Inside the industry-leading enrollment strategy that doubled Clarins’ subscription revenue

Over the last 70 years, Clarins has built a beloved global brand on their commitment to genuine, natural beauty, and a reputation for delivering beauty products and routines that stand the test of time. 

In addition to being a household name, Clarins operates in more than 150 countries — and they have the art of exceeding consumer expectations across markets down to a science, prioritizing data-driven decisions, frictionless customer experiences, and global scalability.

With their biggest year for recurring revenue growth to date, Clarins has officially perfected their formula with Ordergroove-powered subscriptions. By transforming their enrollment strategy to acquire new subscribers at a record-breaking pace in the US, Clarins doubled their end-to-end subscription performance in under a year, and are now in position to scale their learnings globally. 

Wondering how they got there? 

Like many other leading brands, Clarins began their subscription success story by choosing Ordergroove to power their subscriber experience. 

Partnering with Ordergroove to launch a premium subscriber experience around the world

With a massive global presence and eCommerce websites live in 29 countries, the decision to launch subscriptions came in 2020 when Clarins saw an opportunity for a bold move in a key market.

“We zeroed in on the US as the first market for our subscriptions because we knew it would have the biggest impact,” said Edouard Madec, Director of eCommerce at Clarins. “While we would ordinarily launch in a smaller market and then scale up, we knew subscriptions would resonate with US customers.” 

But Clarins would be the first to tell you that at the enterprise level, finding a technology provider that offers flexibility at scale can make or break a high-stakes opportunity like launching subscriptions in the US market.

“As a global brand with complex operations, we needed a streamlined technology solution for our launch to be successful,” Edouard said. “On top of being a one-stop shop with simple UX for managing the product catalogue, subscriber payments, and transactional emails, Ordergroove was an obvious choice because they work with some of the best brands in the market.” 

Four years into their partnership with Ordergroove, Clarins has turned subscriptions into a key revenue driver for their business by implementing a high-growth subscriber acquisition strategy — which started by maximizing Ordergroove’s flexible technology to customize how subscriptions are presented on Clarins’ product pages. 

Transforming product pages into a high-converting engine for subscription enrollment

High growth requires high enrollment rates, and no one understands the power of Ordergroove’s flexible product page customizations better than Clarins when it comes to enhancing subscriber acquisition. 

“Our enrollment optimizations began with our product pages because they’re the most viewed pages on our website, and we wanted to make a big impact,” said Edouard. “We used Ordergroove’s flexible technology to customize the design of our product pages to emphasize the subscription offer with a radio button instead of a standard check box, which has been very successful.” 

Fueled by the initial success of their visual changes to the product page, Clarins implemented a series of enrollment best practices from Ordergroove’s experts to simplify the messaging around their subscriber experience to make signing up a no-brainer for customers.

“After increasing the visibility of our subscription offer on the product page, we decided to change the name of our program from Auto-replenishment to Subscriptions to bring more clarity and simplicity to the subscriber experience,” Edouard said. “It turned out that renaming the program helped mitigate any confusion about what customers were signing up for.”

To that end, the team at Clarins further optimized their messaging to better communicate the value and convenience of the subscription offer by adding bullet points highlighting the many subscriber benefits that come with the experience — from 10% off and free shipping, to three free samples with every subscription order.

“Subscription management can be a major point of friction for the customer, so we wanted to make it crystal clear that they would have full control over their orders,” said Edouard. “That’s why we went beyond the bulleted list of benefits next to the offer and added a popup to explain all the flexibility and autonomy subscribers get with Ordergroove powering an intuitive, user-friendly order management experience.”

These enhancements to the product page might seem small, but they made an outsized impact for Clarins. 

On top of 82% subscriber base growth year-over-year, Clarins doubled their subscription sales within one same month of launching their enrollment-optimized product page design — and have continued to see a positive impact from their enhancements over time. 

“That upwards trend has continued over the last six months, with not only high double-digit subscription sales growth — but sometimes triple-digit growth — in certain months,” Edouard said. 

Maximizing profitability by encouraging subscription enrollment and upsells throughout the customer journey

While many brands stop their enrollment optimizations at the product page, Clarins saw an opportunity to scale their subscriptions even further — and with Ordergroove’s flexible technology, they had the enterprise-scale tools they needed to innovate on the entire shopping journey to increase subscription visibility. 

“Our goal was to use every touchpoint at our disposal to make sure customers know about our subscriber experience,” said Edouard. “Beyond the product page, the homepage and shopping cart are our highest-converting pages where we make sure subscriptions are featured prominently.” 

So, Clarins turned the shopping cart into another pathway for customers to opt into subscriptions, making sure to clearly highlight the subscriber benefits just like they do on their product pages.

The more subscribers flowing in, the more opportunities to maximize the profitability of each subscriber. Ordergroove’s Instant Upsell feature made it easy for Clarins to start driving higher average order values (AOV) across their ever-growing subscriber base by showing them an ‘Add to My Upcoming Order’ button on every product when they’re logged into their subscription account.

“We understand that convenience is one of the benefits subscribers value the most, and now they can add products onto their upcoming orders in a single click, whether as a new subscription or a one-time purchase,” Edouard said. “It’s easy for them, and it means higher AOV for us, which certainly helps our bottom line.”

For Clarins, small improvements to the bottom line can add up to major milestones — like a 50% increase in recurring revenue year-over-year from 2023 to 2024 for their biggest year of subscription growth since launch.  

A/B testing to uncover winning strategies and offers at scale

Every successful subscription growth strategy includes an effective incentive structure, whether that’s for winning over new subscribers or retaining them over time. 

But as a high-end brand that rarely offers discounts or free shipping on their website, Clarins knew they had to proceed cautiously — and ultimately combined Ordergroove’s Analytics with their own customer insights to make a series of data-driven decisions, to find their winning enrollment offer of 10% off, 100 loyalty points, three free samples, and free shipping. 

“We saw other brands in the market offering between 10 and 15% off subscription orders, and knew we had to balance the need to deliver value with the fact that we’re a premium brand,” said Edouard. “We found our winning enrollment offer by considering our price point relative to the product usage trends we saw in Ordergroove’s subscriber data, and A/B testing different discounts from there.” 

The beauty of a data-driven approach to enrollment offers is that often, the winning incentives can do double duty as retention rewards in combination with a loyalty program. With three free samples and loyalty points earned on each recurring order — not to mention, 10% off and free shipping — Clarins’ subscribers have continuous exposure to new products to subscribe to in the future, and nonstop motivation to stick around. 

“It might sound complicated, but integrating loyalty points with our subscriber experience was a breeze because Ordergroove is platform-agnostic,” Edouard said. “Our eCommerce platform plugs right into Ordergroove, and our loyalty program pulls the information it needs directly from our Ordergroove data.” 

A tech stack tailor-made to power a seamless, global subscriber experience and 360° business growth

With subscriptions flourishing in the US and already expanding into new markets, this is only chapter one of the subscription success story for Clarins.

“Outside of the US, our subscriber experience is now live in Canada, France and the UK,” said Edouard. “We’ve seen success everywhere we’ve gone live with Ordergroove.” 

The sales and revenue numbers back that sentiment up when it comes to the business impact of Clarins’ subscriber experience — and with Ordergroove providing the strategic expertise and enterprise technology to deliver a high-end experience worthy of their global brand, the best is yet to come for Clarins and their steadily growing subscriber base. 

“We’ve seen nothing but enormous progress from our initial seamless migration, to our phenomenal partnership with Ordergroove’s team, and their continued investment in leveling up their platform’s technology,” Edouard said. “It’s all come together to help us grow subscriptions into a sizable piece of our business, and we can’t wait to continue growing with Ordergroove this year and beyond.”