The main goal of any subscription business is to get as many people paying for a monthly plan for years on end. Bonus points if those people get hooked in young — earn the trust of Gen Z early, and you could lock in revenue for decades to come.
But loyalty isn’t guaranteed.
According to The Motley Fool, nearly 50% of Gen Z and Millennials feel “oversubscribed,” and Deloitte found that over 50% of consumers in this group have cancelled at least one paid streaming service in the last six months.
Yet there’s a unique way to capture prospects’ attention and make each purchase feel like a deal that most subscription brands are missing out on: card-linked offers.
Keep reading to learn how leading marketers at retail, health and wellness, streaming, and wireless subscription businesses are skyrocketing their growth and maximizing LTV with exclusive cash back, personalized discounts, and time-sensitive rewards — with input from our account executive and account management teams.
5 benefits of CLO unique to subscription brands
CLO has benefits for virtually any kind of business. But it works especially well for subscription brands. That’s because CLO campaigns are:
1. Highly flexible
On the surface, card-linked offers seem simple, but there are other nuances that can drive specific results or consumer behavior. For example, you may choose a percentage or flat cashback amount. You may make an offer redeemable one time or many times. You could set minimum and maximum transaction amounts to target specific purchase values.
For physical subscriptions — like vitamins or meal kits — it takes a few weeks to build a routine. Offering monthly cash back rewards can help build that behavior until it becomes sticky. You can even increase the amount of cash back they get the longer they stay on their current plan.
You could even A/B test two different campaigns at the same time or optimize for higher value purchases by setting specific start and end dates.
Our latest subscription consumer data shows that Gen Z and Millennial consumers spend more in Q1 than in Q4 on sporting goods, beauty, fashion & apparel, grocery, and home improvement. So pairing a cash back offer with a “new year, new me” campaign at the start of the year, for example, could drive more sign-ups through the spring.
Rewards platforms like Kard make it easy to make campaign adjustments on the fly to maximize a brand’s ROAS.
2. Easy to segment
With a rewards platform like Kard, you can leverage past purchase behavior to target very specific segments of your ideal customer base.
For example, you might:
- Offer a set dollar amount to get someone to make the switch or sign up.
- Offer monthly cashback so customers don’t cancel. This could be a flat amount or increase over time the longer they stay.
- Encourage users to sign up for a higher-tier or premium plan with a bigger reward.
- Target customers who haven't purchased from the merchant in the last 3 months and give greater incentives to customers who haven't purchased in 12+ months.
Taylor McClendon, Senior Account Manager at Kard, points out:
“Because transaction data is first-party, subscription brands using CLO know for sure they’re rewarding new subscribers — not wasting their budget on already loyal customers or cancelers. It also allows them to exclude folks who are purchasing from another brand under their company’s umbrella, avoiding cannibalization.”
3. Relevant across the funnel
While gaining tons and tons of new customers is almost always a subscription brand’s goal, it’s not their only opportunity to give their overall revenue a boost.
“Subscription brands should also care about re-engaging past customers,” Taylor explains.
“If designed right, a card-linked discount can not only pull them back in but nudge them toward a higher tier plan.”
One of the brands under Taylor’s purview, a well-known cloud storage company, used Kard rewards to incentivize active customers who’d been paying for the lowest tier plan for several months to move to a more expensive annual subscription.
An enterprise streaming service that Mark Benoit, Merchant Sales Director at Kard, brought in continued with Kard post-POC because the big boost they saw in AOV by pushing consumers toward a bundled plan was too good to pass up.
4. Quantifiable
Unlike some other marketing strategies, card-linked offers have a directly measurable cost per action (CPA). You know exactly when someone transacted and what reward incentivized them to act, critically important information for subscription companies that have dedicated a large portion of their ad budget to acquiring new customers.
Mark shares, “I start my sales calls with the fact that Kard has a guaranteed CPA and we tend to meet or beat aggressive CPA goals. For other types of businesses, this consistency may not matter as much, but it definitely does for subscription.”
The returns are palpable.
In a recent Kard campaign, a leading wireless carrier hit $1.3M in total sales while meeting aggressive CPA goals.
Another Kard campaign for a cloud-based storage provider delivered over $100,000 in subscription revenue at $4.7:1 return on ad spend. And a national meal kit delivery service saw a whopping 81% increase in revenue in just two quarters with Kard CLO.
5. Work on banking platforms Gen Z and Millennials already use
In analyzing over $3B in transactions last year, we saw that alternative payment methods gained significant market share, with the financial services category growing from 9% in March 2024 to 12% in December 2024 (+33% growth), suggesting young consumers prefer a seamless and frictionless buying experience.
This lines up with the results of a recent Accenture survey of 16,000 customers: over half have adopted digital payment methods like digital wallets. PYMNTS found that 50% of Gen Z and Millennial consumers used a Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) platform in the past 12 months.
Our performance-based rewards platform already has a network of banking apps, rewards platforms, and fintech that young consumers use, automatically expanding the audience your brand serves.
Even if your customers aren’t using the latest and greatest fintech, you’re still going to get in front of them — via their banking or credit card app. Experian found that 86% of Gen Z consumers who have a credit score have at least one credit card. And EY found that the use of debit cards is rising among younger populations, too.
The more of those issuers in your cash back offer platform’s network, the more exposure your subscription brand will get.
With the right discount, reeling in new, high-LTV customers is a breeze. And Kard has the back-end analytics and experienced account management team to help you design offers they can’t refuse.
Want to get your next campaign moving?
Get in touch with our team to learn more about how Kard can give your subscription brand a leg up.
