Whether you’re new to subscriptions or experienced with recurring offerings, the right subscription management solution can take your business to the next level. However, the steps to set your store up for success prior to choosing a provider will vary depending on your experience level and existing tech stack.
In this series of blog posts, we’re breaking down everything you need to know about subscription management. We’ve already covered the types of subscription management solutions, the secret to ecommerce integrations, and the most common elements of a subscription management solution. If you don’t yet offer subscriptions, we’ve also outlined the steps you can take to optimize your business before choosing a provider.
In this post, we’ll cover how merchants who are experienced with subscriptions can set themselves up for success before transitioning their subscription management software. For more in-depth information on managing subscriptions, download our free ebook, A Merchant’s Guide To Subscription Management.
Key takeaways
- By choosing the right subscription management solution, stores can increase AOV and LTV while reducing churn.
- The steps to optimizing your business for a subscription management solution differ based on your experience level with subscriptions.
- For merchants who are already offering subscriptions, focus on the customer experience and analytics before choosing a new provider.
How can the right subscription management solution benefit your business?
Subscription management solutions aren’t just meant for merchants who are new to recurring offerings. For those who are already offering subscriptions—either with a home-grown fix or an existing subscription management platform—choosing a well-matched provider can help you take your subscription-based business to the next level.
By creating seamless experiences that improve the customer experience, you can not only improve your subscriber loyalty, but also save time and resources with automated workflows. By empowering your customers to manage their own subscriptions, you can reduce customer support costs while increasing recurring revenue, average order value (AOV), and customer lifetime value (LTV) for your brand.
You can also leverage these solutions to reduce your customer churn, which is particularly important given ever-rising customer acquisition costs. According to the Harvard Business Review, the cost of acquiring a new customer can be 5–25x greater than that of retaining an existing one.
Setting your store up for success
So—how can you lay the groundwork for success before choosing a subscription management solution? For merchants who are already offering subscriptions, it’s key to focus on two main areas: the customer experience and your analytics.
How to prioritize the customer experience
Whenever you adjust your tech stack, it’s crucial to prioritize the customer experience. This is particularly important if you’re already using one subscription management solution and looking to transition to a different provider who can better meet your needs. After all, you don’t want your existing subscribers to be negatively impacted by the shift—they’re the MVPs of your subscription business, and you want to keep them with you for the long term.
Here, it’s key to identify areas for customization within your subscriptions—both short term and long term. From there, investigate which providers can allow you to make those changes so you can choose a provider that will support your goals for business growth.
Consider the potential pain points that your existing customers might experience during the migration. For example, you might anticipate some amount of site downtime, or a subscription billing change for your customers, such as a price increase. Make sure to clearly communicate these changes to manage customer expectations and ensure a smooth transition. As a business, do you anticipate needing additional support due to these changes? If so, ensure that your chosen vendor will be able to fulfill these needs.
Consider your tech stack: What ecommerce tools are you currently using? What tools would you like to begin using in the future? Confirm that your top subscription management vendors offer integrations with these tools.
Finally, when considering providers, it can be highly valuable to request migration success stories from them. These can help you determine if your top choices are familiar with your priorities, challenges, and opportunities.
How to assess your analytics needs & baseline
The best subscription management software offers robust data capabilities, which can help you gain a deeper understanding of your customers. In order to make the most of this, it’s important to gain a baseline for your business and determine your future analytics needs.
To do this, prior to migrating to a different subscription management solution, conduct your own analysis on important metrics for your store. Good places to start are your retention rate, churn rate, LTV, AOV, and monthly recurring revenue (MRR). Investigate trends in your data over time, and consider which metrics you want to improve by optimizing your subscriptions.
At the same time, investigate trends in your customer feedback—another key form of customer data. In particular, take a close look at feedback around how easily customers can manage their own subscriptions, as well as reasons your churned customers give for canceling. Then, build this into your migration strategy, tracking how feedback changes over time.
You may not be able to determine answers for these questions with your existing tech stack—maybe that’s why you’re interested in migrating to a different provider in the first place! If this is the case for your business, consider adding capabilities for collecting feedback to your tech stack as you migrate.
Level up your business with the right subscription management software
By optimizing your business in this way, you can choose a provider that will grow with you. What’s more, you’ll lay the groundwork for valuable customer relationships that stand the test of time.
Interested in learning more about the different types of subscription management solutions? Download A Merchant’s Guide to Subscription Management for free today.
