ChargeBee Blog

Gift boxes and food subscription businesses like Birch, Healthy Surprise, Tasterie and other may have made the news in 2012. However, they are not the only new wave of subscription models. One of the unique subscription businesses that was launched in 2012 is HowAboutWe for Couples, a curated local dating experiences business for couples. Let’s look at this unique subscription business.

HowAboutWe started in 2010 as a dating site. In 2012, the site started a subscription dating curation offering for couples. Every month, users get a DateBook with curated date ideas customized for every user. The date ideas are based on the area that a user indicates they live when signing up and their preferences.

HowAboutWe Works

For example, a person can get suggestion on the best restaurants to go on a date in their area, where to visit and of course, where they can save money and still have fun during the date. The whole idea of HowAbout We is getting people who are dating offline. Most dating sites try to keep users on their sites, offering various features like messaging, virtual gifts and so on. HowAbout We wants users to get to know each other away from the Internet. This is through planning physical dates around the users’ home areas.

Continue reading “Challenges of Dating Subscription Site HowAboutWe” »

In the early stages of a startup it is the founding team that does most of the sales finding early adopters, influencers and evangelists.

During this period you want to run multiple marketing experiments, while engineering the entire sales process through your website and landing pages.

Let’s look at a few pricing models now shall we?

Example 1:  Vimeo Plus: Simple does the trick here.

Source: http://vimeo.com/plus

Example 2: Trackur is another one.

Source: http://www.trackur.com/options

This is when the customers sign up for a trial. And so the process for the sales team begins.

What if the customer is reluctant & wants a discount? 

This is where the greens are actually involved. In such cases the sales team can be allowed to give discounts. Without even thinking and realizing there are chances of a huge revenue leak for the company.

Continue reading “Why plugging revenue leakage with standardized discounts is important in SaaS?” »

Adobe, one of the largest creative software services providers, is now fully pursuing a subscription business model. The company’s flagship product, Adobe Creative Suite, has been evolved to be accessible on the cloud on a subscription basis. What does this mean for creatives and other software services competitors?

For over three decades, creatives have been paying a license fee to use Adobe design software. However, as the subscription business evolves, large software companies are not being left behind. Adobe Creative Cloud was introduced in late 2012 as a subscription option and so far, everything indicates the company got it right. In the first 9 months, over 450,000 premium users and more than 2 million free members had subscribe to the subscription package.

Adobe’s Creative Cloud Pricing

Creative Cloud was initially introduced to individual members and later to teams. The response has been positive so far. Users can access a single Adobe product for a monthly fee of $29.99 or the entire Creative Suite for a monthly fee of $49.99.

As consumer software consumption moves from perpetual licensing (where you purchase a software to install to your PC) to a SaaS model, Adobe has decided to go all-in to offer a SaaS service with its Creative Cloud. While the company will continue selling the current versions of its products, no further feature updates will be made for them

Benefits of the Cloud

Together with its cloud storage service, Adobe is providing creative professionals with all they need to successfully execute projects. According to Adobe senior executives, the shift to a subscription based model is a major but necessary step for the company’s future sustainability. Users can now expect more stable versions and quicker patches, fixes and updates with the Creative Cloud.

Continue reading “Adobe Fully Adopts Subscription Model With Creative Cloud” »

While the rising subscription-based economy is an entirely new phenomenon, the human affinity for narrative is nothing new. According to experienced brand storyteller James T. Noble, “storytelling is a proven way to develop identity, build your client base, and increase sales.” A well-told narrative bridges the gap between advertising and building relationships. Given that 75% of consumers don’t trust advertising messages, the emotional appeal of a story can draw them in, and leave them more receptive to further communications from a brand. Here are several additional benefits:

• Narrative lends a personalized bent to your brand.
• Stories can spruce up even the most boring case studies and data sets. 
• Tales of real-life customers can lend social proof to your advertising messages.

Perhaps best of all, stories are a cheap platform. There’s no cost aside from your time in developing a tale of your best customer’s success using your product, or penning a modern fable that directly ties to your ideal customer’s pain points. Here are some ways to ensure storytelling is highly appropriate, and effective:

1. Strive for Social Proof

Perhaps the simplest and most-apparent form of brand storytelling, case studies allow customers to do the talking on behalf of the brand. Consumers are more likely to listen to another consumer’s take on a branded solution than a companies, and a well-written case study illustrates the efficacy of a product in action. The most well-written customer success stories read more like a narrative than a corporate tip sheet, and include insight on the company’s pain points, and any difficulty encountered in reaching their current level of success.

71% of B2B marketers are currently using case studies actively to convert and convince their prospects. Case studies aren’t the only form of social proof that can effectively convey a brand’s story. Actively solicit quotations, images, and other content from your customer base to incorporate into your content marketing.

2. Be Relevant

Even if you opt to craft a modernized fairy tale of a company actively seeking subscription software solutions and fighting the terrible dragon known as low uptime, your story should be rooted in reality. Use enough consistency with the factors your prospects encounter on a regular basis to develop rapport, and avoid overselling your solution in a way that could potentially damage trust.

While AllState’s Mayhem character is a sort of dark and mythical, the situations he causes present very real risk to the brand’s target buyer.

Continue reading “How to use story telling to increase customer engagement?” »

Drip marketing helps brands stay relevant to their prospects and build relationships over time. To remain in a healthy state, SaaS businesses should strive to get customers at the lowest cost possible. Drip marketing gives SaaS founders an opportunity to establish their credibility in the market and convert leads to customers at a low cost. Let’s take a look at how drip marketing can work for your business.

SaaS companies have to determine what kind of customers they are signing up. Trial users can be argued to be a vanity metric, but with proper segmentation, you can improve the chances of the users converting to paying customers.

Identifying Serious Buyers

When you launch your SaaS offering, you need to check various metrics to determine whether a user is simply an “explorer” or a “serious buyer”. You can use different tools to track user activity on your SaaS offering to better understand them. For example, you may want to know:

• Which features of the app is popular with your user
• Average time that trial users spend on your app
• Expressed interest in exploring paid features
• Know the type of persons who have signed up (Buyer Personas)

User engagement in your app can give you a clear indication on their likelihood of converting to paid customers. At the same time, you will get marketing insight on what users are looking for in your app.

Email communication is an important part of any SaaS drip marketing campaign. Email can provide crucial information that can help you know how to tailor your offer or approach your market. With email, you can:

• Carry out customer feedback and surveys.
• Provide quick links to FAQs and video tutorial.
• Provide marketing messages such as upgrades, discounts, etc.
• Reach users in a personal way to convince them to upgrade.

Continue reading “How to use Drip Marketing to your advantage in SaaS” »

When a SaaS customer churns, it isn’t just a sign of dissatisfaction with your product. As Lincoln Murphy puts it, lost customers are literally “threat to your business, your revenue, [and] your ability to grow.” Regardless of whether your company has a churn rate in the range of 5-7%, it’s critical to utilize implicit data to determine risk among your customer base.

If you aren’t actively using behavioral analysis to determine the segments of your clients who present the greatest churn risk, and reach out accordingly, you could be surprised by a sudden and potentially devastating loss of revenue when your customers migrate to a competitor. Here are several ways to proactively identify risk for churn:

1. User Engagement

The single-biggest risk for churn occurs when your customers aren’t invested in your product. If they aren’t using your subscription business on a regular basis, why should they continue paying for the service? However, it’s essential to realize that you can’t accurately analyze behavior without a baseline measurement of optimal engagement. What’s normal for your product may change significantly over the customer lifecycle, so develop an accurate gauge of how your real-life customers use your SaaS.

Murphy points out that without a baseline measurement, you could miss signs of disengagement, and “lose a customer when you really didn’t have to.” Webengage can aggregate customer insights and feedback for proactive monitoring.

2. Sign the Right Customers

Behavioral segmentation during the trial phase can ensure your company’s sales team are focusing on the right prospects, with intention to buy and a need for the product. Michael Gentle recommends proactively scoring your trial users against a set of defined churn risk criteria, which could include organizational information and insight on need, in addition to engagement.

Continue reading “How to Avoid Churn and Identify Risk” »

Salesforce custom fields can make your marketing campaign more efficient in gathering important information from your leads. Custom fields help you to better understand your customer needs and maximize on sales. 

When gathering leads using Salesforce, it is important to learn as much as you can about the prospects to determine how your SaaS service fits in their needs.The 4Ps of marketing (price, product, place and promotion) can help you determine the percentage possibility of a lead turning into a customer, and thus tailor your SaaS inbound marketing campaign to improve conversions.

Salesforce Custom Fields

Apart from the commonly used fields such as First Name, Last Name and Email Address, you may wish to get other information from your Salesforce forms. This is where custom fields are important. You can specify the type of data that will be accepted in each custom field based on what you are looking for. However, in as much as you can create as many fields as you wish, you have to strike a balance between information gathering and lead satisfaction. You do not want to have too many fields such that prospects will get discouraged from filling the form.

Best Practices on Using Custom Fields

a) Avoid cluttering the page with a lot of fields. Strike a balance between the number of custom fields you set up and the space available on your page. Only set up the necessary fields that will help in lead segmentation.

b) Use the right field for the right job. A text field will be able to hold dates but will be useless if you will want to do any calculations on the date. Whenever possible, use the picklists available to standardize data.

c) Use custom fields where you need them. You can use the fields to get important data such as the age, location, income levels, gender, interest/hobbies and so on. The data you request for should be guided by your service.

Continue reading “Custom fields – What salesforce did right & benefits” »

Arguably one of the earliest forms of group communication on the Internet, forums have changed dramatically and diversified greatly from simply bringing together a community of users to exclusive membership sites with in-demand content. Today we focus on forums in our continuing series of subscription business models.

Forums are perhaps the best places to connect online for people who share the same interests or passions. Forums are great places to learn about a particular subject. Users with problems can get help, most of it for free, from other users, product creators or enthusiasts of a product or service. Free help is what forums are mainly about.

Free Registration vs. Restricted Registration Forums

Registration at forums is usually free although some restrictions may apply depending on the forum owner. For example, forums that are centered towards a particular niche will usually be free. On the other hand, businesses or individuals that sell products or services may allow only their customers to register or view particular content on their forums.

The free or restricted registration is usually tied to the business angle of the forum owners. For instance, at forums that are free to register, the owner is usually a moderator who may not be providing a particular product or service. He or she simply brings users together for the purposes of helping each other out.

On the other hand, the forum owners that restrict registration usually provide a service or product to users. Therefore, they would only want to offer support to users who bought their product. For example, the content at Templatic’s support forum is only available to users who’ve bought the company’s products. Most companies integrate forums on their websites to offer customer support or provide a platform through which users can help each other.

Case Studies: Successful Subscription Membership Forums

Forums can be monetized through different ways including advertisements, affiliate sales, product and service sales, paid memberships, among others. Let’s look at two examples of successful subscription membership forums.

1. John Stone Fitness

John Stone Fitness  is a weight loss focused forum that connects people who want to lose weight and lead a healthier lifestyle. The forum has a lot of helpful weight loss content including recipes, training exercises, inspiration stories, fitness equipment advice, and general weight training tips for beginners and experts.

Continue reading “Subscription Business Model Series – Forums” »

Entrepreneurs and sales experts have long known that selling to your existing customer base is good business. It’s 5 to 10 times cheaper to upsell a current customer than acquire a new one, and the average spend of a repeat customer is 67 times higher. The world’s most-successful SaaS providers take three approaches to increasing revenue: acquiring new customers, upselling, and reducing churn. For many subscription business owners, improving your revenue, and increase customer lifetime value requires designing and implementing a program for upselling.

Source: chaotic-flow.com

Upselling in Practice

One of the world’s most-successful subscription businesses, Salesforce, has built an empire that’s worth $2.27 billion annually through a strong focus on upselling. They don’t bombard their customer base with frequent phone calls, or offer freemium subscriptions, but simply let customers come to the realization on their own that they need more service than they’re currently paying for.

As Joel Yorke puts it, “if you’ve ever been a Salesforce customer, you know 90% of the upgrade process…[is] repeatedly bumping into the limits of your current subscription.”

Continue reading “How to use Upselling in SaaS” »

Even in an era of automation, there’s no excuse to NOT run your company on auto-pilot. The customers of subscription-based businesses may upgrade or downgrade, earn credit for referrals, and dispute charges, and they deserve accurate and timely invoices. Gary Vaynerchuk has always stated that “you can’t scale effort.” While there is truth to his statement, it’s a fact that effective recurring billing should strive to automate as much of the process as possible, while still providing accurate information on every invoice.

Gartner research estimates that by 2015, between 35% of global 2000 companies will generate 5-10% of their revenue through subscription-based models. Is your company’s billing system built to scale the increasing need for on-demand, recurring services?

Common Recurring Billing Issues

It goes without saying that in a subscription economy, there’s no room for one-size-fits all product or billing solutions. Consumers are more hesitant to commit than ever, which has lead to the incredible increase in subscription media and month-to-month mobile services. Recognize that your client base isn’t insulated from your competition, and streamline any systems that could lead to potential breakdown in your relationship.

Many subscription-based businesses are still handling their monthly invoices on spreadsheets. While this format is certainly malleable, the margin for human error makes it more of a liability than a system. Any company that depends on recurring revenue on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis can expect the following changes on their invoices:

• Special Billing and Applied Credits
• Custom Pricing and Charges
• Offline Payment Collection

Continue reading “In recurring billing – Why there is some manual intervention required?” »