2021 REMINDER—Boost Subscription Growth with the Demonstrated Advice

Since the pandemic hit the global economy, businesses from across the industries have seen a downfall, revenue losses, and setbacks.

Though a major shift towards the subscription model has been observed, still except a few, many have struggled to sustain.

As 2020 is touching its limits, it’s time to formulate the new year business plan that can instantly be taken off to recover from the losses and holdups of the former year.

What is the Success Mantra for Subscription Business?

Several subscription companies, from software and services to subscription-based products and monthly boxes, even in the chaotic times of pandemic, have successfully managed the steady flow of recurring revenue streaming.

Do you want to get a sneak peek into the mysteries of these fastest-growing subscription ventures?

If you own a subscription-based business or part of the recurring billing business, get your to-do list ready to mend the ruptures, COVID caused in your subscription business.

In the subscription and SaaS businesses, the fine-tuning of subscription strategies is a constant strategy for the subscription business development. The slightest improvement to optimize customer experience can lead to serious compounding growth over time.

This article overviews some of the most promising subscription business development practices the largest players in the subscription economy consistently follow to attract new customers, fathom factors that retain customers, and mitigate risks that cause churn to stream their monthly recurring revenue while limiting frictions.

Buckle up your bridles for a rocky ride to improve revenue and subscription growth.

Don’t know where to begin? Let’s begin with these easy, instant, and actionable ideas from the SubscriptionFlow support board to help you get the most of your subscription business.

You have done your part.
Let SubscriptionFlow take it from here!

Let us help your business grow with our powerful
subscription management software.

Also Read: Recurring Billing, Recurring Payments, and Recurring Revenue—What are they and How Do They Work Best for Your Business?

What is SubscriptionFlow?

SubscriptionFlow is a subscription management software house. It offers automated solutions for recurring billing and payment processing management with state-of-the-art features like AI-enabled modules for price optimization, support to multiple billing models, multiple payment methods and currencies, and regions.

SubscriptionFlow aims to provide support to subscription and SaaS businesses against all the obstacles of the subscription billing, such as prorated subscription billing, dunning management, cross-platform data-sharing, revenue operations management in one place, etc.

SubscriptionFlow is a team of recurring billing management ninjas. They are experts in resolving the problems that hinder the smooth streaming of recurring revenue.

Here, we are sharing some of the practical guidelines and actions to boost the subscription growth of any business provided they can be channelized with consistency and modifying to the business types and objectives.

Do You Know What Works and What Not?

If you are a SaaS startup or a subscription business in its earlier phase, chances are you look for suggestions and advice from every space available that can keep you falling. Sometimes, despite all the precautionary measures, the founders become prey to their own choices. Instead of unfavorable market conditions or bad-luck, the lack of preparedness sinks them. And, some entrepreneurs take high flights in no time because they make choices and forecast outcomes based on real-time data.

So, how do you know what works for your business, and what would not?

Keeping on track requires to take rational actions and engagements based on the available resources. Over or underestimation or ambition can lead to a mess and muddle. Avoiding this distraction is the key to remain consistent and productive. Data-driven calculative moves can keep subscription startups and small scale businesses to grow steady and stable.

Also Read: Choosing an Easy-to-Use Subscription Management Platform—25 key Features SubscriptionFlow Offers for Seamless Recurring Billing Management

Here are the five key ideas you need to peddle before aiming for your subscription business growth:

Understanding the Business Lifecycle

Every business has to go through the different phases of business development to reach an optimum position. It is vital to understand your spot in the business lifecycle and plan the subscription growth stage by stage.

Business development has 5 stages:

Development
Startup
Establishment
Expansion
Maturity

Subscription businesses thrive when they know in which stage they are. Knowing the phase of the business will keep you aware of the needs and resources and help you achieve the best, accordingly.

Following the Competitive Trends

Keeping a constant eye on the business strategies of competitors and contemporaries is another coherent way to optimize your business processes management with substantial subscription growth strategies.

Looking at the competitors’ business strategies can accelerate the subscription growth or it can also become a primary reason to waste resources with unrequired experiments. It is up to a business understanding of the requirements and the resources of how they follow the competitive trends without raging their resources.

Conserving the Resources

It is the outcome of knowing the business phase and competition potential awareness. Conserving the resources refers to optimizing the subscription growth while remaining in the budget, manpower, and market conditions.

Businesses earn revenue as per their phase, so do they need to spend, accordingly.

Chasing the competition does not guarantee the achievement of goals. Conserve and channel resources in a proper and data-driven direction by ignoring competition and underestimating the market potential if:

Your resources are limited.
Your product is deficient in value.
Your problems and customer base size are not the same.
Your target audience is not filtered.

Also Read: This is How Subscription Billing Automation is a Game Changer for Subscription Businesses

Fine-Tuning the Key Business Processes

This is the most integral part of the strategy for subscription growth. It is not the operations that need to be changed, it is the skills that are required to fine-tune the business strategies for subscription growth at the right time. Following are a few of the recurring billing business processes that should be the focus of constant vigilance:

Subscription Billing

Subscription billing is the process of charging customers after every interval when their billing cycle hits. It includes invoicing, custom invoicing, mid of billing cycle adjustments for upgrades, downgrades, postpones, cancelation, or re-activation of the subscriptions, tax calculations, and others. The subscription growth is directly proportional to the hassle-free subscription billing. It builds customer trust and enhances the customer experience. Here are the two ways to remove frictions from the subscription billing:

Automate Subscription Management

It is the process of automation of the cycle of recurring invoicing, billing, and payment processing. The customers are charged and payment is processed as per their schedule without human intervention. Automate subscription management to induce transparency and work efficiency, and conserve resources that can unnecessarily be spent to remove manual errors and complex spreadsheets complicated calculations.

Offer Multiple Billing Options

The subscription business model gained popularity as it is a highly flexible business model that allows the merchants to make the most recurring revenue from their recurring billing model or the combination of billing models without hurting the customer’s interests.

Not all customers have the same preference for features or services. Attract them all by offering them a customized billing model tailored for them only. Flat fee, metered billing, tiered, or hybrid, charge them that suits you and your customer, both, and continue to stream recurring revenue from all the sources.

Optimize Recurring Payment Processing

Automated payment processing is just a fraction of the payment process optimization. Often, the lead leaves the process at the last phase of the conversion when they don’t find their desired payment methods and the option to pay in their own currency. The automated subscription management system of SubscriptionFlow allows multiple payment gateways integration to cater to all customers from all walks of life and all regions.

Pricing

Price optimization is a must-consider sales and marketing factor, particularly, subscription and SaaS businesses. A horde of features can be fueled through the subscription management software for price optimization along with automated billing, invoicing, and payment processing.

Fine-Tune Pricing Now and Then

Pricing is not a static move in any business. The pricing strategy must be tweaked from time to time to match the changing demands of the market. Smart business minds are those that understand the importance of pricing and packaging variation.

Run Test Drives on Pricing

The pricing page is the most-trafficable page on a site. A/B testing of your pricing will help subscription businesses to get in-depth knowledge of the factors that fuel the interests of the traffic in the pricing.

Improve Upsell and Upgrade Plans

Focusing on increasing the number of upgrades leverages you grow more revenue with your existing customers without investing more resources. Customer acquisitions cost five times more than retaining the customers with upgrades, cross-sells, or re-sells.

Identify what causes customers to upgrade and implement them while running a test drive for pricing.

Customer Service

Customer experience is all you need in today’s subscription business landscape. The subscription business is based on customer retention and customers will retain when they feel connected, served, and facilitated. Providing them the best billing and payment assistance along with instant and stellar customer service support is the way to optimize the customer experience. Use customer support to find personalized solutions.

Identify Churn Causes—Use Predictive Analytics

The best way to find all the concerns and mysteries behind the subscription growth is to use the subscription analytics that can extract the data-driven facts to fuel the growth of the business. Predictive analytics in SubscriptionFlow helps you gain insights and answers the reasons why customers are leaving their subscriptions and why they are not upgrading. It helps you to devise strategies that mitigate the risks of churn.

Drive More Attention on Customer Retention

These analytics can further assist to formulate customer retention strategies in the forms of favorable billing, payment, or integration support to the customers.

Deploy Instant and Intuitive Customer Support System

Automated customer service support integrations with the subscription billing system power-ups the overall customer services. Customer Support Software with knowledgebase, chatbots, instant chats, emails, or ticketing and tokenization can be integrated with the recurring billing system.

Marketing

Without marketing, no business can survive. Marketing supports the product to grow and find the targeted audience.

Use ‘Subscription Data’ to Target Reach

SubscriptionFlow exposes the marketing teams to leverage the subscription, billing, and payment data to learn more about customer behaviors. The data-driven marketing campaigns clear investment paths and empowers product development.

Personalize Marketing Messages

From email marketing to social media to tailored content, channel personalized communications. Each customer is different, its needs, problems, and resources are different. Give them the solutions that strengthen the impression of exclusive tailoring for them, only.

Create Important + Informational + Influential Content

Content is all you need to communicate what you want to. Use any marketing platform and aim for any target of marketing, it is your content that helps them achieve what you want. Use data to find the topics to create content, empower it with compelling writing and influencing stats, facts, and figures with industry practiced solutions, and support it with across the channels engagement.

Measuring Subscription Growth…

Until you can measure, how can you manage it? Measuring subscription growth refers to the monitoring, measurement, and management of the streaming of recurring revenue. The more revenue you can stream, the more growth you are channeling for your subscription business in a business lifecycle. Some of the key metrics that are used to measure the recurring revenue growth are: