NEW DATA: Promotions Boost Subscription Conversions 25 Pct

The subscription commerce business is growing in the United States, and it is all thanks to one consumer segment: the “subscription curious.”

Subscription curious consumers have emerged during the 16 months since March 2020. The roughly 167 million U.S. consumers designated as such are signed up with least one type of subscription service, and many of them signed up within the past year to avoid shopping in physical stores. Many have since grown to enjoy the subscription commerce experience so much that they are now constantly on the lookout for more. The average subscription curious consumer now has 3.4 subscriptions at any given time, up from just 2.5 in February. This trend has occurred even as subscription sign-ups among other consumer segments has come to a halt.

Capturing subscription curious consumers’ attention is thus more critical than ever to succeeding in the subscription commerce industry, and the June 2021 edition of the Subscription Commerce Conversion Index, a PYMNTS and sticky.io collaboration, details just how subscription service providers can go about doing so. We surveyed a census-balanced panel of 2,025 U.S. consumers to learn about how and why they use subscription services to determine which specific subscription features they find most important and which will convert them from curious browsers into loyal subscribers.

PYMNTS research identified three key strategies that businesses can employ to win over more subscription curious consumers, with one of the most important being cross-promotion. It is common for subscription service providers to send out special offers and other promotions to subscribers in an effort to drive new sales. Subscription curious
consumers are the most likely to purchase the items featured in these promotions when they are sent from third parties rather than their current providers, even if their products or services nevertheless complement those they receive from their current providers.

One example would be for a chocolate subscription service to send a cross-promotional email to a consumer with a coffee subscription, offering a discount on a monthly gift box that included both coffee and chocolate products. Half of the consumers receiving this type of promotion wind up purchasing the products they feature either most of the time or every time they receive these promotions. It therefore falls on subscription service providers to ensure that they are doing the most they can to tap this cross-promotional potential.

This is only one of the three key strategies that subscription service providers must know about if they hope to optimize conversion among the subscription curious. The new Subscription Commerce Conversion Index explores the other two strategies and other key trends that providers must understand to drive conversion.

To learn more about the state of subscription commerce in the U.S., download the report.

Upwork: Demand for AI Talent Drove Record Revenue in 2024

Work marketplace Upwork earned record revenue in 2024 and attributed its gains in part to artificial intelligence (AI).

In an earnings release and other materials issued Wednesday (Feb. 12), the company highlighted AI innovations it added to its marketplace platform and AI talent the platform connects with its clients.

“We’ve rapidly unlocked demand for AI-related work on our platform,” Upwork President and CEO Hayden Brown said in prepared remarks for the company’s quarterly earnings call.

Upwork reported full-year revenue of $769.3 million, which marked a 12% year-over-year gain and an all-time high, according to the earnings release.

The company achieved this gain during a year in which the broader staffing industry saw a 9% decline in revenue, Brown said in her prepared remarks.

During the year, the gross services volume (GSV) from AI-related work grew 60% and the number of clients engaging in AI-related projects grew 42%.

In addition, in 2024, the hourly earnings of freelancers engaged in AI-related work were 44% higher than those of other freelancers, per the release.

AI has been the fastest growing major category on the Upwork platform for several quarters, with clients seeking talent in prompt engineering, AI integration, generative AI modeling, and data labeling and annotation, according to an investor presentation released Wednesday.

During the Q&A portion of the earnings call, Brown said Upwork has grown and “shape-shifted” to meet the emerging demand for AI talent just as it did in the past, when there was newly created demand for social media managers and mobile developers.

“We are also leveraging AI on our platform to underpin the evolution of predictive and delightful conversational customer experiences,” Brown said in her prepared remarks.

Upwork enhanced its platform in April by adding an AI assistant called Uma that performs tasks like creating tailored proposal drafts for freelancers, evaluating candidates for clients, and scoping projects and designing optimal teams of experts for larger clients, according to the earnings release and the presentation.

The firm also acquired AI-native search-as-a-service company Objective, a move it said allowed Upwork to enhance the search and match performance of its platform, strengthen the company’s AI and machine learning teams, and continue to develop new capabilities for Uma.

“As the AI work tide builds, organizations of all sizes are seeking out more flexible talent models that match their needs for new and emerging skills, with partners who integrate cutting edge AI technology and valued human workers seamlessly and at scale to rapidly deliver on their priorities,” Brown said in her remarks.

“At the same time, professionals across geographies, specialties and industries want digitally powered ways of working that give them easy access to more autonomy, flexibility and earning power.”