Episode 13: Building Subscriber Relationships with Austin Romansky, Managing Partner at Crema.co

In this episode of the Subscriptions: Scaled podcast, Nick Fredrick, President of Rebar Technology Solutions, is joined by Austin Romansky, Managing Partner at crema.co. Austin shares insight into how crema.co markets to potential subscribers, how they engage subscribers, and how they keep churn rates low.

What is Crema.co?

Crema.co is a coffee subscription business that focuses on specialty coffee roasted in the US. They now manage a supply chain that consists of 50 different partner roasters all over the country.

Initially, crema.co was catered towards ‘coffee purists’ looking for single origin coffees produced in the US. However, they have since morphed their focus to include a more broader range of coffee drinkers looking to move into higher quality coffees and hold tight to their original goal of providing people with the best quality coffee in the world.

Marketing to Potential Subscribers

Austin shares that crema.co focuses on quality over quantity of subscribers. They target a more engaged subscriber who will engage with the community, rate the coffees they receive on the site, and so on. Because of this, crema.co went off of all social media platforms last year and has not used it as a marketing channel since. Austin explains that they found it offered too broad and vague of an audience, rather than the niche group of engaged coffee lovers that they were looking to target. He equates the difference between mass social media marketing and individualized marketing with the difference between throwing a house party and inviting one friend over, with the one-on-one situation lending itself to deeper and more meaningful conversations.

In order to identify their target market, crema.co dedicates a significant amount of time talking to existing subscribers and understanding the types of people that really connect with the product. This style of internal marketing both strengthens existing subscriber relationships and also helps increase word of mouth from existing subscribers.

Incentivizing Existing Subscribers

After realizing that they could leverage word of mouth from existing subscribers, crema.co began building out an incentive plan. They started out by offering traditional incentives such as giveaways, but found little success there. Austin shares that they then had to take a step back and optimize their incentives to appeal to their specific target market, rather than to the average consumer. 

Austin and the crema.co team identified that the people buying their coffee were largely focused on sustainability, treating coffee producers fairly and properly, and being giving. They started crafting their incentives around this finding and discovered that when they donated their product or a portion of proceeds to charity, their subscribers would organically share posts about the company at a much higher rate.

Retaining Subscribers

One of the main strategies that Austin credits for keeping churn low is an authentic and genuine regular interaction with subscribers. 

Austin shares that crema.co puts a great deal of energy on re-engaging subscribers by sending out a weekly newsletter filled with valuable information about coffee and speaking with them one-on-one. In addition, he explains that the company prioritizes providing subscribers with full control over their subscriptions by allowing them to easily pause or cancel their subscription, choose the exact items they receive in their subscription, opt out of newsletters with a big text that says, “don’t you hate it when companies try to hide the unsubscribe button?”, and so on.

This all works together to create a situation where crema.co subscribers genuinely want to continue using the product and purchasing from the company, and leads too decreased churn rates.

To hear more from Austin on building subscriber relationships, tune into this episode of the Subscriptions: Scaled podcast.

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