These days, it’s become more important than ever for subscription merchants to deliver a top-notch customer experience. How does one achieve this? By focusing on subscription management—that’s all the ways that you handle customer subscriptions, including the ways you allow them to manage their own subscriptions, working together to offer your customers a flexible, intuitive, and convenient experience.
Though subscription management should feel as seamless as possible for customers, it isn’t always so intuitive for merchants to decipher how to efficiently manage subscriptions. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce the launch of A Merchant’s Guide to Subscription Management, our latest ebook that can help guide you through evaluating the best subscription management solution for your brand.
What’s in the evaluation guide?
In A Merchant’s Guide to Subscription Management, we walk through all the considerations for evaluating subscription management needs for your business—whether you offer curated subscription boxes, subscription memberships, or software as a service (SaaS). We also cover how your considerations may change depending on whether you’re new to subscriptions or looking to migrate your current recurring offerings.
Subscription management essentials
In the guide, we break down the elements of subscription management software into five main categories:
- Subscription billing (including a recurring billing engine)
- Merchant tools
- Shopper tools
- Analytics tools
- Payments tools
These aspects all work together to create a seamless experience for both your business and your customers.
Every business has different levels of need when it comes to each of these elements—therefore, there is no one “perfect” solution for every brand. Rather, it’s about finding the subscription management solution that strikes the best balance for your specific brand, customers, and products or services.
To help you assess your business’s subscription management needs, in Part I of the evaluation guide, we break down the different types of subscription management solutions to choose from, as well as the focuses, benefits, and potential drawbacks of each. We also cover popular ecommerce tools to integrate with your solution to address any additional business needs, such as fraud and intelligence solutions, cross-sell and upsell solutions, analytics solutions, and more.
By curating the right assortment of different solutions and tools for your brand, you can create seamless experiences for your subscribers throughout the customer lifecycle. Ultimately, this allows subscription businesses to cultivate the long-term customer relationships that both drive recurring revenue and increase customer satisfaction.
Choosing a solution and optimizing your subscription business
When evaluating solution needs, it’s crucial that subscription services consider options that meet their specific needs. If you’re new to subscriptions, you will likely have very different goals and focuses than a brand who is already selling subscriptions, but looking to migrate their offerings to a different provider.
In Part II of the evaluation guide, we address the major benefits and considerations of a subscription management solution depending on whether you’re new to subscriptions or looking to migrate. We also provide detailed lists of key areas for optimization so you can make sure all the bases are covered and that you’re set up for success with your chosen provider.
New to subscriptions
If you’re an ecommerce business who has never before offered subscriptions, a well-chosen subscription management solution can offer a myriad of benefits. These include:
- Launching your recurring offerings more quickly and easily
- Creating more flexible subscriptions from the beginning, with options for skips, swaps, and one-time purchases that encourage your customers to stay with your business longer
- Focus on your customer and subscriber acquisition; building a loyal subscriber base to set your business up for higher customer lifetime value (LTV) and reduced customer churn
Of course, in order to take advantage of these benefits, it’s important to optimize your business for subscriptions beforehand, and take your optimization needs into account when evaluating your subscription management needs. In the evaluation guide, we walk through key areas to hone in on if you’re just getting your subscriptions up and running, including:
- Your product market fit
- Your customer experience
- Your subscription priorities
- Your shipping needs
- Your tax needs
- Your analytics capabilities
Migrating your subscriptions
Businesses who are already offering subscriptions can also benefit greatly from migrating their offerings to a different subscription management solution. These can include:
- Gaining deeper insights into your customer base through enhanced analytics
- Saving time for your business with automatic workflows
- Increasing customer satisfaction by allowing customers to manage their own subscriptions
- Increasing brand awareness, brand loyalty, average order value (AOV), and LTV
- Reducing customer churn
In the guide, we walk through all the ways your business can set your migration up for success as you evaluate your subscription management solution needs, including:
- Ensuring a clean customer experience during your migration
- Establishing a baseline for your subscription metrics
- Investigating trends in your customer feedback
- Identifying which metrics you’d like to improve through optimized subscription management
A vendor evaluation worksheet for selecting your subscription management software
The final section of the evaluation guide contains a worksheet to help you with the decision-making process of evaluating the right vendor for your business. This allows you to conduct a side-by-side comparison of multiple providers while ranking the importance of different features for your business, allowing you to easily visualize which provider is able to check your most important boxes.
Subscription management fosters long-term customer relationships
Equipping your business with the proper tools to create flexible, intuitive, and convenient subscriptions doesn’t just mean increased average order value (AOV) and LTV. It also means increased customer satisfaction and stronger, more loyal customer relationships. In essence, when chosen correctly for your business, these solutions allow you to make the most of all the benefits of the subscription model.
Ready to choose the best provider for your unique business and subscribers? Download A Merchant’s Guide to Subscription Management today.
