- Taco Bell just launched a taco-a-day subscription program called the Taco Lover’s Pass for about $10 a month
- The subscription entitles customers to one taco a day for 30 days straight on the chain’s app
- This is how you keep customers coming back!
For retailers who want to generate repeat business, subscriptions are the not-so-secret weapon. The incredibly powerful Amazon has thought the world of the power of subscribers with its otherworldly successful Amazon Prime. And people are taking notes (you shoud, too)
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Being a Prime member means a world of perks. Among other things, Amazon offers discounted prices for consumable items for customers who “subscribe and save.” Those often include food products, and those in the food industry have started to introduce the subscription box to generate their own repeat sales.
As we saw in Free coffee? Sign me up!, Panera bread won over a lot of customers to its loyalty program by luring them in with unlimited coffee service for $8.99 a month. Now Taco Bell is doing a similar thing to drive up membership in the Taco Bell Rewards Program with its eponymous product.
It’s rolling out a monthly “pass” that customers buy via the app. That then unlocks a “secret category” on the app menu, where customers can pick their taco flavor and pick it up.
Zipporah Allen, Chief Digital Officer at Taco Bell explained why they decided to offer their most popular item as a subscription: “It’s a fun way to continue offering unique ways to reward our most loyal fans through our digital access points.”
It certainly achieved that aim when it was tested out in September 2021 in Tucson, Arizona. The company reports that among the participants in the testing phase, “20 percent were new to the Taco Bell Rewards Program, and an additional 20 percent renewed for a second time with the fan-favorite Doritos® Locos Tacos Supreme being the most redeemed taco.”
The results show that Taco Bell not only gained more loyal members but greater tracking of purchases to arrive at a better understanding of what is the most popular taco choice in a particular location. That’s a great ROI for the marketing push from a subscription that appeals to customers’ desire for both taste and value.
And, to close that value-loop, collecting all these new data sets from a reward program and using them to segment audiences and personalize communications will only lift that ROI even further.