Cove is a vegan, all natural and multipurpose soap. I had never come across a product like this before. No parabens, no sulfates, and yet it can be used as shampoo, soap, floor cleaners, and laundry detergent. Feels like it would be a great product for young families, minimalists, and environmentally aware consumers.
I love seeing natural products like this go direct to consumer, because the big box stores where most of us buy our cleaning agents are mostly stocked with soaps and detergents with harmful chemicals.
But as ecommerce enthusiasts we love these three aspects of the business most: their product pages, their subscription tooling, and their thoughtful email popup.
Product Pages
The thing we love most about Cove is the product page design. This template is gorgeous. They’re using a heavily customized version of the Modular theme’s Mayfair variant.
It shows a very large photo of the product, which can be made to fullscreen by clicking. It has informative and witty copywriting, which makes the reader comfortable with the brand. It shows other product scents or variants, also with images to make them enticing to click on and read about. It has subscriptions, which we will double-click on in the next section. And best of all there are recipes for cleaning products you can make at home with their product.
This shows me that Cove is super versatile. It can be cooked into a facial cleanser, lathering shaving soap, all-purpose cleaning spray, the page has so many ideas for their customers to create high quality, environmentally friendly, and less expensive cleaning and grooming products. It’s a great marketing tactic, showing customers the added value of their product.
Subscriptions
With all these applications for their product, Cove makes it super easy to buy their products on a subscription cycle. For consumable products, like food, cosmetics and cleaning, they will naturally run out, so it makes sense to encourage customers to think about their future needs and give a discount on day one.
I like that Cove has pre-selected the auto-refill feature. I would guess this automatically increases their customer lifetime value (LTV) so I’m glad it’s auto-selected. I love that that they suggest how much and how often they need their products. By clicking “Still not sure” the website will serve a popup with a couple questions.
After selecting how many people in your household, and for what you anticipate using the soap for, the website will suggest the buying frequency and quantity. You can see the screenshot below showing how much it’s suggesting so you know you’re getting the right amount.
Thoughtful Email Popup
I can’t tell you how many Shopify stores I’ve visited where the second I land on the website, I’m greeting with a sudden email collection popup. What I like about Cove is it not immediate. The app waits until you’ve engaged with the website for enough time and then shows the popup. This way you give the customer some time to look at the beautiful store you’ve spent so much time designing, and lets them ease into this digital destination you’ve built.
Additionally, I would also expect that the quality of the emails is higher when you ask customers after you give them enough time to figure out that you are what they were looking for.
If I were Cove I would experiment some more on this and perhaps only ask for the email once they’ve visited at least three pages of the website, or some other higher level form of engagement and see how much better those emails are compared when they show the popup to anyone whose been on the site for over 15 seconds.
You can visit the Cove website here: www.messwithcove.com
Cove uses our Shop Phone app for Shopify to help them recover abandoned checkouts, and welcome new and VIP customers: Shop Phone Shopify App