For ecommerce brands, it’s crucial to build a base of engaged and loyal customers. LOLA, makers of period and sexual wellness products, has done just this. Not only do they give amazing perks to their subscription members, but they also rally around their mission of giving back—which is something their customers appreciate too, creating a sense of greater purpose around their products.
By offering members access to free shipping, first dibs on products, special discounts, and the chance to donate, they have created subscription packages that are worthwhile and beneficial for all.
This post will dive into how LOLA has created an effective customer incentive program, as described by their senior director of DTC, Anna Stearns, on our Hit Subscribe podcast. We’ll also talk about how other ecommerce brands can apply these strategies to a rewards program and achieve greater customer satisfaction, with existing and new customers.
Getting to know LOLA
LOLA’s mission is simple: to provide products that support every reproductive stage of someone’s life. They started by offering period care products, and have expanded into sexual wellness and vaginal health. As Anna explained:
“LOLA was really founded upon both transparency and access; delivering the utmost transparency of what’s in our products and getting healthy ingredients essentially to the consumer, but also delivering access. So if someone wants to shop online for convenience or if they would rather go in-store, we’re there for them when they need us.”
–Anna Stearns, Senior Director of DTC, LOLA
One of the major reasons that LOLA has seen such great success is their mission. Anna was drawn to work at LOLA because she wanted to be part of a woman-empowered group with a company that was giving back to the community. At LOLA, it’s not just about the products. When you purchase from them, you are also helping other people gain access to critical health products.
Attracting customers to subscriptions with customization
For LOLA, offering customization in products and the customer experience has allowed them to give customers exactly what they want and need in the subscription space. Period care products in subscription form just make sense. They’re needed monthly, so why not create a subscription service?
Where LOLA really succeeds, though, is in their extreme flexibility. Not everyone’s period is the same, and LOLA gets that. By offering various absorbencies, sizes, and delivery schedules, customers can get the right care products when they need them.
Anna described the need for this kind of customization in the world of period care, and where LOLA found a huge gap in the market:
“Part of the period care world was that you could get a customized subscription to just about anything these days, but not your tampon. So you go to a store and typically find one absorbency or a mix of absorbency set for you…with LOLA, you can actually choose the absorbencies for the tampons that you might want to get so it fits specifically to your cycle because no period is the same.”
–Anna Stearns, Senior Director of DTC, LOLA
A lesson in flexibility & shifting with consumers
Once LOLA realized that customers were yearning for this kind of attention to detail, they realized their whole business should be customizable. This led them to go headless, an option that allowed them to fully own their business and website. Headless commerce is a commerce architecture that separates your brand’s front-end and back-end and gives major flexibility in contrast to traditional ecommerce platform builds.
As Anna described, going headless married the Shopify and Recharge experiences together, meaning seamless transitions for customers and a better overall shopping experience.
The pandemic also led LOLA to shift, following changes in the way consumers were shopping. They made value packs available, and let customers purchase one-time products in addition to subscription products. Creating loyalty programs and rewarding customers for their brand commitment—like offering discounts on shipping and giving free samples to new customers—helped LOLA create a trustworthy relationship with those who use their products.
Customer incentives to make memberships & subscriptions desirable
Besides offering products that work well in the world of subscriptions, LOLA has found ways to incentivize their customers, meaning higher average lifetime value (LTV) and less churn. By offering membership for just $20 a year, LOLA gives their most loyal customers access to bonuses like free shipping and early access. Receiving extra gifts and surprises—whether by becoming a member or just a regular subscriber—makes people more excited to commit long term.
Here are a few of the customer incentives that LOLA offers to their members:
- Free standard shipping on every order
- 2x rewards points for every dollar spent
- Period product donated when you become a member
- Special early access to new products
- Bonus 5% off select products
Besides memberships, LOLA offers monthly replenishment and prepay options. By leaning into the customization mentioned earlier, they’re able to reach customers exactly when they need period care and sexual wellness products. Prepay options came about after pandemic shifts and the addition of new products. Anna described this change:
“One of our traditional offerings which we started with was our monthly replenishments: tampons and period care products. When we started expanding into new product lines, like sexual wellness and vaginal health, we realized that a lot of those products might be more one-time purchases than monthly replenishments.”
–Anna Stearns, Senior Director of DTC, LOLA
Prepay allows LOLA customers to receive three months’ worth of tampons or period products upfront in one shipment, then receive another three months later. There’s a discount with this offering since shipping happens upfront and is more eco-friendly this way. This has also helped LOLA navigate some of the shipping woes that resulted from the pandemic, and increase customer retention by meeting people’s needs.
Learn from LOLA and reward customer loyalty
So, how can other merchants learn from LOLA’s success? The answer is simple: offer your customers customization at every step of their shopping journey, and don’t hold back in rewarding customer loyalty with special incentives. Especially in this age of adjusting to pandemic life, shifting with customers’ needs is essential if you want to continue thriving and making customers happy.
Another major factor of LOLA’s success is the community they’ve created around their brand and giving back. In 2016 they founded LOLA Gives Back, a program that has already donated over seven million period products. When the pandemic negatively impacted homelessness and domestic violence, they donated an additional million products to shelters in need. LOLA is committed to giving back and changing the way people perceive feminine care, and it shows in the commitment their customers have to the cause, too.
Check out the full interview with Anna, as well as conversations with other industry experts, on our Hit Subscribe podcast.
