7 Tips on Keeping the Subscription Management Simple as Your Business Grows
As your business expands, you might find yourself struggling to accommodate your customers' subscriptions. This goes beyond recurring billing and payment. The biggest challenge is keeping your customers engaged and satisfied with your brand. You need the right tools and strategy to secure their loyalty in the long run.
A study by McKinsey shows that only 55% of customers subscribe to a service for the long term. The other half only lasts for a month or two—just in time for free trials or demos to expire. And while you might think that this percentage is high enough, replacing lost subscribers can dramatically stunt your business growth.
To avoid losing customers, here are some tips on how you can keep your subscription management simple and effective as your business expands.
1. Invest in reliable software
Scaling up your business also means upgrading your current tools and strategies. As you expand your customer base, the more subscriptions you have to manage. Personally handling them one by one can become inefficient in the long run. It makes you more perceptible to errors and delays. At this point, you should consider investing in the right subscription management software for your business.
With so many options available, you might find yourself overwhelmed during selection. Nonetheless, you shouldn’t just go for the most popular or affordable option. You must first evaluate and determine which one can fit with your current workflow and business model. Most importantly, you must make sure that it can meet your current needs.
Ask questions such as: what type of customers do you have? What kinds of subscription plans do you offer? How fast is your business growing? What are the challenges you are currently facing?
By answering all these, you have an idea of the ideal software for your business.
2. Take advantage of automation
One of the biggest advantages of using software is automation. These tools allow you to operate without further human interference.
For example, you can use a subscription management app to remind new customers about their expiring free trial. Likewise, this app can offer them to renew their subscription and upgrade into a paying plan. This way, you don’t have to personally keep track of every new customer and still be able to convert new clients into loyal customers without much work.
Another automated function you can take advantage of is allowing your customers to change their subscription plans any time. Your software will take note of such changes and automatically apply them in the next billing.
If a customer decides to discontinue their subscription, you can program your software to get their feedback on what went wrong with your product or service. Moreover, you can use automation to send payment reminders to customers during the billing period.
3. Offer flexible pricing plans
Pricing plays a critical role in influencing your customers’ decisions. With the right strategy, you can acquire new customers and reduce customer churn. However, subscription pricing is complex compared to other pricing models since payments are done monthly instead of a one-time event. The loss of a single paying customer means losing more than just a single sale. You are also losing the Lifetime Value (LTV) of that account.
Having a one-price-fits-all can turn away customers—both new and existing. For a win-win approach, you should consider offering flexible subscription plans with varying price points. This way, your customers can find a plan that fits their budget while you increase the likelihood of their conversion in the process.
This is a popular strategy for many SaaS subscription management. To create an effective pricing strategy for your services, you must first understand the different subscription models. You should also give away promos, deals, or discounts to encourage long-term subscriptions from customers.
4. Provide transparency and customer support
Your customers should always know what they are signing for or purchasing. This includes the billing policies, prices, payment methods, refund/cancellation process, and product information. It is important that you remain transparent and upfront about your subscription policies from the get-go. Doing so can reassure your customers and encourage them to try out your product/service. Moreover, you can also consider using a client portal to keep in touch with customers and support them at all times.
Moreover, customer support plays a crucial role in making sure that your customers stick with their subscriptions. In fact, a study by PwC shows 59% of customers will walk away from a brand after several bad experiences. Worse, 17% claims they won’t hesitate to cut ties with their favorite brand due to a single bad experience.
Therefore, you must make sure that your after-sales support is robust and responsive. You can hire customer representatives who can entertain customers’ questions or complaints, create a FAQ page or database, or use software to automate the process.
5. Keep customers engaged
Signing up customers for your subscription is just the first step to securing their loyalty. There is still a long way to go to earn their trust. For one, you need to make sure that they remain engaged with your brand. Otherwise, they might start to lose interest and discontinue their subscription as a result.
There are many ways you can maintain a connection with your customers. You can send them emails about promos, deals, and discounts each time you are giving away one. Sign them up for monthly newsletters that contain news and updates within your organization. Post blogs and articles on your website, which customers can read anytime.
Consistently producing new content on your website can help sustain your customers’ attention. You can check out this article where CompareCamp shares some features of content management system software that can help you boost customer engagement.
6. Personalize customer experience
Nowadays, customers demand more personalized experiences with their subscriptions. They want to feel they are getting good value for their money. Through personalization, you can provide better subscription management for customers. You show how much you are willing to listen and accommodate their needs. This can be in the form of a personalized subscription plan to tailor their specific demands, flexible payment methods, and customizable orders.
You can do this by leveraging customer data and analytics. This lets you see common patterns, behaviors, and trends in the market. In turn, you can use this data to improve your subscription model, expand your available plans, and develop new promos, bundles, or deals.
You can also use data to offer more accurate and relevant recommendations to each of your customers. With the right recommendations, you can encourage your customers to upgrade their subscription plan or purchase another product or service from you.
7. Consider integrations
While a subscript management software will prove helpful for your growing business, it still has its own limitations. Its purpose is simply to handle the subscription lifecycle of your customers. It can fall short for recurring billing and payment, lead generation, marketing, and customer management.
If you want to streamline all your processes together, you should consider integrating your subscription management software with other software like online payment gateways, billing automation, marketing automation software, and other latest tools for digital publishing. This way, your customers can have a seamless and immersive journey from being a simple visitor to your website into a loyal paying customer.
Keeping it simple
As your customer base grows, you might find yourself struggling to keep up with all their subscriptions. Nonetheless, keeping it simple is the best course of action in this case. Enlist the help of technology to make subscription management easier and more convenient on both sides.