Designing loyalty that delivers
Background
At Recharge, we’re always exploring ways to help merchants succeed, especially when it comes to keeping their most valuable customers: subscribers.
Churn is a constant challenge, so we asked: How might we give merchants the tools to retain subscribers till their next order?
Opportunity and goal
Recharge lacked a native solution to help merchants reward subscribers and convert one-time buyers—leading to churn and missed LTV growth. To address this, we set out to launch Recharge Loyalty: a customizable tool designed to support subscriber retention and drive new conversions.
Our goal: Reach 12% merchant adoption post-launch.
Challenges with existing tools
Insights discovered from 50+ merchant interactions via events, check-ins, and sales calls
Existing tools didn’t offer enough customization:
Inability to tailor experiences for different customer needs.
Merchants had limited flexibility in configuring reward incentives.
Lack of emphasis on acquiring new, and retaining current subscribers:
No targeted incentives to convert one-time buyers into subscribers.
Few offerings to engage or retain active subscribers.
My approach
Grounded in merchant feedback and business goals:
I designed a highly customizable experience that enables merchants to reward existing subscribers and convert one-time buyers, supporting retention and increasing LTV.
My focus was on reducing friction, surfacing clear value, and making Loyalty easy to adopt within existing merchant workflows.
What I delivered
Driving engagement through instant rewards
I designed a new credit account page that gives merchants a clear financial overview of issued credits. Each credit assignment is logged with key details, such as type (Manual, Referral, Reward, or Gift), expiration date, and remaining balance.
To boost engagement and prevent credit hoarding, I designed an interaction that allows customers to automatically applies credits to their next order, making the reward feel instant and valuable, rather than allowing them to pile up and lose impact over time.
Build experience that increase loyalty
By working closely with merchants, I designed customizable experience that merchants can use to create experiences that highlight the benefits of staying subscribed, like upcoming rewards. This increased the likelihood of subscribers staying through to their next order.
These flows are triggered by milestone-based notifications, automatically engaging subscribers when they're close to earning a reward.
Reduce churn with unused rewards
I addressed the challenge of reducing customer subscription cancellations by leveraging unused rewards. To tackle this, I crafted an experience that encourages customers to redeem rewards when considering cancellation. This approach not only increased retention but also turned potential churn into renewed engagement.
In one use case, this feature prevented over 150+ customers from churning by incentivizing them to apply credits and retain their subscriptions instead of canceling.
A complete rewards experience
One-size-fits-all rewards don’t always hit the mark. To fix this, I designed a flexible, subscriber-first system that lets merchants pick rewards that truly matter, whether it’s free gifts, credits, or discounts.
I designed every loyalty-flow, that allow merchants to create create tiered, milestone-based, and standard credit reward-on-purchase experiences, among others, supporting nearly any loyalty strategy.
Over 1+ million customers rewarded!
Where we’re at currently
Recharge’s Loyalty is available through Retain, an add-on for merchants on Standard and Pro tiers.
Our current adoption rate is sits at 35%, and 47.55% of subscribers stay after their third subscription order, a new high!
The typical retention rate in e-commerce is around 31% [Source: Shopify's annual commerce reports, Gorgias report].
Our ongoing goal: Increase adoption to 50%.
Let's collaborate
Got something cooking? Whether it’s just a sketch or fully scoped, I’m happy to help.
Shoot me a note: zaidalirasool@gmail.com
Zaidali Rasool , Rhizhome (C) 2025