How to Launch Panera Bread-Like Subscriptions Through Your App | Per Diem Webinar

Hey everyone. Welcome to our weekly webinar. We're going to be talking about how to launch your Panera style subscription at your coffee shop, at your bakery or restaurant. I'm Tomer Malovinski, CEO and co founder of Per Diem and today is July 17th. So let's jump right into it. In terms of the agenda, we'll have just a little bit of an overview. We'll go through some case studies of some brands that you probably know, how you launch your own Panera like subscription with per diem and then how you can promote those subscriptions, enable free trials, which is a new feature. Any questions and answers and then, and then, yeah, we'll jump in. I'll just do a live demo of how it looks in the Per Diem app and we can go from there. So jumping in. I think by now most people have heard of Panera's unlimited sip club. From what I Remember, it's about 500,000 people that have registered and it makes up 25% of the total transactions in Panera's stores. And so just to give you some, you know, some context there and how big it is and they just launched it really in 2022. They had an earlier version that they launched in 2020, but it's, it's basically, you have to think about it as if, if Starbucks made points and the whole loyalty program from that perspective, really popular, then Panera did the same around coffee subscriptions. And the biggest benefits of this being like, obviously you're going to get more transactions. How do you get more transactions? Well, I have this unlimited coffee where you can see here you're getting like unlimited hot coffee, unlimited cold drinks, discounts or on, on food as well. And then here you can see I get three months free. And so from that perspective you can see how this is going to drive a lot more people into your store. And it's really, it can be in terms of offering a subscription, it can be 30% more like your visit, your regulars are going to visit you 30% more. Obviously they have a good deal. But part of it is this kind of like use it or lose it type of subscription where it's like you're paying. Hey, in Panera's case It's I think $15 a month you get the unlimited drinks and every couple of hours you can get a free drink but that means you're going to be in their store two or three times a day. So obviously you got to do the ROI there, make sure the math works for you. And we have A few examples for people that are using per diem and we could show you what they've set up. A lot of you are probably offering, you know, higher quality coffee than Panera might be offering. And obviously the cost there is higher but, but that's fine. You can adjust things as you see fit. But at the end of the day, this is a killer loyalty tool. And you can see subscribers of the Unlimited SIP Club spend 11 times more annually compared to non members. So just a really huge success. And yeah, jumping here locally in New York, Blank street, they've launched their own subscription program. So this is a growing brand. They probably have like 30 some stores but this again, this is their loyalty program of choice. So they're calling it Blank Street Regulars. And now you can see up to 50% of their of their revenue comes from their subscriptions. When we were building this into per diem, I became a Blank street regular because they have a few near my house. And what I can say from a personal anecdote, it was very addicting. I would wake up, I'd drink my cup of coffee, I'd go get my cup of coffee and then I plan out part of my meetings and the rest of my day based on when I'm going to get that free cup of coffee. So I can't guarantee that that's what everyone's behavior is. But all I could say is on me personally, it worked and it does really drive that loyalty. And so mission accomplished in that sense. Pret has a club Pret and same deal as Panera. It's, it's been a big success for them as well. Nearly 30% higher on average, the average transactions. And this again, you're given free coffee and then you give a discount on pastries or food or something like that. So what this is going to inevitably do for you is you're going to offer a subscription, you're going to, you're going to give the coffee at a discount, right? And then people, you're going to upsell people on food and you're going to drive more food sales. And that's what those extra visits, they'll translate. Now someone who doesn't get lunch from you typically now they're going to pick up a sandwich from you. So I think that's, that's part of the deal here. So it's great, especially for bakeries. A lot of bakeries have really good coffee, but it's not really what they push. But then you have amazing pastries. So then if you could push some sort of, you know, deal around coffee and get people into your store more. All right, great, I'm going to buy a loaf. I'm going to buy whatever it is. If I'm going to be in your store more, then obviously you can, you can put two and two together and see that I'm going to purchase more from you. A few other programs that have been trialed and, and you could do similar types of programs. So the seasonal Olive Garden nine week subscription and so this is something, I think the learning here is that you can do these types of subscriptions on a limited basis. Maybe you do a summer subscription, something like that. Or you know, think of your slow time a month, what's something that you can put out there for your regular customers to really help to drive that retention. So for Olive Garden it was the never ending possible promotion. And so same store sales went up 8% and you can see that as part of it. Same thing. We have a lot of health and smoothie places and a lot of them do these meal plans like which, which are a big upfront commitment from people. But like if you can make that where it's like, hey, pay this subscription and you get 10 smoothies a week and then just through the app you can order it whenever you want as opposed to like having to jump through all these hoops or getting like a big package from you or whatever it is, they can really do it whenever it's convenient for them. So that's another great option. Whether it's a smoothie a day, a 10 pack, a 20 pack, mixing it together with other products, you can all build that into your app and then obviously you can promote it as such. So then how do you launch your, your Panera Lake subscription with per diem. You can see here, here's a screenshot of, of how the subscriptions actually look, a few of the, of, of the screen caps. So we'll, we'll help you promote it. We'll let people know how much they're they've been saving. And then people will see, once they're on certain products, they'll see the type of discount that they get on that product, whether it's free, whether it's discounted and what have you. And then how do you get people to sign up? Well, once they have your app, once you're offering this, then a clear way to do that is by sending out marketing push notifications so people start downloading your app. There are other ways, there are banners and stuff like that as well that we'll show you. But push Notifications. This is a really. When you have a mobile app, this is one of the best features that you can have in a mobile app. So you can send people all kinds of marketing stuff. It doesn't necessarily have to be discounts or offers can be new menu items, new store openings. Hey, you're having an event Friday night, come stop on by. You can use push notifications for all those things and then obviously to promote subscriptions. It's a great way to do that. And so it's easy in per diem to send out push notifications, to schedule push notifications, to send push notifications to even specific groups that you've set up in your square marketing stack. All those things are achievable through per diem. And then once people download your app, whether it's through one channel or another, let's say you have some QR codes up, you're sending out an email to people you can embed through per diem, you can do these pop up banner ads and you can embed video into those banner ads. So if you have, let's say you do launch this program and you have a video out there, or you talk about it or whatever you, however you want to launch it, you can embed that in this pop up to give people kind of an explainer or you can just have an image with a strong, you know, CTA as you see here. Love cold brew, subscribe 1799 a week. Boom. So these banners. So in per diem there are two types of banners that you can set. We have sticky banners which are smaller and they're in the home screen. And then we have the pop up banners. So think of like Spotify style. We're giving you something, It's a one time deal. The thing we've added recently to the pop up banners is you can also schedule them weekly. So let's say you do do something, you know, whatever, it's not necessarily related to subscriptions, but you can have that banner pop up every Friday, every Monday. We talked before about having a theme day. So if you do every Tuesday, we have someone who does a Tika Tuesday, right? If every Tuesday you're doing a Tika Tuesday, you can do a scheduled pop up banner. So everyone that opens the app knows, hey, it's Tika Tuesday. So that's one way to market the subscriptions. These are the sticky banners that we talked about. So once you, once you add subscriptions in per diem in the dashboard, it's really easy to do. You can choose to promote those subscriptions and when you do, you'll choose a hero image and then it'll just be this sticky banner. You promote which plan you want. And then when people click through this, they'll see all your different plans and then they can pick, they can see what items and they can sort of choose. We'll show you how that works. But basically this is, this is another way. So this would kind of be here by default. Once you open, once you have a plan and you're choosing to promote it in the app, you'll have this default banner show up. Another way that we're promoting it in the app is items that are available in that subscription will automatically be be listed. Here you can see this macchiato. You get 100% off when you have a subscription. So, so that's a great cta, a great way to educate people. Same deal. If it was like a pastry and you have like 50% off or whatever it is, it would just say 50% off. So that's one way to merchandise your subscriptions. And then even people who are downloading your app and just using your app on a day to day basis to order their coffee and get their croissant, well eventually, you know, they're going to think twice and they're going to eventually get that subscription and then that should lead them to even more, order more coffee and order more croissants from you. So here you can see as part of the subscription, one way to get people. Obviously the incentives that you offer. The deal itself is going to be important. So here you can see as part of this deal, it's like an unlimited coffee. Get a couple cups a day and then get 50% off of a, of all muffins. So whenever you order your coffee through the app now you can order your muffins too. Again, a great way to upsell. I see the discount right here. It's added to the checkout card. And this is one more thing that you could promote. You know, once you have let's say push notifications and let's say you create a group for everybody that is a subscriber, then you can push a push notification to all your subscribers saying, hey, make sure we have new muffins out today. Make sure to dive in, you get 50% off. So those subtle reminders. And then again, we're going to be reminding people on the product pages. You can promote certain items on your homepage of your app as well that you want to push. You can upsell certain items in your shopping cart that you want to Push as well. So you can gear a lot of the experience around the subscriptions and free trials. So we just added this feature. You're already giving people a little bit of a deal, whether it's unlimited coffee, discounts on pastries, what have you. But now we've added, hey, you know, we know it's a commitment to do a subscription. So now you get, for, you can select as the merchant how many payment sessions essentially you want to give them. So you want to give them one week. So whatever, whatever that criteria is. If, if, if you set up a subscription to charge people once a week or once a month or once every other week, you can basically, that's like a trial period and you can select how many of those trial periods you want to give. So if you can give people like two weeks, you can give people one week, whatever it is. And then as they're signing up, they'll just get that, whatever the cost of the subscription, they'll actually get it as store credit and then they can purchase whatever they want with that store credit. So it's additional pastries or stuff like that. So I have a $20, I have a $20 subscription for the free trial. I'm going to add $20 onto the store credit for that specific merchant and then they can spend that on the subscription. And they're already signed up for the subscription. So that's kind of how it works there. And then after that they just get charged again. However frequently you've set up the cadence, whether it's, most of them are going to be charging once a week is what I see. Or once a month, you know, once a month would be a higher cost. And so generally, one thing to note on this as well, when people cancel a subscription, it's going to. The cancellation takes place at the end of the billing period. So if I signed up today and I get charged every week, I'm going to cancel. And let's say the next billing period starts next week. Well, the subscription is going to be good until the next billing period. So that's how it works in terms of the billing and what's, what's, what's active and what's not. So that's in a nutshell, the subscription experience. What we'll do right now is we'll dive into the app. I'll show you how people can discover your subscription and then how they can order and how all that works within the app itself. So let me. And if there are any questions, feel free to add them in the chat or to undo Your mic and you can ask away. One second. Let's try and share it again. Are you able to see my phone? Yes. Awesome. So we'll check out Prevail Coffee here. They're one of our. They're based. They have stores in Atlanta, in Birmingham. And you can see they have their subscription program here. You can see they choose. You can choose the image you want to put on it as well. And then I can see all the items here. And then I can just tap view items. The plan is laid out. Hey, I get a free drink every hour max of three drinks daily. And then here you can see, here's all the. All the. So a lot of the espresso drinks are the ones that I get 50% off. And so we have free drinks which are more my typical like my drip, my Americano and stuff like that. And then we have my 50 off drinks that are included here. So that's a great example of what you get. And there. And what you can see is this is 49.99amonth. And then they have the annual plan which they're charging 500. So again, similar deal. And then boom. And then you can see. So I'm just going to be signing up here and here you can see how they're promoting it there. So I'll know, hey, get 50% off when you buy a subscription plan. Boom. This will take me right in. So now we'll go to our demo app. This is Per Diem's demo app. And then so you can see the banner here. So I'll go in, I can see the different plans. I'll do a daily plan. Just because I can also see if it. If you only want to offer it at certain locations, it's available at all locations. Here I can see the items, one item every hour. That's probably not the best plan, but you get the idea. And here I have different muffins and teas where I get. And so here we have all these different plans here that we've just set up. So I'll just go ahead, I'll hit subscribe and save. Then it's going to take me to payment. I'm going to add my credit card. And then cool. Now I'm in the coffee club. You can see that's. That's enabled right there. I have an active subscription. Amazing. And so now as I'm going through, I get 100% off this drink. And if I go down and I'm getting 25% off muffins. And so now we're we're thinking about it and then you can see it's labeled right there. Obviously we're trying to upsell people additional items. Here's my discount, $8 and $75. I saved 9.75 today. I'm gonna go out and check out and then that order is going to go right through. So it'll charge. I had store credit available, so it's going to charge my card on file. And then you can see, boom, that order goes through and I'm going to get my push notification and all that good stuff. I would just come in to the barista and say, hey, I'm here to pick up my order. And then we're going to also tabulate for people here how much you've saved since you've joined the program. So obviously that's huge. If I wanted to cancel, I could cancel right there. And then again, if I want to see what I get, I can see what I get right through. Right through there as well. So the interesting thing now let's go and do this again. So let's. Try this again. Oh, I guess we get more than one. What I wanted to show. Let's try this. I guess on this plan we don't have a limitation, but on some plans it would say there, hey, you can get this discount in about an hour. For this plan specifically, we didn't, we didn't set up any limitations. So that's why it's not, that's not, that's why it's not there. But otherwise it would say right there, hey, you, you're able to order this again in about an hour, but again, that's not there. So I'm just getting the entire discount here. So the same deal. But you understand how that, how that would work. So yeah, it's really easy. And then obviously you could send people push notifications. So whatever it is, you'll be able to send them, you know, refer, you can see all these different types of push notifications that are, people are sending through the app. And then as I mentioned, you'll be able to, to mention whether it's just menu items or whatever it is, you don't necessarily have to be pushing the subscription, but obviously you can just to make it really easy. And then once people are in your app, obviously it just makes it a lot easier for them to order from you. So that's it. I'll quickly also just show then how to set up subscriptions in the merchant dashboard. So here, this is the dashboard that we're logged into. We have this subscription plan section. And we can also see in the reporting itself we are going to mention the subscriptions, how many, how much discounts you've given, how much revenue, how many orders and you can export all this information as well. But in order to set up a subscription plan here you can see all my active subscriptions. This is obviously a test account. This is the subscription plan that I'm promoting. But let's say we're creating a new one. So we'll just go, you know, let's go Alla Panera Unlimited Sip club. Right. And so I think it was 1499. A week or a month? I think it was a week. And then we're going to give up, we're going to give a free trial for up to one billing cycle. So that's the new feature that we just added. So now you can promote this. Hey, you sign up and basically a no brainer sign up for the first week you're going to get a bunch of drinks and then, and then you're hooked. The default here you can get a drink every two hours. So we're getting one drink every two hours. That's what I mentioned before that we had set this up to a higher threshold. But if it's just set up and then you can say hey, and no more than three per day because obviously you got to watch your costs. You can set up a weekly or you don't set up a weekly. If you set up, I would, I would set up one or the other, but maybe not both. And then you got to decide do you want to enable this on modifiers as well? So yes, you get free oat milk every time you order from us. That's the deal. You don't have to pay the extra 75 cents. Then we're going to go in, we're going to assign the item. So let's assign this to all my espresso drinks here. Cool. And that's done. So now all my espresso drinks have this and now the discounted items. So same deal. You know what, on discounted we'll give you up to 10. I'm good with whatever. And we're not going to limit the quantity because this I'm just giving a discount. So I'll just go into my breads and my muffins or we'll go to my muffins and then we're going to say hey, let's give everybody 25 off. So then we can see. We've added that. Done. So now we can see all these items. You're going to get 25% off. So anybody that signs up as well, as I mentioned before on the unlimited sip club, we'll be able to choose any photo that we want. So you can obviously upload different photos there. And then, yeah, these are the locations that'll be available. We'll hit save and this will be my new plan. And again, if I wanted to promote this plan, then what I would do, I would simply click that one on and then that would be the promoted plan in the app. We can see it's a weekly frequency, 1499, yada yada yada. So that's it. Thanks for joining our weekly webinar. But our session on subscriptions, it's really as simple as signing up with Per Diem. You can download this app, it's the Square mobile app in the App Store and you can test it out. You can sign up using your own credit card. We won't actually charge you. I know it's a little worrying for some people, but it's just like all test data. So you could do that or you could just sign up for an account. All you do is go to tripredium.com and so you just go to our website and you just hit the sign up button and then you're basically connecting your square account. This, we're going right into this account. But you just hit that button, you connect your square account and then accounts are 99amonth and then we have a deal now where subscriptions are baked in for the first three months so there's no upcharge on them as well. So yeah, hit us up triper diem.com I'm Tomer and thanks again for joining us today. Have a good one, everybody.