When sourcing subscription management solutions, it’s important for publishers to understand the four phases of the subscription lifecycle:
1. Acquisition
The acquisition phase marks the beginning of a subscriber’s journey, which includes:
- Offering compelling products and services: This might mean bundling products together (eg. print plus digital), a continuity (eg. a monthly book series) or a tier membership program (eg. gold, silver, bronze). Ultimately, you need to offer your targets the products and services they need or want.
- Pricing. Pricing. Pricing: This includes pricing for different periods of service, for different currencies or geographies, special pricing for specific segments, discounts for different types of customers, etc.
- Communication: When customers are onboarding your products, ensure they are receiving communications about those products and confirmation of their purchases.
2. Billing and fulfilment
This phase involves core financial and distribution handling, including:
- Billing: Once the order is created, you want to make sure that invoices go out and any payments are made. Subscription platforms should support both invoice reminders and autocharge models.
- Fulfilment: If it is a digital or physical product, once that order is placed, it needs a smooth transition to the next step of digital access or physical distribution.
- Financial record keeping: A subscription platform must manage a double-sided ledger for detailed accounting, including earned and deferred income that integrates into your accounting system.
3. Engagement and retention
Key activities in this phase include:
- Customer support: All the information needed for your customer service representatives must be available, allowing your reps to quickly respond to customer questions while also transacting any requests. This includes recording customer interactions for future reference and analysis.
- Churn prevention: Ultimately, some percentage of your subscriber base will want to cancel. Retention tools are key, whether it’s performing the cancellation and refunding appropriately, offering a lower price, or adjusting the content mix to better match their interests.
4. Renewal and expansion
The renewal and expansion phase includes:
- Renewal notifications: Offer your subscribers different renewal choices depending on their current attributes (current price, history as a subscriber, etc). Autorenew subscribers will be on autocharge. Subscribers not on autocharge will fall into an invoice notification flow.
- Upselling: As a business, you may want to offer your customers additional products and services during any interaction, such as a phone call, email notification, renewal notice, billing reminder, or distribution event. The trick here is to optimise the upsell opportunities for your customers by identifying the right combinations of when + who + where!
For subs-focused publishers, any subscription management solution, whether handled in-house or outsourced to a bureau, needs to excel in all four phases.
About us
AdvantageCS is the developer of Advantage — a subscription, marketing, sales order processing and membership management platform for publishers who use it to manage their subscriptions and orders for magazine media content, entitlements, products, bundles, memberships, conferences, donations, payments and customer care. AdvantageCS has been serving the publishing industry for 45 years.
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Email: sales-eu@advantageCS.com
Website: www.advantageCS.com
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