This Drink Brand Uses Gifts to Convert First Users

Acquiring new customers in the energy drink market gets more expensive every year. Ad costs keep climbing, influencer partnerships are costly, and every brand competes for the same shoppers. When each visitor costs more to bring in, your store’s offer needs to do two things: give people a reason to click and a reason to buy.

Perk Energy, an energy drink mix brand, addressed both challenges with a free gift with purchase offer built around its starter kits. Below, we’ll look at how Perk pairs each kit with relevant gifts to turn more first-time visitors into customers.

TL;DR

• Pair each starter kit with relevant free gifts: a sample package to explore other flavors and a useful accessory to improve the drinking experience, which gives first-time shoppers more reasons to buy.
• Create separate offers for different purchase types: gifts for one-time purchases make it easier for shoppers to try the products, while subscriptions encourage recurring orders.
• Set a free-shipping threshold that fits customers’ buying habits, and use a cart progress bar to show how close they are to qualifying.

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The Challenge: Converting More First-Time Visitors as Customer Acquisition Costs Rise 

Perk Energy makes flavored drink mixes for people looking for a coffee alternative. Its catalog covers the whole day: Perk Energy for a morning boost, Perk Hydrate for electrolytes, and Perk Chill for winding down at night.

The brand’s goal was clear: create offers that appeal to new customers and convert them effectively. That is harder than it sounds for a drink mix.

A first-time shopper can’t taste the product online, and the real value only shows up after weeks of daily use.

So the offer needs to win the first-time buyers while motivating other regular ones to subscribe and build long-term loyalty to the brand.

Doing both meant running several gift offers at once, each with its own products and purchase conditions. To make that work, Perk Energy needed a promotion app that could:

• Set multiple conditions flexibly
• Work correctly on subscription conditions
• Run every offer perfectly once it goes live

That’s where BOGOS: Free Gift Bundle Upsell comes in, a Shopify app trusted for over 12 years and rated 5 stars from 4,500+ reviews. 

The Solution: Gift With Purchase Offers That Attract Customers and Convert Them Effectively

Every Perk starter kit includes two free gifts that match shoppers’ intents and improve their drinking experience from the very first cup. These gifts give creators and ads a clear selling point while encouraging visitors to buy once they reach the product page.

The key is choosing which purchase type qualifies for each gift offer. Here’s how Perk Energy sets them up.

#1. Add Free Gifts to One-Time Starter Kits to Encourage First Orders

The first offer applies to one-time purchases, allowing shoppers to try Perk without committing to a subscription. It covers two kits:

• Hydrate Starter Kit: Shoppers receive a free Perk frother and a free 8-pack Hydrate variety pack.
• Halle Simons’ Bundle: A limited-edition kit created with content creator Halle Simons, featuring her Extra Protein Sugar Cookie flavor. Shoppers receive a free Perk frother and a custom Hydrojug.

Both kits target shoppers who are still deciding whether Perk is right for them. For the Hydrate Starter Kit, the offer serves two purposes:

• Encourage hesitant first-time shoppers to buy: Perk Hydrate has fewer reviews than the brand’s other products, so shoppers may hesitate to subscribe before trying it. A one-time kit with free gifts makes the first purchase feel less risky.
• Encourage future purchases: The Hydrate variety pack lets new customers try different flavors and find their favorites to reorder.

The second one-time kit converts new shoppers too, but it targets a specific source of traffic: the audience of Halle Simons, the content creator Perk partners with as a brand ambassador.  

The offer runs on a single product, a larger size of Extra Protein Sugar Cookie, the flavor the brand presents as her favorite. Buying it unlocks two gifts: a free frother and a custom Hydrojug. Perk promotes the kit as her personal pick, with only 200 units available.  

Each part does a different job:

• The trigger product is a bigger size, which increases the AOV.
• Featuring Halle Simons’ name in the offer not only helps shoppers engage more through her influence and credibility but also provides a smart way for the merchant to guide them toward products based on what they already love.
• Both gifts improve the drinking experience: the frother helps create a smoother drink, while the Hydrojug keeps the drink with them all day. These practical extras make the kit more helpful to shoppers and may help increase the conversion rate. 

If you run influencer marketing campaigns like Perk Energy but want to offer exclusive deals to a specific audience rather than mass traffic, BOGOS: Free Gift Bundle Upsell lets you use the Specific Link as a sub-condition. 

This way, only shoppers who arrive through the specific link that is promoted through the influencer’s social channels can unlock the offer. 

#2. Add Free Gifts to Subscription Starter Kits to Encourage Recurring Revenue

The second offer follows the same approach, pairing a sample pack of different flavors with a frother. The difference is that the free gifts are only available with subscription purchases, which already come with a 20% discount. The offer applies to two product lines:

• Energy Starter Kit

• Chill Starter Kit

The frother and sample pack are priced at $19.99 and $19.95, respectively. Together, the gifts are worth more than the $23.99 first subscription order, making the offer even more appealing alongside the existing 20% discount. 

The rewards don’t stop at the first order. Perk also gives subscribers a free gift on their 2nd, 4th, and 6th orders: an energy stick pack in their chosen flavor. On the 7th order, their discount increases to 20% off for life. 

With each reward just a few orders away, subscribers always have something to look forward to, giving them a reason to keep their subscription active.

By offering these gifts upfront, Perk encourages customers to subscribe rather than make a one-time purchase, helping the brand build a more stable stream of recurring revenue.

#3. Set a Free-Shipping Threshold That Fits Stock-Up Habits

Shipping cost decides more checkouts than most merchants expect. In Baymard Institute’s research on why shoppers abandon carts, extra costs, including shipping fees, rank as the top reason, cited by 48% of shoppers.

Perk Energy didn’t leave that to chance. The brand offers free shipping on orders over $69. This threshold fits how customers buy drink mixes: they use them daily, finish them quickly, and often purchase multiple products at once.

With a standard canister priced at $29.99, two canisters cost just under the $69 free-shipping threshold. Shoppers only need to add a small item to qualify for free shipping, giving them an extra reason to add more to their orders.

More importantly, the store embeds a progress bar in the cart drawer, so shoppers always know how close they are to unlocking the reward. Right below it, product suggestions give them a quick way to close the gap.

If you want to use a similar setup to encourage shoppers to add more items to their carts, you can easily create it with BOGOS. The video tutorial below will walk you through the in-cart upsell setup step by step 👇

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The Results: A Lower Customer Acquisition Cost

According to Perk Energy, its promotion strategy attracts more qualified traffic at a lower customer acquisition cost. Two parts of the strategy help explain how:

• The gifts attract shoppers: A free frother or Hydrojug gives social ads something valuable to promote, encouraging more clicks to the product page. The Halle Simons bundle takes this further by reaching an audience already familiar with the creator, helping Perk attract more relevant traffic than broad advertising.
• The right gift offers convert shoppers: Instead of giving away random freebies, Perk pairs its starter kits with useful gifts that improve the product experience. The one-time kits make trying Perk feel less risky, while the subscription kits give shoppers more reasons to commit to regular purchases.

The brand also sets a free-shipping threshold to encourage shoppers to add more items to their carts. An in-cart progress bar shows how close they are to qualifying, while a frequently bought together widget below suggests relevant add-ons to help them reach the threshold.

Together, these offers help Perk attract more clicks from the same budget and convert more visitors into customers, ultimately lowering the cost to win each new customer.

Conclusion

Perk Energy shows how the right gift offers can help brands attract and convert new customers as acquisition costs rise. 

If you sell products that customers use daily, especially those available through subscriptions, this strategy is worth considering for improving your store’s conversion rate. Start by identifying which products shoppers are likely to try first and which ones they’re ready to subscribe to. Then, pair each with gifts that improve the first experience and give shoppers a stronger reason to buy.