We talked last week about the benefit of being a little flexible with subscription offerings. The payoff is adding subscribers who might otherwise fall into the gaps between your offers. A key to increasing your subscribers are making it easy to buy.
You want to make it super easy to buy. I mean E-A-S-Y. An example would help. Let’s talk about the wine store I mentioned last week.
When resubscribing to the monthly wine selection, we had to re-enter every bit of personal info and card info. It’s tedious. It’s annoying when you know that info is already in their system. It isn’t E-A-S-Y.
How would you improve the process? Examine each step.
Re-entering the email address should have given us the opportunity to restart the subscription, or at least avoid re-entering a bunch of info. It’s possible the system was capable of this, but the salesperson pressed us to fill out the whole thing again. Thanks to a prompt on the screen, my wife asked about logging into an existing account in their system. She was told to ignore the prompt. Unfortunately, the CRM allowed her to create a new account with the same email address – without any warning like “we found an account for this email”.
Card data is very rarely stored locally in small retail these days, so re-entering that isn’t terribly surprising. It should have been swiped or inserted into a chip reader – but that wasn’t an option. That there are still businesses taking cards without chip readers is disappointing – particularly given that this business has a reasonably new CRM / POS system. Security is important.
The pause that refreshes
One key to retaining subscribers is making it easy to resume. Resume? You can’t resume without the ability to pause. Few subscription plans have a pause button.
A limited number of subscription plans provide the ability to pause your subscription. In plans where there is a consumable and/or deliverable product, like wine plans or subscription boxes, having a pause button can prevent losing a subscriber. Once you lose one, getting them back is real work.
As an example, Audible (the audio book division of Amazon) allows you to pause your subscription. Sometimes, life doesn’t let you consume all the audio that your subscription provides each month (sounds like wine, eh?). Even before Amazon bought them, Audible recognized this and allowed you to temporarily pause your account. They understand that life happens or that their plans may not fit every person’s consumption model all the time.
Don’t sell junk subscriptions
While not every business can be focused on subscriptions as their primary revenue source / sales mechanism – quite a few can be. Even if you sell something that doesn’t lend itself to a subscription model, it’s pretty likely that there is some component of the business that is ideal for subscriptions.
Subscriptions are great for businesses for a number of reasons. One of the best reasons is that they fill in the dips caused by things like seasonal markets & unexpected dips in sales. They add a certainty component to cash flow that many businesses have never had.
I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like the idea of stable / consistent / dependable / predictable cash flow. Most folks are keen to the idea of subscriptions when discussed in that context.
The thing is, they have to mean something to your customer. Watch a few commercials over the weekend and you’ll be inundated with offers for frivolous “monthly boxes of stuff”. Most of it is, quite frankly, crap no one needs.
That’s what I mean by “don’t sell junk subscriptions”. Sure, many of these companies are making big money selling them right now. Will they be around in five or ten years? Doubtful. Are they essential to their subscribers? No, they’re frivolous luxury purchases. They have many thousands of subscribers but their subscription base is fragile because of the nature of the product.
Make it meaningful & simplifying
Create your subscriptions from something your customers already need or want from you. A subscription should simplify their life, whether you sell to consumers or businesses. Sell them something they don’t want to forget, or that they should keep up with. Eliminate tedium and hassles. It may not make sense for yours to be weekly, monthly, etc. Figure out what works and make becoming a subscriber a no-brainer purchase.
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