Top 5 Metrics For Subscription Businesses: Digital Publisher Revenue Strategy
Imagine your content not just being consumed but cherished, sparking a connection that inspires your readers to return time and time. How can you do this? Implementing a paywall solution and measuring the success of your content monetization strategy.
The subscription model transcends the traditional boundaries of reader engagement for digital publishers, morphing into recurring revenue that supports and promotes the caliber of content delivered to your screens.
The decision to incorporate a paywall demands a strategic selection of a subscription model that aligns with your goals and a meticulous analysis of its performance. How can you do this? A profound understanding of subscription metrics is a toolkit for steering your strategy in a direction that resonates with your audience and provides a more competitive edge.
This article unveils the top five subscription metrics that are decisive in shaping your strategy. The insights of each metric are curated, ensuring that every decision is informed and every action is impactful.
Metrics For Subscription Business and How to evaluate them
Here are the top 5 metrics for a subscription that you can evaluate to understand the performance of your content.
Churn Rate
The churn rate is the percentage of subscribers who canceled the subscription or forgot to renew during your measuring period. The number of subscribers existing on the final day of the period divided by the total number of subscribers at the beginning of the period multiplied by a hundred gives your Churn rate.
The churn rate can affect the monthly/ yearly income. It also indicates the customer satisfaction level. Either the subscriber forgot to subscribe because they missed the notifications. Or, it might be a decision to quit the subscription.
If your Churn rate is higher than expected, you can take necessary actions to reduce it. Provide quality content, ensure remaining notifications are automated on time, and offer subscribers low prices or extra benefits.
Average Revenue Per User
It is the mean revenue generated from the active subscriber. The average revenue per user is usually denoted as ARPU. Subscribers have different plans based on the number of plans you provide. Readers may take a monthly or yearly subscription.
ARPU measures the average revenue per subscriber over the measuring period. If ARPU is low, you can plan some upselling strategies. Further, it helps you categorize subscriber groups and understand which produces the most revenue.
You can then target them more or provide content targeted to that category. ARPU also gives an idea of your subscription model. If ARPU's total revenue is lower, you can change your subscription model.
Monthly Recurring Revenue
It is the expected income or predicted revenue from the subscribers in any month. You may have expected revenue from your active subscribers in any month, recurring revenue you don’t have to worry about.
Monthly recurring revenue helps you finance forecasting and analyze the performance of your subscription business. It also assists you in brand valuation. If you have less MRR, your subscription business is performing poorly, and you have to make additional changes in content or subscription model.
Track your MRR every month. To do so, multiply your monthly active users by their subscription model (price). MRR growth is a straightforward way to measure the number of additional subscribers achieved in a month. It shows how your content monetization business is growing every month.
Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value, commonly abbreviated as CLV, measures the total money a brand can earn from a customer throughout their business relationship. It shows the brand's long-term worth. CLV is an indicator of multiple things. It shows you how well your brand's content monetization plans are performing.
Customer lifetime value indicates the balance between the money you spend for the customer and its impact on your subscribers. You will get the CLV by multiplying the average customer lifespan by purchase within a given time frame.
Customer Acquisition Cost
As the name suggests, CAC is the amount required to acquire a new customer. This cost includes spending content, ads, design, and marketing to acquire customers. Unlike other metrics, it is not a simple calculation. You have to consider all the money spent to acquire the customer.
CAC gives you an idea for budgeting and analyzing where you have spent the most. If your CAC is high, you face tight competition in the marketplace. It also signals your business's profitability. You must consider CPS and touch costs, such as acquiring staff, etc. while calculating the CAC.
Conclusion
Once you measure all the above metrics, you will understand how your subscription strategy performs. You can alter the subscription models and offer exclusive discounts or additional benefits for your subscribers. If you have a positive result on all the vital metrics, you offer good-quality content and are on the right track.
For better results, you can choose Accesstype as your paywall management solution. Accesstype has various subscription models that can turbo-charge your content monetization plan.