Role of Payment Flexibility in Digital Subscriptions

Written by : Rashmi Singh

Every digital publisher knows that the quality of the content brings subscriptions. The higher the quality, the more subscribers one gets. But there must be more to the picture than that. After all, there are many publishers out there that create high-quality content but are yet to find success in the digital subscription area.

As the data on digital subscriptions reveal to us, payment flexibility plays a major role in the growth of any publisher’s digital subscriptions. Here, the payment flexibility can be understood in terms of the number of payment methods available to users or the different models of subscriptions such as hard wall, recurring payments, micro-payments, etc.

In this article, we are going to have a look into how payment flexibility impacts the digital subscription growth of digital publishers – be it small publishers or media giants. Read on.

At its core, offering payment flexibility is about understanding the user/reader’s needs and buying habits. A business model on paper might tell you that offering a yearly subscription model is best to achieve the yearly financial goal. But when you communicate with your users, you might understand that what they need is a more flexible option like micro-payments.

When digital publishers understand the needs of the customers at scale, they can also understand the bigger trends happening in the industry. One relevant example of this in the publishing industry is subscription fatigue.

Subscription fatigue is something that does not happen just to a single or few users once in a while. It occurs regularly to a fluctuating percentage of users. Whether this user base is increasing or decreasing can be gauged only by understanding your users’ customer journey with your brand. Hence, you can fight subscription fatigue with flexible payment options only after understanding your users.

There is a general saying in the business world that less is more. It might be true about customers for whom all options are similar. But for a user who simply can not get a subscription via one payment option or who is not ready to commit to a subscription, less is definitely not more.

Researches show that offering flexible subscription offerings lead to not only more revenue but it also helps in customer acquisition. For example, adding payment options from wallets along with traditional methods attract younger demographics. Newer methods of banking appeal to Millenials and Gen Z as they have grown up using more of these methods than traditional banking methods like debit cards.

The last few years brought technological changes in both the publishing and the financial world. People started consuming more content; they deeply understood the value of quality content, which ultimately led to more and more users going towards buying digital subscriptions.

In the financial world, more and more people moved toward the digital world. At one point in time, cash almost lost the war to digital currencies. Naturally, the digital publishing world also had to update it with the changing time.

Today, if a digital publisher does not keep up with the changing time and hesitates to offer payment flexibility, its competitor will fill the void soon. In this manner, giving payment flexibility has become a matter of surviving along with thriving.

If you run a digital publishing company and are interested in increasing your subscription revenue through digital subscriptions, we can help you. Quintype offers a smart subscription management platform called Accesstype. The platform helps you generate predictable revenue by tapping into the hidden strength of your digital subscriptions.