Attracting new subscribers to your subscription business can certainly be a challenge, especially in today’s e-commerce landscape, where everyone is looking for more attractive deals. Customer acquisition is especially important because it typically costs businesses a lot of money to acquire new customers, which means your acquisition strategies must count.
Thankfully, there are ways to attract customers even without slashing your bottom line to ribbons with discounts. And you can also apply this if you are doing home-based work. Check out this list of best practices we’ve compiled that should help you get new signups for your subscription-based business.
Make the journey from curiosity to purchase as streamlined and frictionless as possible
One big reason why potential subscribers may be turned off from doing business with you is the fact that the signup or purchasing process takes too long or requires too many bothersome verification checks. Work with your programmers and website designers to shorten or simplify that process as much as possible while still maintaining transaction security. Doing so will enable more buy-in opportunities to come to fruition.
Use the right subscription billing software solution for your business
Once you get new subscribers, it’s up to you to make sure they keep subscribed. One way of doing this is also streamlining how your subscribers get billed every month. Using a subscription billing software that automatically charges your subscribers for every pay period—as well as automatically following up and retrying in case of failed transactions—will go a long way towards retaining your customers and eliminating subscriber attrition, i.e. customer churn.
Make yourself known to new subscribers
You can offer the perfect product and have the perfect price point for potential subscribers to buy-in, but if they don’t know you exist, then you might as well not be selling anything at all. Change this by making sure to put your business name and product out there, by all means possible. Use social media as a free mass-marketing tool. Take advantage of search engine optimization (SEO) as well as email marketing.
Target foreign markets
Depending on the product or service you offer, it may be a good idea to start targeting customers from other regions. Mark Mulligan, a writer for LinkedIn Pulse, mentioned that for subscription-based services the western market is getting very overpopulated. Look towards big regions where Internet usage is booming, such as China and Brazil, as well as certain parts of Europe. Regionalize your pages and content to entice customers from these areas if possible.
Offer multiple payment methods
While most of the e-commerce generation do their online purchases with credit cards, there still exists a portion of that group that seek to use other payment methods—either for fear of credit card debt or identity fraud. By diversifying the ways in which your customers can pay for their subscriptions, you’ll not only attract more business, you’ll also be able to provide your existing subscribers other ways to keep their subscriptions going, in case their credit card is suddenly maxed out or rendered unavailable.
Give incentives to people spreading word about your business
Leverage your current subscriber base by offering discounts or perks whenever they share a positive experience or review of your product through their own social media accounts. Not only will this improve your image in the long run, but it can also help attract new customers.
Never compete with pricing, but value
It’s always tempting to try and be cheaper than the rest of the herd. After all, it’s often a great way to get people’s eyes on your service or product. However, this is the lazy way of doing it, and it makes your product or service immediately appear ‘lesser’ than your competitors. Instead, seek to provide more value for your asking price. Keep improving your product or service, or even go the extra mile in ways that won’t break your bottom line. These include providing personalized customer support or extra months in warranty.
How about you? What customer acquisition best practices do you follow in your subscription business?