It’s hard to miss the shift in consumer preferences that’s happening as the Millennial generation grows up, earns more and rejects traditional models of ownership.

In a recent interview with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo went a step further than declaring a shift.

“The reality is ownership is dead; now it’s really about access as the new imperative,” he said.

Future of Subscription Services

We’ve all gotten used to subscriptions for certain products and services: food, books and music, video content, wine, and even clothing. But where will the subscription economy go from here? Growth is staggering – the subscription market has grown by more than 100 percent a year, increasing from $57 million in sales in 2011 to $2.6 billion in 2016.

So what’s next when it comes to subscriptions?

The sky is the limit, according to Tzuo.

“My colleagues and I, often over dinner and wine, would challenge each other to come up with businesses that couldn’t be turned into a subscription model,” he told Stanford Business School. “We tossed out ideas like guitars, cement. We realized it’s not about the physical product, it’s about what the customer is trying to do. And that inversion of thinking is at the root of everything.”

Making the Switch to Subscription Models

Experts are warning that companies that aren’t thinking about how they can switch to a subscription model – or at least offer one parallel to other business models – may find in the future there is no business left for them. If companies do it right, they can keep selling their products and sell new digital subscription services, as well.

To embrace the subscription economy, however, organizations need to prepare a robust administrative platform to support their subscription customers. Effective customer support and marketing are vital.

“Advertising may never go away, but as subscription services become the norm, readers and publishers alike are starting to appreciate the dividends of a direct consumer relationship,” Tzuo told Stanford Business School. “The behavioral insight that comes with membership plans and paywalls helps media companies move away from empty calories like page views toward more valuable engagement metrics like time spent.”

The answer lies in a reliable, flexible cloud-based subscription business platform like Subscription DNA.  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, launch marketing campaigns and much more.

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

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.

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.