There’s a reason why more companies than ever are interested in launching subscription-based business models: recurring revenue rather than one-time revenue from a now-and-again purchase.
“Recurring revenue — the main benefit of the subscription business model — will help improve the value of your business, provide a steady cash flow, and make your business a lot more predictable,” wrote John Warrillow for Inc. magazine.
But launching a subscription business is harder than just waving a magic wand. For starters, you need to figure out how to translate your offerings to a subscription model and find a way to serve the greatest number of customers possible. You also need to support them adequately. Following are some issues to consider before launching your subscription-based business.
Remember that Subscription Billing Is Time-Consuming
If you’re still billing and invoicing by hand, moving to a subscription business is going to be tricky. Customers will need to be billed monthly (or quarterly), and they may be subscribing to different tiers of service, so things are going to get complex. It’s recommended that you put an automated subscription billing solution in place that bills automatically and securely, but also allows customers to make single one-time payments. It’s important that you’re able to accept multiple payment methods and rebill automatically if a payment fails the first time. (It might save you some administrative headaches later!)
Ensure That You Are Flexible
One of the challenges to launching a subscription business today is convincing customers to lock into a contract. Customers today don’t like to sign on the bottom line if they’re not sure that a company is going to deliver, so be sure to have options such as free trials, lower tiers of service and easy cancellation. Trouble-shoot their problems before they have to ask for help with proactive customer outreach.
Proper Subscription Management Helps Ensure Success
Once you’ve launched your new subscription business, you’ll need to manage it, and engage in careful customer support and retention. You’ll need to be able to work with subscribers from multiple perspectives so you can answer their questions, show them the benefit of upgrades to greater tiers of service (if that’s part of your business) and reach out to them when appropriate. You’ll also need a method of gathering data for the purpose of analysis and reporting to measure the health of your business.
Ensure You Have the Right Subscription Management Solution
Subscription DNA provides a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that creatively integrates subscription billing, subscription management, paywalls and authentication. We provide customized front-end options, so you can ensure that it’s easy for your customers to log in and manage their own accounts.
Subscription DNA gives you everything you need to automate recurring invoicing, analyze and report, communicate with targeted user groups, engage in email marketing, process transactions, generate payment requests, track member login statistics and more.