The letterbox subscription service making a difference

Mobile Marketing Magazine talks to Sue Azari, Head of Growth Marketing at Yoppie, a personalised menstrual care solutions service. 

Subscription commerce has moved on from a past focus on magazines and newspapers, to embrace everything from recipe food kits to self-care. According to Finder, the subscription box market is estimated to grow by 77 per cent to be worth over £1bn by 2022. 

Letterbox subscription services have proved particularly popular in recent years due to their convenience and flexibility, offering consumers regular deliveries of day-to-day items such as razors, make-up, and even fresh pasta. 

For Sue Azari, Head of Growth Marketing at Yoppie, its essential that brands think of their environmental impact. “Yoppie was one of the first in the market to pioneer personalised period care, but also period care that is sustainable, eco-friendly, doesnt contain chemicals and is all 100 per cent organic cotton. Youre getting products through the letterbox that are good for your body and dont have a negative impact on the environment.”

With several competitors on the market, Yoppie aims to go one step further by addressing the lack of education resources around menstrual health with digital content on its website. Born out of the desire to not only educate, but to “bust stigmas”, Yoppies online Full Stop Blog has a wealth of articles ranging from Navigating Birth Control When Your Trans or Non-Binary to The Top 10 Questions Women Wish They Could Ask A Gynaecologist. 

“We have a scientific board who work with us on all of our educational content, which is grouped into various themes” says Azari. “When you log in, you can personalise the content that you want to see within your dashboard, so its a customised feed. Within that, you have a dashboard to manage all your deliveries, so you can very easily swap things out and customise it based on your own cycle. Maybe you go on holiday and dont need an order – the idea is that you make it work around your own life”. 

With an age demographic of around 24-45, its no surprise that Yoppie has tapped into the growing world of social commerce. In fact, a huge 95 per cent of its sales come from smartphones. 

“Weve just launched on TikTok with some amazing viral content, and weve kicked off on Twitter with a mixture of paid and organic posts. Facebook is a big one for us – weve got a closed VIP group on there which is brilliant as not everyone wants to talk publicly on social media about their menstrual cycle.” 

She continues: “Our organic content strategy is a mix of anything that drives brand engagement – some of it is educational and some of its amusing memes. The paid side is really thinking about brand awareness, consideration and conversion. We have a mixture of brand awareness campaigns, where were top of the funnel as there are a lot of competitors in the market. For example, we focus on raising awareness of the toxic chemicals that are in mainstream period care products and how Yoppie is changing the industry in that way. Then well also look at retargeting users with pixel-based retargeting on paid social, with either some sort of discount or more product led messaging.” 

Subscription services boomed over lockdown as people were unable to go to the shops. Since the second lockdown, Yoppies subscriber acquisition growth rate is over 850 per cent. But according to Azari, since restrictions lifted Yoppie has seen less engagement from their paid social campaigns. “We think thats linked to the fact that more people, particularly with the younger demographic, are just going out and enjoying themselves, not sitting in on their phones.”

Azari admits that there are “many great options out there” in terms of apps and websites catering to fertility, periods and menopause. “At the moment theyre all very separate” says Azari. “But within a womans life you go through all these different stages. You might have PCOS or PMDD and the idea is that weve got this one website that helps you manage all those things together and helps you get to know your body better. Weve also then got the physical products that we can recommend off the back of it.”  

A subscription service is a pricier way of managing monthly periods, as opposed to simply purchasing products from a shop. Yoppies subscription boxes not only offer period products personalised to the consumers unique flow but offer three different supplements to help tackle the symptoms of PMS which can be added to the order. Are customers paying a premium for the quality of Yoppies products, the education they provide or simply the convenience? 

“Convenience is a big factor” says Azari “Theres that additional cost but theres also the change in psychology of not doing that last minute dash to the shops or having to ask your friend for a tampon. We stock up on so many things but as women its often the last thing we think about. But we also want to get to a place where its more about addressing symptoms and actually getting people know their body better, so they can recognize when things are wrong. We can then point people in the right direction of what they might need to address that.”