Our speaker, Felix Rossknecht, spoke at a recent dinner about building a successful subscription business, here’s what he had to say about how to make a subscription model work for your business.

There’s a few areas to consider when thinking about how to make subscriptions work for you and your business, these are product, flexibility and experience.

Product
Customers care about your product, not the subscription. It’s the product they buy into and the subscription can be a ‘hassle’ from a customer’s perspective. You need to make sure you put the consumer at the heart of the user journey.

Flexibility
The first interactions between you and your potential consumers is crucial so it’s important to make them aware of the benefits of the subscription model.

We’re doing this for you, to make your life easier.

By being flexible and transparent with the subscription process, you’re enabling consumers to get into a habit of receiving your product and thus avoiding a high churn rate. When it comes to flexibility, subscription models do have a bad rep from legacy (think gym or phone memberships that are notoriously difficult to get out of!), so make sure the model fits around your consumers’ existing habits and behaviours. Make sure you can answer the questions, how much do they consume? How often? Are there any gaps? And so on.

Don’t make a business out of ‘tying people in’ instead you need to get people to trust you! Be open as a business.

Finally, make sure once the customers are set up that you show them the benefit and make it carefree.

Experience
Build a space for emotional engagement, you want your consumers to look forward to their shipment. Make the product exciting and develop a cracking tone of voice. To get the experience right, you must know your customer and their lives (inside and out!). Think about the user journey, every renewal phase, every experience has to be customer friendly and have a good interaction. From the packaging to the ease of receiving the shipment – it has to excel and be hassle-free.

For more great tips from our speakers, check out our Top Tips posts, although nothing beats hearing from them in person. So, why not join a dinner?