Green Drop Garage engaged me over a period of 12 months to help launch a new business model of automotive service and repair—Car Repair as a Service. At the end of our 1-year piolt program, the churn rate was higher than we wanted it to be.
Members pay a monthly fee for one of two plans: Coverage of their car's vital maintenance needs, or coverage of the vehicle's entire service and repair needs. We concluded that it was the customers who did not book all the services they could (didn't "get their money's worth") who were not renewing. So we created onboarding campaigns specifically targeted to each subscription level that would prompt the customer to book a covered service and reiterate the messaging of all the services that are covered (and an occasional upsell to the bigger plan).
We decided to proactively and directly engage new subscribers to take advantage of the services covered at their plan level. We would encourage interaction with the program during the first 8-12 weeks to get the customer in the habit, so to speak, of using their plan services. We needed to create and deploy targeted onboarding schedules that would begin showing our customers right away the actual value they can start getting from their plan. When their renewal date comes around, they will have been getting good value out of their program all year long, making renewal a much easier decision.
The technology part
The onboarding is managed by MailChimp Automation campaigns, which allows the client to easy update the message content. What we need to do is add new subscribers to the list that will initiate the right onboarding automation in MailChimp. We have available a webhook announcement from our subscription management tool, ZoHo Subscriptions.
ZoHo sends new subscriber information to a REST endpoint at Integromat. Integromat allows us to leverage service integrations and advanced data processing without having to reinvent the wheel for every kind of data structure. The subscription announcement is parsed and analyzed at Integromat and the new subscriber information is added to the appropriate list via the MailChimp API.
Incidentally, here's why we chose to go with ZoHo Subscriptions:
- Free tier for the first $50k of revenue
- No transaction fees at any time; paid tiers are based on client count and offered a much better average cost per transaction than any competitor
- Plan management and customer signups were intuitive and easily adopted by staff
- Customer-facing UI was simple and offered sufficient customization for our immediate needs
- Signup API allows for custom signup process UI in the future
- Webhook announcements for all subscription actions allow us to integrate with other services
