colombe regularly releases popular, seasonal coffee products. Unfortunately, their first subscription solution didn’t allow subscribers to add these products to their recurring orders. Instead, subscribers were forced to purchase them separately, which led to order abandonment and hurt La Colombe’s AOV.

Today, La Colombe uses Ordergroove’s Instant Upsell that prompts subscribers to easily add items to their upcoming subscription orders as a one-time delivery or a new subscription.

“Before we fully implemented Ordergroove, our AOV was barely budging,” said Emily McCracken, senior manager of eCommerce at La Colombe. “It only took a couple of months of working with Ordergroove to see that number rise 12%.”

Reducing support tickets with an easy-to-use subscriber dashboard

Before migrating to Ordergroove, 50% of La Colombe’s direct-to-consumer support tickets were subscription-related – a sign of a confusing subscriber dashboard and unhappy customers.

The most common help request? Subscribers needed help managing their orders.

“It became clear that our subscription program wasn’t working for our customers, and we needed a change,” Emily said.

Thanks to Ordergroove’s intuitive and easy-to-use subscriber dashboard, La Colombe shoppers can effortlessly skip a shipment, swap a product, or pause their subscription. In addition to reducing subscription-related support tickets, La Colombe’s new subscriber dashboard has helped decrease subscriber churn.

“We now offer an intuitive subscribe and save option on each eligible product page and a much-improved subscriber interface,” Emily said.

Eliminating backend complexity with efficient prepaid subscriptions

La Colombe launched prepaid subscriptions on their first subscription platform to further build on their VIP shopping experience and drive higher LTV.

A popular shopping experience, prepaid subscriptions allow customers to prepay for multiple orders at a reduced price.

But again, La Colombe’s first subscription provider failed to deliver an easy-to-use solution.

La Colombe’s initial platform forced the coffee brand to create separate SKUs for one-time transactions, pay-as-you-go subscriptions, and prepaid subscriptions. For La Colombe, this meant numerous SKUs for the same product, making analyzing product performance impossible.

La Colombe’s challenges didn’t end there. Their first platform required the coffee company to create a different product display page for each prepaid subscription offer. When there was an update to a product, La Colombe had to edit multiple pages, a time-intensive undertaking. Customers also weren’t able to see the various prepaid shipping options on one page and would instead have to click to view these individual pages, hurting prepaid subscriber enrollment.

Migrating to Ordergroove solved La Colombe’s problem. Ordergroove uses a single-SKU setup, which prevents backend complexity and creates a better onsite experience. La Colombe now has one product detail page that shows the various prepaid subscription options in addition to pay-as-you-go subscriptions and one-time purchases. La Colombe also has greater visibility into the performance of their products, along with improved fulfillment efficiency. Also, the coffee company’s warehouse team now has a shorter SKU list, helping them fill orders faster with fewer errors.

Most importantly, La Colombe saw an increase in prepaid enrollment and LTV compared to their previous solution, Emily said.

Going deeper with robust and intuitive analytics

To continually grow and optimize their subscriptions, La Colombe combs over their data. However, it took an excessive amount of time and energy with their first subscription platform.

“Our first subscription platform had analytics, but they weren’t intuitive and were stressful to use,” Emily said. “Ordergroove has been huge in helping us figure out how our program is performing and making decisions for the next month or even six months out.”

Ordergroove offers a powerful self-service analytics dashboard that lets eCommerce brands painlessly review key performance metrics around revenue, cancellations, product performance, enrollment over time, and more.

Boosting subscriber enrollment with a seamless Shopify integration

La Colombe’s first subscription solution didn’t fully integrate with their eCommerce platform, forcing the coffee company to send subscribers offsite to complete their purchase. Known as a “hijacked checkout,” this type of experience is proven to decrease subscriber enrollment.

“The separate checkout was causing customer friction, with some people believing that they somehow left the La Colombe site,” Emily said.

Ordergroove fully integrates with all popular eCommerce platforms, including Shopify. Now La Colombe customers aren’t sent to a separate checkout to enroll in subscriptions, removing buying friction and increasing conversion.

Continued growth through ongoing innovation

La Colombe expects even more subscription success in the future because of Ordergroove’s commitment to developing new features and capabilities.

“With our last subscription provider, it never felt like there was a lot on the roadmap,” Emily said. “With Ordergroove, there’s always something to look forward to, like prepaid or a new analytics feature. We’ve seen quite a few of these features roll out since we signed up, so we can’t wait to see what’s next.”