As publishers globally are recognizing the value of subscriptions both for brand trust and also revenue generation, they need to ensure their subscription management platforms are optimized for their needs. To deliver the best customer experience, here are 7 changes you can implement with your subscriptions to increase efficiency for you and your audience.
Know your audience
How does your subscriptions platform let you see what your audience is doing, and how can you use that information? Understanding your customers’ habits and history on your site, what they’re being driven to read, and where they’re coming from is key to optimizing your subscription platform.
Understand your product’s true cost
Knowing the true cost of production for your product is key to determining ROI, and should be your guideline when establishing how much your subscription should cost. This should include each separate cost to providing your product: production costs, sales processes, the physical product itself. Knowing that baseline – and how to improve it! – will facilitate the growth of your recurring revenue.
Simplify the user’s buying experience
The maintenance of a subscription should be as easy and navigable as possible for customers, as well as allow them high personalization to ensure they stay engaged. This is a great opportunity to check your self-service portal: does it make the process simple? Is it available 24/7? Does it bundle the features they want in easily-understandable packages?
Assessing and changing available packages if necessary
If some of your packages aren’t selling, you need to be able to understand why: is it the products that are collected together (do they not draw the same subscriber audience?) or is it the price? Targeting the correct audience with the correct package is key, and you need software in place that can help you assess what’s working – and what’s not.
Create meaningful key performance indicators for your subscription revenue
Ensure that your KPIs are achievable and centered around something concrete, like revenue. You should be able to drill down into the software to measure those KPIs easily, especially as we see the flux in subscriptions revenue both during and after Covid-19. Examples of appropriate KPIs for this could be consumer engagement on-site or time spent on site. This will vary from each company, so make sure you’re determining the best one for you.
Optimize your meter
The number of pages a customer visits should be fluid! Don’t establish one standard pageview number and apply that to all engagements on your site. That page number should fluctuate based on both the content your subscribers are looking for, and where your traffic is coming from. Each of these can tell you how engaged a visitor is and thus how inclined they might be to subscribe in one or two page views instead of five or six.
Most importantly, engage
How often are you speaking with or soliciting feedback from your customers who aren’t already subscribers? With all the media available to consumers, they’re more willing to leave their trusted sources if you’re providing better, more targeted communication. Engaging like this with your customers ensures a two-way street of communication: you’re able to solicit feedback about their needs and requirements, and they feel listened to and understood. Once you have that mutual understanding, you’ll then be able to provide the customized subscription platform that will encourage them to commit to your service.
