Business Solutions Category Archives | Page 8 of 18

Nurturing Drip Marketing Campaigns for Subscriber Bases

Staying engaged with customers is a challenge for every business, but organizations that operate on a subscription business model need to cultivate their marketing even more carefully. Send too many messages, and customers might unsubscribe. Target them incorrectly, and you’ll also lose your list. Drip campaigns, conducted properly, are great for your email marketing efforts and can get dramatic results in engagement and sales, but they must be the right message at the right time.

What’s a Drip Campaign?

Automated email drip campaigns are set up to send emails to subscribers over a set period of time. You can also set up triggers or other conditions for the campaign based on the actions of the recipients, which will automatically launch an email in response to an event (think: when the customer reads a white paper, views a video or reaches a milestone in his or her membership). While normal email marketing is based on the schedule of the marketer, a drip campaign is built around the timeline of the customer. According to this infographic, drip campaign open rates are about 80 percent higher than single sends.

Choose the Right Subscription Drip Marketing Platform

Ensure that when you embark on a drip campaign, you’ve chosen a solution that is built for subscription-based businesses. Subscription management platform Subscription DNA includes an email marketing campaign engine and allows companies to conduct end-to-end drip marketing to all their subscribers, or just chosen segments of their audience. Subscription DNA’s communication management software features preset HTML email templates that you can use and re-use for scheduled email delivery making your work more efficient. Users can create email blasts to targeted subscriber groups and use optional variables to personalize each email for a more effective campaign. The email blast can be sent to the filtered audience immediately or at a future date and time.

Send Emails at Predetermined Times

With Subscription DNA’s add-on drip marketing campaign module, users can easily create a series of sequential emails on a schedule relative to their subscription anniversary. (“You’ve been a valued member for a year! Here’s a discount to show our appreciation.”) Users can control and configure the emails and the filtered audience, frequency or schedule. It’s a great solution for retaining old members and nurturing new leads.

Contact Subscription DNA today to discuss how we can help your organization effectively manage and market to your subscriber base.

A Platform to Manage Group Subscriptions

As the subscription business model expands and becomes more popular with consumers, companies are looking for new and better ways to manage their subscription customers, whether on a one-on-one basis or as a group.

What Are Group Subscriptions?

Group subscriptions are a way for organizations to purchase digital access for all or some of their members. (Think about a financial services company purchasing credit monitoring for their customers after a data breach, or a university purchasing scientific journal access for its researchers.) A group subscription provides access to a set number of authorized users – either paid, discounted or for free — and allows an account administrator to manage the list of users as a group.

Not all subscription management solutions allow for group administration, though the ability is increasingly important for subscription providers. Subscription DNA is one of the platforms that makes it easy to build and administer group subscriptions.

How it Works

Subscription DNA users can generate group packages that allow for a group “owner” to manage a set group of members. The group’s billing can be automated however the subscription provider prefers. Group members can optionally have their own subscriptions or access any active subscription of their group owner. Companies can quickly and easily generate a unique signup form that each group’s members can use to register into their group and communicate with that group exclusively.

Communicating with Groups

It’s easy to customize email responders and generate batch email blasts to target group owners and/or group members and populate the email body using a variety of optional variables. HTML email templates can be created so they can be reused quickly for future emails, and email blasts can be scheduled for a future date and time based on pre-set triggered responses.

Group owners can also optionally add members from within their account, though each member remains a unique login and statistics. They may also share a custom link that can be used for their members to sign up to the group. Subscription DNA also provides help with custom group import and other creative solutions to help validate the legitimacy of the group’s members.

Using the Subscription DNA platform, companies can quickly manage group accounts, automate recurring invoicing, analyze reports, communicate with targeted user groups, process transactions, generate payment requests, track member login statistics and much more.

Contact Subscription DNA by via our website or by calling 513-574-9800.

Subscription Model Driving Demand for Cloud-based Subscription Management

As consumers become more comfortable paying for goods and services via the subscription model, demand has increased significantly for cloud billing software. Customers want subscriptions – it eliminates the hassles of purchases, returns and ownership – and companies want to increase opportunities for profit and business flexibility while still keeping control of costs. Cloud billing solutions offer the benefits of cloud technology to the subscription business model. This is leading to the technology’s increased adoption across several industry verticals.

Cloud-based Subscription Management Software

Cloud-based subscription management and billing solutions such as SubscriptionDNA are scalable (so they can grow with your business as needed, or expand and contract with business cycles) and allow for streamlining of the billing process, which helps improve customer satisfaction. Cloud billing solutions also lower upfront costs for companies engaging in the subscription model, since real-time, multi-tenant billing systems are maintained by the solution company. (This reduces companies’ need for IT resources.) Cloud-based subscription platforms enable billing accuracy and management of large volumes of data in real-time without the headaches of maintaining the back end. Companies can also use them to implement paywalls for premium content.

New research has shown that the demand for cloud billing for customer subscription management will grow at a double-digit rate for the foreseeable future. Driving this growth is the increasing need for reducing operating expenditure as well as customer preference. While much of the growth will be in media and entertainment sectors, the subscription model is also being embraced for cars, prepared meals, clothing, personal care products, pet supplies and more. In preparation for this subscription-based economy, companies need to be prepared to put a robust and reliable billing and communications foundation in place.

Integrate Subscription Functions

SubscriptionDNA provides a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that integrates subscription billing, subscription management, paywalls, and authentication, providing customized front-end options so customers can log in and manage their own accounts. Companies can use the solution to automate recurring invoicing, analyze and report, communicate with subscribers, engage in email marketing, process transactions, generate payment requests, track member login statistics and more.

Contact us today to learn how SubscriptionDNA can help your business.

Tips for Launching a Successful Subscription Business

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.

Get started today!

Customer Support is Critical to Subscription Success

When we hear the word “subscription,” we tend to think of magazines. Pay your fee once a year, and a new copy of “National Geographic” arrives in your mailbox each month. But the business model of subscriptions is an increasingly popular one, and now can be applied to everything from cars to wine to clothing to Legos. Younger generations of Americans are not as keen on ownership as older Americans: they like the idea of paying for only what they use, read, watch, drive and wear. They like the variety subscriptions offer. More companies are offering “box” subscription services in which items are shipped, tried out and used or returned for more things.

Customer Support in the Subscription Economy

Because the subscription business model is often more complex and has more moving parts than a purchase model, customer support becomes more challenging, according to Brad Birnbaum writing for Forbes. Companies need to be more careful about “listening” to customers, so this means social media monitoring and dedicated customer support agents.

“Subscription brands need to know what their customers are saying on social to find out if they’re connecting,” wrote Birnbaum. “They need to know if a customer has downgraded their service, and work to find out why.”

Each Interaction Is an Opportunity to Build Loyalty

When you build your customer support infrastructure, remember that subscriptions customers will need to communicate with you more frequently, and they’ll also expect your customer support agents to be experts, according to Birnbaum.

“With great knowledge of your customers comes great responsibility, and that responsibility falls to your agents,” wrote Birnbaum. “Instead of simply solving problems and answering tickets, they need to become makeup stylists, fashion advisors, and pet experts. In other words, agents have to become consultants. Only with that level of deep engagement can they connect with customers and anticipate potential pain points while surprising and delighting them when it counts most.”

To achieve this, you may have to change your hiring practices and engage in more in-depth training on both hard “product” skills and soft skills like deescalating the ire of an angry customer.

You Need a Solid Platform to Build a Subscription Business

Customers like subscriptions because they offer them options, so be sure you’re doing just that and not boxing your customers in, forcing them to shop and pay for things the way you want them to.

A good subscription management platform like Subscription DNA, a software-as-a-service solution that provides subscription billing and membership management, is essential. Using the suite, organizations offering subscriptions can have a single administrative console to manage accounts, automate recurring invoices, analyze reports, communicate with targeted user groups, engage in email marketing, process transactions, generate payment requests, and track member login statistics.

Communicating with your subscription customers – and making it easy for them to communicate with you – will help you improve the quality of customers support you provide. By becoming proactive rather than reactive, you’re better positioned to give your customers what they want when they ask…or even before they ask.