August 26th, 2025
Onboarding, fixed: Adam Bianco shows how four months, rewards, and testing turn churn into long-term customer retention.
Is your onboarding building loyal customers, or just leaking them out the back door? Adam Bianco has seen both at The Beard Club.
In this no-fluff, high-impact talk, customer marketing leader Adam Bianco shows how a D2C brand fixed a classic leaky bucket with smarter subscription onboarding. From trial and error to a full journey redesign, he breaks down what actually drives customer retention. The fix?
A four-month onboarding journey tied to a rewards program and real behavior. Clear milestones, useful content, natural touchpoints, and personalized offers turned short-term subscribers into long-term loyalists, increasing retention by 17 percent. Effective onboarding is not one welcome email. It is guidance through the hardest moments with reasons to stay.
TL;DR
Adam Bianco: Today, we're going to talk about onboarding. As marketers, we throw shit at the wall and see what sticks, and not everything's going to work. Often, a lot of things aren't going to work, but we hope that some things do go well. Out of all the things we tried, this is definitely one that went well. There was definitely some trial and error along the way, but some onboarding stuff and kind of the case study we'll share today went well. As mentioned, I am Adam Bianco, and I'm the Director of Customer Marketing at Givelify.
Alright, so the Beard Club. When I came here in 2020, I was actually working at the Beard Club. It started in 2014, was a D2C monthly subscription business, and sold surprise beard products. This is the TBD of the show so far—we're going to see if this video works. Okay, we're good.
Chris: "I'm Chris, founder of dollarbeardclub.com. What is the Dollar Beard Club? Well, you sure as hell won't be receiving any fucking razors from us to demolish your manhood. I eat shaving cream for breakfast instead. For only a dollar a month, you'll receive the most legendary beard oil known to mankind.
Finding the time to go out and buy your monthly beard supplies is just too tough. I get it. You have a beard, probably busy doing stuff like riding your motorcycle, swimming in a box full of women. But if you cherish your beard and you wanna keep it healthy, feeling smooth, and smelling like the beard of Zeus, then you're gonna need some oil in that hedge.
Every month, straight to your door, you'll receive a fine selection of beard oils, waxes, balms, shampoos, and everything else you'd ever need to keep your beard looking godly. Good job, boys. Just keep on growing your beard, and we'll take care of the rest. Be a man and sign up at dollarbeardclub.com."
Alright, so that was the Beard Club, or Dollar Beard Club. Does anyone know what that was riffing off of? Any guesses? Yeah, it’s kind of obvious. Dollar Shave Club may have had a cease and desist with Dollar Beard Club at some point. I will not talk about that, but that was the brand. Dollar Beard Club launched like a rocket. Eight million in the first eight months. But the brand was very, for lack of a better word, macho. When I joined, we were trying to change that. If anyone knows who Dan Bilzerian is, I actually didn’t go in. Having a monkey on your shoulder was like a normal thing around Dollar Beard Club.
The good thing is, because of this, we had a really huge Instagram following, especially for a small D2C company. The good thing is, because of this, we had a really huge Instagram following, especially for a small D2C company. We started changing our brand, got a new logo, rebranded to the Beard Club, and aimed for a more stylish, more sophisticated look. Whether you were focused on growth or grooming, we had products for you. The problem was that the Beard Club had a leaky bucket. We were pouring tons of money into paid ads, getting thousands of new customers, which was good, but subscribers were leaving just as quickly as they came. Sad. Romeo and Juliet Leo. It was terrible.
If you aren’t familiar with the leaky bucket, it’s when new customers come in but you can’t retain your current ones. On top of that, part of the subscription model was deep discounts. MSRP is $95, but we’d give it for $75, then with a special code for $56, just to hook you into the first subscription. This isn’t uncommon. Most brands have some sort of initial offer.
DoorDash with free delivery on the first order. Freemium companies like Dropbox give you two free gigabytes to get you hooked. Mint, RIP Mint, which is basically the definition of a leaky bucket. They had 20 million users, all the way down to 3.6 million when they shut down a few months ago. There is going to be some math in this presentation, so I apologize to the folks on the right side of the brain. It will be short, I promise. Look at churn. At the end of month one, churn was right around 65 percent, and it kept decreasing from there. If you are part of a subscription company, this may look familiar. Each month, your subscribers are getting lower and lower. It will start evening out farther down the line, but it is not great to start.
One of the companies very similar to the Beard Club is Fabletics. They are notorious for making sure you don’t realize you’re signing up for a subscription. They hide the fact that you’re going to be billed 60 dollars a month until the end of time unless you cancel. Two for 19 shorts sounds too good to be true, and it is. So how do you know if you have a leaky bucket? Peloton peaked during Covid, then declined a bit, though it stayed higher than I expected. Match Group, with Match and Tinder, saw users drop. HelloFresh meal subscription boxes peaked in 2022, then declined. They are desperate now, offering 16 free meals if you subscribe.
So what does this mean in dollars and cents? MSRP is 40 dollars to start, discounted 25 percent to 30 dollars. Margin is 50 percent, so originally 20 percent profit. With a discount, we net 10. Then factor in customer acquisition cost, and we are losing 40 dollars for every new subscriber. Not great economics. Our CFO freaked out, and we had weekly battles about tweaking things. So what do we do?
In month one, we were 40 dollars in the hole. In month two, if they re-up, we make 20, so the total is negative 20. In month three, we broke even. In month four, we were in the green. Our churn data reflected that. If we got people to month four, churn flattened out. About a third of our customers kept coming back. The solution was revamping the onboarding experience.
We had a good welcome email, but onboarding mostly stopped there. First tip: if you send an important email and it isn’t opened, resend it two days later with a different subject line. That email you crafted with care should get seen. Open rates hover around 50 percent, and a resend might get another 25 percent.
Our goals for onboarding were to create a unique experience for our main customers, especially growth and grooming customers. We wanted to deliver useful content so it comes back to trust. We wanted to deliver content with blogs and videos at certain points of their journey. We wanted to extend that onboarding experience for four months, and then we wanted people to easily upgrade or add new products.
So as we mentioned, we stretched this. Our whole goal is getting people to four months. So why not create an onboarding experience that lasts those four months? While we were working on this, we were also working on a rewards program at the same time. For the rewards program, we wanted to generate more referrals. We wanted to create natural touchpoints to engage with customers. That is half our battle. I am always a big proponent of do not send things unless you have a reason to send them, but more importantly, find reasons to send stuff. Create things that are valuable. For us, what are natural touchpoints? Birthdays, anniversaries, and anything else along those lines. That allows us to create natural touchpoints for customers. We wanted to gather more reviews, and most importantly, at the end of the day, we wanted to increase the lifetime value of our customer base.
So the aha moment was, we are working on these two things, let’s combine them.
Very few brands do this. For better or worse, Starbucks, probably the most notable rewards program out there, has that free coffee intro offer, and then they just do the dollar per spend for the most part, and some spontaneous deals along the way. Nike, no signup offer. They do have a birthday deal and special offers as well. Birchbox, for a subscription company, you earn coins for every dollar spent, but they are ruthless. Points expire after six months. My personal belief is not to be like that. Let people at least have them for a while. Six months seems a little aggressive.
For ours, we were going to be pretty straightforward, at least initially. You get a point for every dollar you spend, and once you get a hundred points, you get ten bucks off. That is the core component. But then we layered on a couple of things. We layered on three tiers of benefits based on the number of purchases, and we have our grid here. This is right online on the Beard Club’s website.
We incorporated things we were already doing. If you subscribe and save, you get 15 percent off or more. Free shipping for purchases over 30 bucks. This was everything we were doing; we just put it in as some extra benefits. You get a birthday bonus, you get an anniversary bonus, and then we added some extra things like exclusive shopping events. We tried to make it sound good. First access to the new product. That could be like a week in advance or a month in advance. VIP. Sometimes we sent things out an hour in advance just so we could keep with our adage. You try to be buttoned up, but you can only do so much. Most importantly, you got to the platinum level after four purchases, when some of the extra benefits kicked in. Everything we are trying to do again is trying to get people to make four purchases.
We had a few extra ways to earn points. You get a big extra boost of 100 points when you make four purchases. Then we incentivized referrals, reviewing products, etc. We were using Yotpo for this. So, if you are in the Shopify ecosystem, Yotpo helps make this easy. We wove the rewards throughout the onboarding experience. Month one: create an account, follow us on social. In month two, we asked you to leave a review if you were having a good experience. Month three, we kind of built that trust already, so we say “give us an NPS score”, and then we had that extra automation. If you gave us a good score, we would ask you to refer a friend. Throughout that time, we were layering in educational content, things that people would need along the way. Month one, if you have ever grown a beard, you know the worst part about it is getting started with that beard itch. Right at the beginning, we had, whether it was certain products or certain content, how do you get past that?
Once you get to month two, you have grown it out a little bit, and it is time to start trimming it. There is some content based on that, and some videos to help get you along the way. Month three, now you are Leonardo DiCaprio. You are trying to think about what version of Leo I want. Do I want to be Django Unchained Leo? Do I want to be Revenant Leo, just grow it out all crazy? It is really up to you. Month four: essential products to enhance your beard.
We kind of followed a similar cadence for each month. You had that transactional message. The beard tips, trying to weave in extra value for you. There is usually a reward incentive along the way, again, added value, and increased attachment. And then email four for the month, your upcoming shipment. Do you want to add any products along the way? How can you get them to upsell, add value? We had a general flow of this. Week one, you have a lot of communications. I can tell you our unsubscribe rates were good for all of this because we were trying to provide value to our customers. Month one, month two, you see the NPS and referral. You see the review. Beard tips along the way. Add to your next box at the bottom with a few days in advance of your subscription.
Once you have your flow down, you can start adding wrinkles to it. Our two main key segments were growth and grooming, and we created unique paths for each. A lot of that content, a lot of those tips, were tailored toward the type of customers we had.
Another quick tip. Quizzes and surveys. This is one of our competitors, Beardbrand. I stole this and have used this type of quiz in almost every place I have been since. They ask you questions about what kind of beard you want or what kind of beardsman you want to be. It is a really fun quiz that you get to engage with. Learn about your customers, whether you do this right on the front end, the first part of your funnel, or you do as part of your onboarding. This is key information you can pass into your CRM tool and then weave into your onboarding automation.
So we have our flow, and a couple of things we did along the way. Intro to rewards. We tested a few different layouts. What works, what gets people into rewards, gets people to check it out and start doing some things. We tested a few different layouts. Subject lines. I have tested emojis in subject lines. I am sure we all have. What I was fascinated by is that with the Beard Club, emojis worked great, especially that last call sales ending. You throw the siren emoji or the alarm clock emoji, and those worked great. Moving to the nonprofit space at Move For Hunger, we did emojis, we did a lot of emoji testing, and it did not work whatsoever. So it really depends on your industry, and everything is always test, test, test. See if it works. It is not going to be universal across the board. With reviews, we tested where to put this. We tried it out in month two, and it did not work as well as it had right after month one. We actually tested it right after the first purchase, and we got it really in that second purchase. That worked well for us. We started getting many more positive reviews.
I had a big battle with our CFO on adding to your next box. We were basically reminding people they had a subscription. After many disagreements, I said, Alright, let’s do a test. Let’s put half our audience into the bucket that gets these, another half that does not get it, and let’s see which person sticks here. And, to his surprise, and a little bit to me, to be honest, was that if we sent them an email and reminded them of their subscription, they actually retained longer. Which I am for because I am all for treating your customers well and they will keep coming back. Do what is right by the customer. It pays off long-term. There is an adage that says if they are happy subscribers, do not bug them too much, and there is a segment of this group that does not engage with our emails, but they are subscribing. We are just going to leave them alone. We look at the post onboarding experience, we definitely have that group, but we always sent the add to your next box because it allowed them to be stickier and allowed them to upsell and change out their products.
The last thing is that we produced all types of content: videos, blogs, and different subjects for the blogs. A lot of it failed. We continued to swap them out if they were not performing as strongly as others. We had a certain benchmark. If it was performing underneath that benchmark, we would swap it out for something else until we got the right mix.
The other thing I want to throw out is dynamic modules. These can be tricky to do, especially if you do not have a developer. We did. Common theme, getting to month four. We did a dynamic module of tracking your progress to month four, and you got to earn credit. You had the carrot along the way, so it was always visible. We had dynamic product modules to showcase products, what they were purchasing, and what would make sense to have them purchase next. We had the referral incentive, which had its unique referral link. We had the Beard Club rewards. Depending on if they had something to redeem, that was dynamic and showcased their current point total. This was a pain in the ass to implement. I will not lie to you. Our developer worked long and hard on this, and we had a lot of testing, and eventually it worked out, but it was a pain, especially with trying to get some custom fonts.
You can implement all kinds of dynamic modules. With Move For Hunger, we did not have a fancy developer, so we used many merge fields. We tried to showcase how much impact someone had that year, how much they donated, and how many meals they helped produce.
That was all done with merge fields. You can see all kinds of examples here. Sometimes it is as simple as this. This is just a simple merge field. Or you have something like Netflix, which probably uses very dynamic content that allows you to pick your next favorite movie or TV show. If you are not a developer or you use Nifty Images, this is great. It is a software tool. You can do countdown clocks. We did this a lot for sales that are expiring. You can do a lot of dynamic things without having to be a pro yourself.
How can we expedite our learning? We used multivariate testing. I only have a few minutes left, so I am going to speed through this a little bit. Essentially, we wanted to go beyond the A/B test. In this case, we layered two variables together, and you have four different variations. We wanted to test timing as well as content. The more variables you layer onto do this the scientific way, the more options you need to continue to have. You can do all at the same time, so you do not have to be exclusive to A/B tests if you are trying to expedite those learnings. For us at the Beard Club, we were lucky because we had a lot of customers flowing through, so we could do this type of test and have our answer essentially by the end of the month if we wanted to. Sometimes with Move For Hunger, we did not have as many people flowing through, so we had to do an A/B test and make that last four months before we actually got an answer that made sense.
The result was a 17 percent increase in retention in the first year, which contributed millions of dollars to the business. This was huge for our retention. We did not get the leak closed fully. There were still leaks, but we are just excited. Apparently, again, I have not been there for four years, and I looked at the website two weeks ago as I was putting this together. I am like, that looks very familiar. Alright, I did a little dance and then did a little jig in my chair. I am like, either they are lazy or it must be working. I like to think it is the latter. You never know.
So what can you do at your business? Again, nothing is universal. Without actual takeaways, here are some thoughts to get you started. How is your onboarding unique to your business model? For us, it was getting people to month four. How can you set your customers and your company up for success right from the beginning, when attention is highest? That welcome email, as we talked about, is probably your strongest, highest open rate email in your entire series. What are the economics and customer behavior for your business, and how might you tailor onboarding to fit that? How can you personalize the experience with segmentation and dynamic modules? For us, it was a lot of rewards and a lot of growth and grooming customers in our customer type. And what kind of A/B or multivariate testing can you do?
As I mentioned, I have been with Givelify for four months, and one of my OKRs for Q2 is to start revamping the onboarding experience. We are going to have V1 and V2, and this can be throughout the year. These are things that are going on in my brain, and I am thinking about our goal for Givelify. Our customers get sticky after three donations in the app. I am currently building an onboarding model for what that will look like. We have very different types of donors. We have regular nonprofit donors who may donate once for Giving Tuesday and may not donate again until that day.
Then we have folks who go to church every week, and they donate every time they set foot in that building. We have very different types of donors. Our onboarding experience cannot fully be timing-based. It is not that monthly subscription. We are going to start mixing in behavior-based messaging. We may have an onboarding experience that lasts a couple of weeks or a month or two, but if you donate a second time two weeks in, or if you donate a second time two months in, we will likely have a certain message that goes out to you right afterwards. Users who donate in the app are much stickier because they have downloaded the app. They are going to use it more than someone who just donates on the website. If someone purchases in the app, they are likely already a great customer for you, and they are going to continue to be sticky.
How do we incorporate dynamic modules? What dynamic modules make sense for us. For us it is getting people to three gifts, and we have this Champions of Good program that propels you to three gifts.
Thank you so much.
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