Stay AI Review

Every subscription-based business must measure three metrics if they want to succeed: subscriber count, churn rate, and lifetime value (LTV). These metrics determine if your business stays afloat or sinks into bankruptcy. Surprisingly, many companies leave them to customer loyalty. Research by PWC shows that 32% of customers will stop doing business with a brand after one negative experience. This proves that your competitors’ strengths can influence your customers’ loyalty. 

However, your Shopify business can gain more control over customer loyalty with subscription management apps like Stay AI. It can help your business increase its lifetime value and decrease churn rate through its various customer retention strategies. Therefore, this article aims to explore Stay AI’s features, integrations, and policies.

Stay AI Overview

Stay, formerly known as Retextion, is an AI-powered subscription management platform for Shopify brands. Shopify brands are businesses built on the Shopify E-commerce platform. Stay integrates directly into Shopify and helps businesses manage their subscribers effectively. Its several new features allow businesses to onboard new subscribers seamlessly. It also employs systems that trigger an increase in the lifetime value of each customer, as you’ll see.

Stay first came to market in 2021. At the time, its founders, Pierson Krass and Gina Perreli, were managing Lunar Solar, a direct-to-consumer (DTC) digital marketing agency. Their years of experience as retention specialists gave them insights into the customer retention problems in their industry. And with Shopify’s subscription API, they built an AI-powered subscription management tool to help Shopify brands increase their lifetime value.

Stay’s founders have not only said but also proven that their goal is to drive more innovation in their industry. Since its inception, Stay has released more than 50 new and innovative features to encourage a tradition of dynamism among business-to-customer (B2C) franchises.

Some of these features include subscriber rewards, dynamic bundles, and predictive analytics. All of which are powered by their large language model proprietary AI. You can learn more about this in the ‘Notable Features‘ section of this article.

As the platform grows, it continues to attract funding from both angel investors and venture capitalists. In July 2023, the company announced that it had raised $15.1 million in Series A funding. Most of this funding comes from Telescope partners, alongside investors like Adam Turner and Nik Sharma. 

• Established: 2021
• Founders: Pierson Krass, Gina Perreli, and Taylor Cawiezell
• Offices: Utah, United States (Headquarters)

5 Reasons Stay AI Stands Out

Expert Opinion

Rating: 4.5/5

Stay is a valuable option for Shopify brands looking to excel at subscription e-commerce.

Stay AI has brought to the market some of the newest features for boosting customer lifetime value. For instance, their advanced out-of-stock rules allow businesses to split shipments in the absence of a product. Their retention engine also boasts several features to help brands lower churn rates. 

Still, one feature that we think is not fully developed is customer support. The only way clients can get support is through the customer support form. However, other options like live chats will make a good addition.

While we think the software offers enough value for the price, we would’ve preferred a different pricing strategy. The pricing follows a one-size-fits-all concept. Including micro plans would benefit smaller businesses. However, the company makes up for this with its 30-day free trial.

We found the software’s automation very helpful. From AI-powered personalizations to analytics for predictions, Stay makes great use of its proprietary AI. Since the founders are marketers, they’ve incorporated some strategic features in the app. 

For instance, the personalized video messaging option to reduce churn rate. As of now, Stay offers over 50 integrations but we look forward to seeing more.

Overall, Stay AI is a great tool to help businesses increase their customer lifetime value and step up their retention game.

Notable Features of Stay AI

Stay runs on proprietary AI, which means they can employ a variety of custom-made solutions to help your business grow. Their features, as you’ll see below, are built on reinforcement learning, large language and predictive models.

1. Subscription Enablement

In e-commerce, the acquisition of subscribers is just as important as their retention. Stay’s subscription enablement feature comprises several focal points to help you create your desired subscription program. With it, you can start a trial or prepaid program. You can also create interesting dynamic bundles.

Moreover, you do not need coding knowledge for this. Stay allows business owners to create their customer portals with no code. With its dynamic content blocks and rulesets, you can make a mini-site out of your subscriber dashboard. And engage your customers more.

Your customers can also build and customize their dynamic bundles right from the portal. Other actions you can carry out on your portal include promoting new launches, building product carousels, and separate dashboards for gifters and receivers.

2. Experience Engine

Stay’s experience engine allows you to improve your users’ experience, thereby leading to more average order value (AOV). Here’s where you put on your creativity cap and create campaigns that’ll boost your revenue.

Stay’s promotion builder is simple and quick to use. Therefore, in about a minute, you can design personalized promotional campaigns, carry out A/B testing, and segment upsells.

On the promotions builder, you can segment customers based on buying attributes and order patterns. Then, create different experiences for them. The A/B testing feature then allows you to compare them to determine which works best. Thanks to its proprietary AI, Stay can aid your segmentation by organizing customer cohorts based on their actions.

This option also comes in handy when creating upsells and cross-sells. Its large language model helps you identify which customers will value which products. All you have to do is create the offers, sit back, and let Stay personalize their experiences.

3. Retention Engine

Call it retention or churn; this factor has posed a threat to many businesses over the years and still does. The churn rate is the degree to which customers leave your business over time. And it’s one of the direct-to-customer problems that Stay addresses. Stay acquired Retention Engine in August 2022 and has, since then, maximized its AI for reinforcement learning.

The retention engine allows you to create cancel flows and analyze and create personalized treatments based on them. You can create your cancel flows in about 15 minutes with no coding required. 

When customers want to unsubscribe, they’ll encounter your survey, allowing you to learn their reason for exit. What’s more, the retention engine also learns how your customers behave over time.

In the future, it can predict which customers are likely to have a shorter lifetime value. Besides this, it can create personalized follow-ups for them. One way to assist the retention engine is to create video messaging that it can add to the cancel flows. For the best results, ensure your video messaging is highly personalized.

Stay AI Integrations

Stay integrates with over 50 software solutions to ensure their customers have a seamless experience across the platform. Some of these solutions are Klaviyo, Attentive, Zendesk, Postscript and Wonderment. If you use any of these tools with your Shopify shop, reach out to the Stay team and they’ll help you get started. However, here’s a shortcut to get on with some of them.

1. Stay AI’s Wonderment Integration

With this integration, your subscribers can now track their orders on the custom-built tracking page. Here are some steps to follow:

• Confirm that your Wonderment is properly configured. Your Wonderment URL must be consistent with your Shopify’s store URL. If not, reach out to Stay’s support first.
• Click on the Stay AI merchant portal and scroll to settings.
• On the settings page, click on integrations.
• On the Wonderment card, click “integrate with Stay AI,” and afterward, click activate.
• To deactivate, follow the first four steps, but now, click on deactivate.

2. Stay AI’s Postscript Integration

If you use Postscript for SMS communication, here’s how to integrate it with Stay AI.

• Visit the Stay AI merchant portal and click on integrations.
• Under integration, click on the postscript section and then on “Integrate with Stay AI.”
• After selecting Postscript, click on the Insert your private key option. You must have gotten your private key from Postscript beforehand. Input it in the text field and click validate.
• A check mark should show within the Postscript line if you’ve successfully validated it. Now, click on Finish installation.
• Once it’s successful, trigger the actions for which you want to configure workflow.

3. Stay AI’s Klaviyo Integration

If you use Klaviyo, you can link it with your Stay AI’s merchant portal for more automation. That way, your email marketing still runs seamlessly, and the data generated can be converted to insights. Follow these steps to get started.

• Log into your Klaviyo account and go straight to your Account page.
• Click on the navigation bar and select API keys. Copy your public API keys for the next step.
• Log into the Stay AI app and navigate to settings. Under settings, click on integrations.
• Click on Klaviyo Integration. Then paste your public API keys in it and save.
• If you’d like to send your transactional emails from Klaviyo instead, reach out to Klaviyo to mark the flow as transactional.

Plans and Pricing

Stay AI has only one plan for interested businesses. Except you’re an enterprise merchant, your fee is $499 per month. This comes with an added 1% plus $0.19 per transaction. Transactions are orders with subscription products. For instance, if your customer pays for two subscription products, you’ll be charged for that transaction.

Enterprise merchants are those who want custom pricing and features for a larger-than-usual scale of business. For others, the monthly payments give automatic access to all the essential features. This includes the retention and experience engines. You can also start maximizing the built-in A/B testing, churn risk forecasts, portal banner ads, and more. Read the table in the next section to catch a glimpse of all the features you get.

Features

• Experience Engine
• Retention Engine
• In-portal banner ads
• Account manager
• AI personalization

Key Features Table

Terms and Policies

Like every other SaaS solution, Stay has its terms and policies through which it governs users’ actions on its app. Everyone who signs up for the software and pays for the service agrees and is bound to these terms. The most important condition is that you must be of legal age to form a binding contract with the company.

Stay’s terms and policies also require you to become a registered user before accessing any of the software’s features. The use, in the first place, is at your own risk, with no warranty that it will meet your requirements. You should also note that using new beta features is at your risk. And Stay reserves the right to discontinue them as they please.

Customer Support

Stay offers customer support to every registered customer. To contact their customer support team, first scroll down to the Contact Us button at the bottom of the page. Clicking the button will open the Contact Us Form. You’ll be asked to fill in your first and last name, email address, interest, and message. The interest field is a single select option and you have to choose customer support from the list. 

After submitting this form, a message that says, “We’ll get back to you” will be displayed on your screen. Non-users can also reach out to Stay through the contact form for other issues. This should suffice, but if it doesn’t, you can reach them on their social media platforms:

• X (formerly Twitter): @GetStayAi
• LinkedIn: Stay AI

Conclusion

Customer loyalty is difficult to acquire but easy to lose. That is why business executives must take initiative when playing the retention game. As a Shopify brand that thrives on recurring revenue, having a powerful subscription sidekick can make your processes easier. If you wish to turn to Stay AI, register for the 30-day free trial. However, if you want to learn more first, reach out to the team through the contact form.

Contributors: Adenike Omope (Technical Writer); John Ayanfe (Graphics Designer)