Subscriptions That Stick - For All the Right Reasons
Subscription commerce has huge potential - steady revenue for the brand, convenience for the customer, and a relationship that grows over time. But success doesn’t come from locking people in; it comes from building an experience they want to stay part of.
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Across dozens of implementations, we’ve seen what makes subscriptions thrive. The best ones remove friction, build trust, and quietly reinforce value at every step. Here’s what we’ve learned from helping brands like Vivactive, Incontinence Choice and Age UK turn subscription pain points into real performance gains.
1. Give Customers Control
The easiest way to build loyalty is to make people feel in control. “Pause”, “Skip”, and “Cancel” shouldn’t be hidden three clicks deep - they should be easy, obvious, and fast.
When Vivactive redesigned its subscription dashboard, cancellations fell, not rose, because when customers felt trusted, they trusted back.
Tip: Make self-management simple. The easier it is for someone to adjust their plan, the more likely they are to stick with it.
2. Treat Payments as Part of the Experience
Payments shouldn’t break relationships. Cards expire, banks block transactions - it happens - but too many systems treat a failed payment as the end.
Adding smart retries and tokenised payments stopped unnecessary churn for Incontinence Choice almost overnight. It’s not glamorous, but these small automations often make the biggest commercial impact.
Tip: Retry payments intelligently and communicate clearly. “We’ve saved your spot” goes further than “Your subscription has ended.”
3. Keep Reinforcing the Value
Subscriptions aren’t a transaction you set and forget - they’re a service that needs nurturing. Every confirmation, every dispatch email is a moment to remind customers why they subscribed.
Bird & Blend do this brilliantly. Instead of a dull “Order Confirmed”, their emails say things like “Your tea box is ready - your favourite blends arrive Friday.” That small shift reframes a payment as part of an experience.
Tip: Use post-purchase touchpoints to remind customers of the benefit they’re getting - time saved, effort reduced, value added.
4. Build Around Real Life, Not Billing Cycles
Customers don’t live in neat 30-day patterns. Fixed cadences cause stockpiling, late skips, and unnecessary cancellations.
When we built a flexible scheduling system for Vivactive, allowing people to move deliveries forward or back with one click, lifetime value jumped by 33%. Why? Because the experience started fitting around real lives, not the other way round.
Tip: Give customers control over timing. Flexibility drives retention more effectively than any discount code.
5. Make Self-Service the Default
If your support team is answering “Can I skip next month?” messages all day, something in the UX isn’t doing its job.
After we introduced proper self-service for Vivactive customers, customer services tickets dropped significantly, freeing the team to focus on higher-value conversations.
Tip: Build intuitive self-service first, and reserve your people for moments that genuinely need a human touch.
Case in Point: Vivactive
Vivactive’s subscription setup was already strong, but it was built around the business rather than the customer. Together, we rebuilt it with flexibility at its core:
A clear dashboard with simple pause, skip, cancel and “send now” options
Smart, tokenised payment handling
Adjustable delivery scheduling
Seamless self-service tools for cards, addresses, and products
The result? Churn down, lifetime value up by a third, and happier customers all round.
What It All Comes Down To
Good subscription design is about giving customers confidence and control.
When you make it easy to stay, people stay.
When you make it flexible, they adapt with you.
When you keep adding value, they notice.
Subscriptions work best when they’re built on respect - for the customer’s time, money, and autonomy. Do that well, and retention stops being a target on a dashboard. It becomes the natural outcome of an experience that’s genuinely worth repeating.
The best subscriptions feel effortless, for your customers and for you.
At GENE, we help brands design flexible, intuitive experiences that keep people coming back because they want to, not because they have to.
