The TL;DR:

• Let’s Chat D2C: My Analysis of Recharge’s 2024 Subscription Commerce Report! Breaking down the 2023 numbers from over 15,000 merchants, complete with my industry and merchant-size-specific takeaways.

• What’s New This Week: Bard becomes Gemini, plus a new mobile app.

• The D2Z Podcast: In this week’s episode, I sat down with Dean Ginsberg, Founder of Winback, a service that reactivates your dormant emails.

• App Highlight: Siena AI - Empathetic AI for CX.

• Upcoming Events: I’m super excited for EEE Miami on February 22nd in my backyard in Miami! Last year was my first year at the conference, and it was by far the most insightful and tactical event I attended all year. Take 20% off your EEE ticket with the code BRANDON20. And if you’re a brand doing more than $5M in revenue per year, email me!

Let’s Chat D2C - My Analysis of Recharge’s 2024 Subscription Commerce Report!

Recharge just published its annual subscription commerce report, pulling out some critical insights from the data of over 15,000 merchants. All metrics reflect the full calendar year of 2023 and exclude any merchants who began subscriptions that year, as well as merchants with under 1000 subscribers.

Five key metrics tell the story of a subscription-first business:

• Average order value (AOV): Gross merchandise value / total orders

• Lifetime value (LTV): Total revenue in a given period / number of customers in the same period

• Monthly recurring revenue (MRR): Median GMV merchants generated from subscriptions in 2023/12

• Customer churn: Median percentage of customers lost by a merchant each month

• Customer retention: % of customers who maintained a subscription 12 months after signup / total active customers during the month of signup

The numbers are broken down by industry and by subscriber count.

Industry

• Beauty & Personal Care

• Food & Beverages

• Health & Wellness

• Home & Pets

• Other

By Subscriber Count

• 0-999 subscribers

• 1,000-9,999 subscribers

• 10,000-49,999 subscribers

• 50,000+ subscribers

Below, I highlight my biggest takeaways from the report, how you should think about them for your business, and what they mean from a larger macro perspective for the ecosystem.

What’s New This Week - Google’s Gemini

Bard is now known as Gemini, and with this announcement comes two new experiences — Gemini Advanced and a mobile app.

Gemini Advanced

You can already chat with Gemini with the Pro 1.0 model in over 40 languages and more than 230 countries and territories, but Advanced gives you access to Ultra 1.0, Google’s largest and most capable AI model.

Gemini Advanced is more capable of highly complex tasks like coding, logical reasoning, following nuanced instructions, and collaborating on creative projects.

Gemini Advanced is available as part of the brand-new Google One AI Premium Plan but is currently only available to personal Google accounts and can not be added to a Google Business plan.

Soon, you’ll be able to use Gemini in Gmail, Docs, Slides, Sheets, and more Google products. New features like multimodal capabilities, advanced coding features, and deeper data analysis are also planned for the future.

Mobile App

Gemini and Gemini Advanced now have a new app on Android and in the Google app on iOS that can be accessed through text, voice, or images.

This Week’s The D2Z Podcast

#93 – How to Win Back Dormant Email Subscribers

🎧 Listen Now 🎧

In this week’s episode, I sat down with Dean Ginsberg, Founder of Winback, a service that reactivates your dormant emails. Specifically, we explored the following:

💰 Dean unveils Winback's innovative strategies for driving incremental revenue while mitigating risks through targeted approaches and meticulous deliverability monitoring

📲 Gain a deeper understanding of the ethical considerations and deliverability challenges associated with reactivating dormant email subscribers.

😎 Distinctions between client-side and server-side tracking

🚀 Shedding light on the significance of predictive pop-ups in email marketing strategies

App Highlight - Siena AI

What is it: Empathetic AI for CXX

Differentiator: There's a lot of noise in the AI space for customer service, but only one platform stands out. Siena is an empathetic AI Agent that’s almost human, designed for commerce. Siena takes a seat in your help desk and helps CX teams automate conversations (on brand) across all channels and languages.

Price: $1,000/month, no implementation fee, usage-based.

How we use it: Automate and engage with customers, order management, subscription management, product questions, personalized recommendations, FAQs, returns, image recognition, social media comments, DMs, ads, text messaging, and more.

Upcoming Events

I’m super excited for EEE Miami on February 22nd in my backyard in Miami! Last year was my first year at the conference, and it was by far the most insightful and tactical event I attended all year.

Take 20% off your EEE ticket with the code BRANDON20. And if you’re a brand doing more than $5M in revenue per year, email me!

I’ll also be heading out to:

• Vinexpo: Feb 12 - Feb 14 in Paris

• ShopTalk: Mar 17 - Mar 20 in Vegas

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