What is the Lifecycle of a Subscription?
Nowadays, people prefer subscriptions. For software, automobiles, content or cosmetics customers prefer to try an item or service for an affordable monthly cost instead of purchasing it at a higher cost.
This is why companies are trying to learn how they can implement and be successful with subscription-based business models.
Five Phases of the Subscription Lifecycle
1. Acquisition
The acquire phase comprises actions like the definition of offer and product segmentation, personalization, packaging, pricing, promotion campaigns, testing, iteration, onboarding, as well as entitlements.
Two of the most important capabilities that drive acquisition are:
Go-To-Market flexibility
The ability to quickly design any plan that your sales and marketing teams come up with – not limited by technology, software costs, or time or cost limitations.
Agility
Fast times to market innovative products, and the capability to quickly change the course of your product and tweak offerings (e.g. altering price and adding new features).
2. Billing
The Bill phase comprises billing, invoicing tax calculation, payment handling and fraud detection. It also covers control of chargebacks, accounts receivable collections, revenue recognition, and reporting.
It’s not simply a logistical or technical requirement; it’s an effective weapon to increase revenue, acquisition and retention. Flexible billing allows for creative marketing.
For instance, subscription lifecycle management software‘s offer multiple pricing options to attract customers with various preferences, including use-based billing, recurring costs discounts, tiered options including virtual currencies, and many more.
It isn’t a good idea to change your billing platform often. This is the reason subscription softwares were designed to help your expansion and growth.
They are extremely adaptable and supports international currencies as well as global taxes, and more than 90 different payment options, including national credit cards as well as digital wallets like PayPal, Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, and so on.
3. Retention
The retain stage begins at the time a subscriber signs up. It covers customer engagement and loyalty programs, as being a constant challenge like forecasting churns, churn-prevention, dunning and most importantly the recovery of unsuccessful transactions.
Retention is an important aspect for subscription businesses. The cost of keeping the customer is around one-fifth (some claim one 10th) of the price of getting another one, therefore companies that invest in their customer relations and retention starting beginning the moment a new customer is converted.
There are two kinds of churn, active churn and passive and both need to be tackled in a different manner.
Active Churn
This happens when a customer is unhappy with your service and decides to leave at their own discretion. Businesses need to guard against active churn by altering the pricing or product or by enhancing the way they communicate the benefits to the customer, and by offering loyalty points, incentives as well as other ways to increase customer engagement.
Churning that is passive
When a customer decides to leave your service, it is not due to choice but due to an issue with the payment network, resulting in an unsuccessful charge card. The most common tools to combat the passive churn problem are retry, account updater, and dunning.
4. Expansion
In the expand stage, it’s all about expanding your horizons and vision. It encompasses fundamental processes like cross-selling and up-sell but also allows you to launch new products, properties, or expand geographically.
The growth in revenue is the lifeblood of subscription companies. Revenue growth helps fund acquisitions expansion, expansion, and innovation.
Growth is mostly by two aspects:
Expand Revenue Already Existing:
Start by attracting new customers, and then cross-selling and up-selling your customer base.
Increase Revenue With New Sources:
Expand your operation to include new products and new business lines and even new regions. Subscription software’s extensive support for different currencies, languages and tax compliance around the world makes it simple for businesses that subscribe to the service to expand their operations internationally and within the United States.
5. Success
The Succeed stage includes specific activities such as the integration, implementation and migration, and more importantly, continuous optimization driven by consulting as well as benchmarking, analytics along with business intelligence.
Bottom Line
The success of a subscription business requires excellence throughout the lifecycle of a subscription business. This book has briefly outlined the phases and the way SubscriptionFlow provides you with all the features you require to achieve success and expand.
