Needless to say, if your business sells products and services online, the vast majority of visitors who place an item in their cart fail to complete the purchase, sacrificing untold revenue dollars each year.

In a previous blog, we explored some of the more common reasons for cart abandonment, including unexpected costs, lack of consumer trust with regard to security, and hosting a non-mobile-friendly website, among others. Here, we’ll explore additional factors that may contribute to cart abandonment, as well as solutions to mitigate them.

1. Some Customers Conduct Research With No Intent to Buy … Yet

With nearly endless vendor options and paths to purchase, savvy consumers will likely conduct extensive research on a product before opening their wallets. When a consumer places a product in their shopping cart and then abandons, it may just be part of the consideration stage of the buying cycle – and they’re likely doing the same with your competitors. In fact, according to a SeeWhy report, as many as 99 percent of first-time visitors won’t convert on their first visit, but 75 percent of those visitors who abandon do so with the intention to eventually buy.

Solution: Offer a price-match guarantee designed to target those visitors who don’t perceive your product as more or less valuable than your competitors’, and whose primary buying criteria is price. It’ll offer a chance to tip their interest in your company’s direction. Or, build out a remarketing campaign targeting ad spend against keywords that consumers have already searched for.

2. Keep the Checkout Process Clean and Simple

Ecommerce is truly a buyer’s market, especially given the increasing number of resources that consumers have at their fingertips. A frustrating or overly complicated checkout won’t keep your visitors on-site for long, so keep the process as clear and simple as possible. We’ve already discussed the importance of mobile and tablet optimization, but how else can you streamline the process?

Solution: The number of form submissions required of your visitor should secure enough information to complete the purchase, but not so many that it becomes an overwhelming or intrusive process. You certainly want enough customer data to gain deeper insight into their buying habits and to leverage for repeat business campaigns, but you don’t want the purchase process to become a deterrent to the purchase itself.

In addition to keeping your pages fast, clean and easy to navigate, include a progress indicator on your page, so a visitor knows exactly how far they are in the purchase process, and how far they still have to go.

3. Keep Coupons and Promo Codes In-house

Consumers continuously look for the best price, and the availability of coupons and other promotions keep their interest piqued. Many third-party sites like Groupon and Retail Me Not offer coupons and deep discounts for online retailers. But unfortunately, forcing consumers to look elsewhere for savings directs them off your site, and you run the risk of visitors never coming back (up to 8 percent of all visitors, according to Statista).

Solution: The nature of paying full price makes consumers feel like they’re not getting the best price. Therefore, include an auto-apply coupon or discount of the week, or consider selling a featured product for less than the normal price, for a limited time. Consumers will be more likely to see value in your product, which will ultimately increase the chance of conversion.

4. Real-time Customer Service

While conducting product research in preparation for a buying decision, consumers will likely have a series of questions around price structure, product functionality and subscription options. If your company’s FAQ page falls short, this may increase the likelihood of cart abandonment. Some 83 percent of visitors say they’d prefer on-site help, and 51 percent said they’d be more likely to make a purchase decision if they had on-site support, according to a LivePerson report.

Download the ebook: Retaining Subscribers & Optimizing the Renewal Process

Solution: Site visitors who are able to have a phone conversation or face-to-face Skype experience with a product expert will be better informed around their buying concerns. Offer real-time customer service over the phone, as well as a message system on your site, so visitors feel fully informed around the product you’re offering.

5. Increase Payment Options

As younger, tech-savvy consumers control more and more buying power, merchants would be wise to host as many payment options as possible. The fewer payment options your company offers, the likelihood of cart abandonment increases. In fact, some 25 percent of U.S. online shoppers abandon their shopping carts because their preferred payment wasn’t an option.

Solution: In addition to the standard credit and debit payment options, make other methods available – particularly those that are popular in specific regions. The fewer payment obstacles standing between your visitors and a purchase, the more likely it is that a visitor will complete the transaction.

Keystone

The key to decreasing your company’s cart abandonment rate is knowing why the cart is being abandoned in the first place. Design your payment process around what your visitors need to know, what they want to know, and reduce the number of obstacles they have on the path to purchase using the tips above.

Kyle Shamorian is the content marketer for cleverbridge.

The post 5 Ways to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment appeared first on cleverbridge.

Wherever you find digital shopping, you will also find different regional requirements for succeeding in those markets. To accommodate those local customs across the global market, your customer experience needs to be flexible. Flexibility in this area does not mean your customer experience needs to touch its nose to its toes. A flexible global customer experience means that your business technology gives the best customer experience to anyone who visits your site, no matter where they come from.

Localization is one technique you should use for creating the good customer experiences. It is important for maximizing recurring revenue, because it provides more acquisitions up front and more renewals later on, thus reducing your churn rates and increasing your customer lifetime value.

To help you take your business to this next level of safe and secure customer experiences optimized for global customers, we put together this analysis of the seven most important aspects for creating the best customer experience to grow your global subscriber base:

• Languages
• Currencies
• Prices
• Payment methods
• Page elements
• Taxes
• Risk management

Localize Languages

Avoid making assumptions about which language to display to your customers based solely on their geolocation. Instead, rely on the preferences customers select in the browser. Then use those preferences to deliver the right customer experience for sign-up pages, marketing emails, customer account sections and in-app messages.

Localize Currencies

If you want to raise conversion rates and maximize renewal rates, you must let subscribers pay in their local currency. Depending on your base currency, a fluctuating exchange rate may be a problem for CLV, or it may be an opportunity for unexpected cash. Research your competition and test different pricing methods to see which prices work best for specific regional markets.

Localize Prices

You can price your service in a local currency but still not offer a competitive price. When you set prices in local currencies, don’t use a floating exchange rate to convert the prices of your product, and make sure the prices display in clean, round numbers. You also have to consider the purchasing power of the average customer in your target market.

Localize Payment Methods

Localizing payment methods makes the user experience of paying for subscriptions as simple as possible for the customer. Many subscribers in different regions of the world prefer to use payment methods other than credit card. You must offer those payment methods to reduce friction in the customer experience and increase recurring revenue rates.

Localize Page Elements

Page elements are easy to overlook, but they are essential to providing exceptional customer experiences to your global subscribers. The way you display dates, prices, and form fields must all comply with local conventions, which vary widely.

Localize Taxes

If you are the merchant of record for your online transactions, you need a system in place to correctly calculate, collect and remit taxes to the proper tax authorities. Displaying taxes the right way raises conversion rates and maximizes renewals. And complying with regional tax law mitigates the risk to your business. But the number of taxing jurisdictions across the world makes achieving compliance with all global tax requirements on your own a difficult challenge.

Localize Risk Management

More and more, companies are starting to realize just how important it is to both comply with regional privacy standards and secure crucial business data from hackers and breaches. The more you know about your obligations in the areas of data privacy and information security, the safer your customers will feel and the safer your business will be.

Keystone

Localization is crucial for creating better customer experiences and earning more recurring revenue. When you implement great customer experiences, you make it easier for people around the world to subscribe to your service, and that means more recurring revenue for you.

Download the full ebook to learn all about localizing your subscription business for international markets.

The post Seven Tips for Growing Your Global Subscriber Base appeared first on cleverbridge.

Today, customers easily compare your pricing with your competitors, share positive or negative reviews of your product, and demand personalized options for engaging with your brand.

The business model focus has shifted from one-time transactions to nurturing long-term customer relationships. The result of this shift is that you must continuously bring valuable experiences to customers — if you don’t, you’ll see your churn rates increase as customers leave you for your competitors.

In contrast, research published in the Harvard Business Review showed that even a 5 percent decrease in churn can increase profits by up to 85 percent. For digital goods companies shifting to subscriptions, the ability to decrease churn and retain customers becomes even more important.

With that fundamental understanding, let’s dive in to how to retain subscribers and optimize the renewal process to dramatically improve the economics of your business.

Three Key Touchpoints for Retaining Customers

There are three critical times to connect with your customers, and we’ll review actionable tips and best practices to minimize churn and maximize retention.

1. The first 48 hours after signup or purchase
2. Throughout the customer lifecycle
3. Pre-renewal time

The first 48 hours after signup or purchase

“The first 48 hours are the most important to set up for the rest of your customer’s lifetime value.
– David Walsh, former Marketing Director at Intuit

You start building a relationship with your customer as soon as they sign up. By creating a good first impression, you can help educate your customer on the true value of your offering, which will aid in creating a stickier relationship that is less likely to churn.

What types of communication should you be sending at this juncture in your customer relationship?

• Say, “Thanks!”
• Explain the benefits the customer stands to gain as a paying customer
• Educate customers with tips for using your product or service

As we noted in World Class Customer Service – Enhancing Confirmation Pages, you should view your order confirmation emails as marketing emails because they represent your brand and they can also drive more business.

Throughout the customer lifecycle

The better the experience you offer your customers while they’re using a product, receiving support, and buying and renewing their subscriptions, the lower your churn rate will be.

Manage customer expectations with information about new product features and upcoming enhancements. By relentlessly analyzing subscriber data, it’s easy for you to know exactly what interests your customers.

This insight enables you to constantly change offers and add personalized extras, increasing overall revenue.

Pre-renewal time

Here are some best practices to implement in your subscription program for streamlining your renewal process and maximizing retention.

• Automate subscription renewals.
• Offer a variety of payment methods.
• Launch an integrated marketing campaign to notify subscribers of upcoming renewals.
• Utilize revenue retention tools to identify upcoming renewals with outdated credit card details.

Start communicating with customers no fewer than 30 days out. This gives them adequate amount of time to decide how they want to proceed with their service. Your subscribers may need a bit of encouragement, so contact them with reminders seven days out, 48 hours out, 24 hours out and then on the day of renewal.

Even after multiple renewal reminds and strategic revenue retention efforts, there will always be those few customers who fall into the black hole of inactivity. When a subscriber has gone radio silent on your brand, use these last-minute efforts to re-engage them:

• Communicate the unsuccessful renewal to the customer.
• Utilize a winback email campaign.
• Don’t hide the “Cancel” button.

Keystone

Focusing exclusively on customer acquisition — without a plan to reinforce value and nurture a relationship — is a recipe for short-term success and long-term failure.

Check out What Does It Take To Retain Customers? for detailed examples of the emails discussed in this blog post.

Ryan Greives is the Public Relations Manager at cleverbridge.

The post What Does It Take To Retain Customers? appeared first on cleverbridge.

“Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.”
– Stephen Covey

A New Perspective on Confirmation Details

In our previous post in this series, we showed some examples of the installation/activation instructions that software companies display on their order confirmation pages. In this installment, we’ll present ideas that will further your new understanding of confirmation pages and the role they play in your customer’s support experience.

We’ve already discussed how using your first post-purchase contact with your customer to share helpful support resources is part of providing exemplary customer service. The most tangible benefit of this strategy is customer retention. This clarity and access to helpful information results in building or maintaining a positive image and providing a positive customer experience.

In the software industry, confirmation pages should perhaps be thought of more as introductions to your company. They are your brand’s opportunity to solidify the relationship that started when your customer purchased your product or service. Considering it simply a confirmation of purchase or a set of technical instructions is really a wasted opportunity. Instead, you should use confirmation pages to set customers up for a lasting relationship with your lineup of offerings.

The strategy of setting the groundwork for a great introduction to your company was touched upon in our first two posts where we talked about clarity of information and providing additional resources for the customer to access when experiencing a challenge of some sort. Now let’s focus on:

• Support options
• Links to additional help resources

Support Options

What are your current support options? If you were your least experienced customer, would the lack of a direct contact option help you — or would it turn you off? If your company has chosen to allocate resources towards other areas in your organization, a phone number may not be an option you can offer. What about a simple, memorable email address? How about a direct link to a contact form that is not buried somewhere a customer has to dig through layers to get to it?

Offer an Email Address or Easy Access to a Contact Form

Remember, without a phone number, you are already at a disadvantage. Flashback to our quote in our first post where it was mentioned that, “71% of customers believe that calling is the most effective channel for a quick response.” Adding extra layers to get to your support options increases the chances that a customer will request a refund or refuse to make further purchases.

Instead, use your confirmation page to clearly indicate an email address or contact form and include reassuring wording like “Dedicated Support Email Address/Support Form.” This informs your customers that you have established avenues of contact and responsive staff to receive their requests for assistance.

In today’s day and age, it seems that quite a few businesses are actually striving to hide their support options — or at least they aren’t making them easily accessible from a support page. Now, only you can view your specific numbers and determine whether this tactic is a worthwhile risk for you to take. However, from personal experience on the front lines of providing support, the accusations made by frustrated customers are, “This is a scam because I can’t get the support I need!” or “You made taking my money easy but not taking my request for help!”

The prevailing belief of the consumer is that if you want them to buy something, you better be prepared to help them with their purchase. Failing to do so, or making it an Easter egg hunt to find your contact options, can only frustrate your customer and leave them with a negative perception of your company.

Provide Links to Additional Help Resources

In the second part of our series, we showcased examples of companies that provided links to additional support options and information. These options can be a valuable resource for customers, but you have to remember to make sure that they are relevant, easy to navigate and up-to-date.

Here’s one thing to double-check: Is the link that a customer clicks on taking them to the support for the right product? We have seen examples where a software vendor had good intentions by providing a resource link, but the link took the customer to a page for a different product. Sure, there could be a listing on a sidebar to the correct item, but is that really helpful to someone who’s potentially already confused?

If you take the customer to a support page with many options, you need to clearly indicate what each option is for — perhaps by creating categories with individual software product names noted under each. This could make things easier for both you and your customer. They can easily choose the topic they need and it makes your resources easier to maintain, as you can update or remove links to product sub-pages as needed.

As you experiment and evolve these options, make sure the wording is consistent with your current products. Outdated screen shots or instructions that don’t match up (or provide clarity) can create confusion for someone relying on step-by-step instructions. Most importantly, as your site structure changes, you must offer a helpful redirect to a current page or present a more helpful message than “Link not found.”

Keystone

Think of your confirmation pages as introductions that your customer can rely on to provide helpful details. To provide a positive experience with your brand, give clear support options and resources that are relevant, easy to navigate and up-to-date.

Bernie Aguirre is the Customer Service Quality Assurance Analyst at cleverbridge.

The post World Class Customer Service – Enhancing Confirmation Pages appeared first on cleverbridge.

No longer does the customer relationship end with the swipe of a credit card.

But is it the best option for your company and customers? Let’s explore.

What Successful Subscription Businesses Have in Common

Companies like Netflix and Spotify are able to cultivate cohorts of customers who continue to submit additional payments over time for two interdependent reasons:

1. Customers frequently use the service,
2. The service is frequently updated.

If the service never improves, then usage declines, and the recurring revenue well dries up. This means that for subscription businesses, innovation is the key to ensuring customer loyalty, and thus, recurring revenue.

This differs from perpetual license businesses that depend on single transactions from their customers. In these perpetual license models, users pay a higher amount upfront to own the product regardless of how frequently they use it, and the product remains static until the next release a year or two down the line.

Following this line of thought, it’s also important to consider another benefit of subscriptions over perpetual licenses. With perpetual licenses, customer lifetime value is improved through maintenance/upgrade fees or selling additional units.

In the subscription world, lifetime value is improved with every successful renewal or billing event. Additionally, subscription businesses can increase lifetime values with a strategy for upselling customers to higher-tier plans and additional licenses for colleagues and family members.

Types of Subscription Pricing Models

So let’s assume you frequently push updates to your service, your customers frequently use the service and find those updates valuable, and you’re looking to subscriptions because they provide consistent and predictable revenue.

It’s important to understand that there are different types of subscription models. Choosing the best one for your business is not always obvious.

Time-based intervals

Subscriptions based on time intervals are common. Think about how many services you pay the same price for every month. The key to success with this type of model is whether the customer consistently submits payment. Usually, this means encouraging automatic renewals. Some companies decide to bill subscribers monthly, while others choose annual or even quarterly billing intervals.

Activity-based intervals

Your other option for billing customers in regular intervals is to measure value based on user activities. A usage-based pricing model — employed by companies such as Amazon EC2, Mixpanel and nearly all cell phone carriers — is a common example of this model. Activity-based intervals might not be as predictable source of revenue like time-based subscriptions, but their advantage is bringing in greater revenue than billing based on a flat fee, especially from your base of power users.

All in all, with a subscription business model, provided you focus heavily on customer experience and relationships, your business stands to gain a stream of recurring revenue, improved business planning and loyal customers.

Read our ebook for more insights into the benefits of a subscription business model.

Download “The Subscription Dilemma: Do Subscriptions Make Sense for Your Business?” today!

The post Do Subscriptions Make Sense for Your Business? appeared first on cleverbridge.

The team at cleverbridge developed the Five Fundamentals of World Class Customer Support. These five simple actions allow representatives to provide efficient and polite support that leave customers overwhelmingly satisfied. The Five Fundamentals also free customer support representatives from formally scripted interactions, which customers will spot from a mile away. As long as each of these Five Fundamentals is kept in mind, the representative can be assured their call will go over well.

Shirin Caiola, head Quality Analyst for cleverbridge Customer Support, points out that the Five Fundamentals not only improve quality for customers in one part of the world, but they translate beyond borders, ensuring that, “[we] can guarantee that we’re providing World Class service to our customers, whether we’re speaking to a British customer calling in Cologne or a Canadian customer calling us in Chicago.” We reviewed the Five Fundamentals, along with some comments from the cleverbridge Customer Support Team below.

First Fundamental of World Class Customer Support

Be courteous and professional

This First Fundamental may seem like a no-brainer. Then again, think of your past interactions with customer service. It is certainly possible that one or more of your experiences was neither courteous nor professional. So the First Fundamental is to show courtesy to your customer and to be professional. The best way to show this is no mystery — say please and thank you.

Even the best support professional is no mind reader. Your support team cannot assist customers without their cooperation. Saying please when requesting relevant information shows respect to your customers, and saying thank you upon receipt of their information invites them into the process of resolving their difficulty. Your representatives can establish a base line of communication supporting a polite and courteous tone.

Second Fundamental of World Class Customer Support

Use the customer’s name

Dale Carnegie‘s famous admonition to, “Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language,” remains as true today as when it was first published. This is why the Second Fundamental is so important. Caiola says, “[using the customer’s name] is a great way to build rapport with the customer throughout the call.” When added to the courtesy and professionalism displayed in the First Fundamental, using a customer’s name helps to build understanding between the representative and the caller on a personal level.

Using the customer’s name is also an excellent call control tactic. When a customer hears you use their name, it can grab their attention away from the frustration they might be experiencing. Unfortunately, most customers have had such negative customer service experiences, they often meet a customer support representative ready to speak to a robot or girded for an epic fight. When a live human representative uses a customer’s name, it helps them disengage from the fight they were expecting to have, and can often help to turn a contentious call into a successful one.

“The greeting should set the tone for the entire call and have the same impact as a firm handshake.” — Shirin Caiola

Third Fundamental of World Class Customer Support

Have an energized tone

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Because of this reason, the greeting should set the tone for the entire call and have the same impact as a firm handshake.” says Caiola. If your representatives show an energized tone and start strong with a confident greeting, it is easier to get the customer’s relevant information and keep an upbeat tone no matter the disposition of your caller. Your representatives’ energized tone can be the difference between a good call and a World Class call.

Of course, the inverse is true as well. We have all been in a room where one person’s bad attitude can destroy the group’s otherwise positive energy. This can happen on a customer service phone call as well. The last thing a customer service representative should do is suck the life out of a caller, or compound an already negative tone with low energy or zero enthusiasm. Keeping an energized tone can actually be infectious, inspiring an upbeat attitude in your caller as well.

Fourth Fundamental of World Class Customer Support

Restate the problem

Once the customer has described their problem to the representative, he or she should find a way to restate the problem back to the customer. Caiola emphasized this Fundamental builds rapport with customers by, “demonstrating active listening. The customer knows we understand the issue and are committed to resolving it.”

Representatives can ensure customers feel heard especially by using phrases like, “I heard you say you were looking for…, is that right?” or “I want to be sure I understand your challenge correctly…” and then detailing the issue the customer described. Besides building rapport with the customer, the other benefit of this fundamental is that the representative can ensure they truly understand what they need to do before moving further. If there is a misunderstanding, restating the problem allows the customer to clarify their inquiry before precious time is wasted tracking down the wrong task. Going back to the First Fundamental, representatives should remember to say ‘thank you’ after the customer has confirmed the nature of the challenge.

Fifth Fundamental of World Class Customer Support

Explain what you have done and any next steps

Shirin noted that, “By following this step, we are insuring the customer understands the resolution process for their request and what has been done so far.”

Once you have completed the task at hand, be sure to review what has been done. This way, if a customer has forgotten anything, you will have a chance to resolve it in the same call, keeping your contact to order ratio low. Reviewing the next steps for the customer helps them feel like they accomplished something, and they know how to move forward.

Do not skip this step. Even if there are no further actions that the customer must take, there’s nothing a customer likes to hear more than, “You don’t need to do anything else; it’s all taken care of.” Of course, this will also help to keep your contact rates down, as customers will not need to call back and check what they need to do next.

The Fifth Fundamental also helps your representatives control the call. By recapitulating what has been done, and explaining what, if any, steps remain for the customer, they are signaling that the call is concluding. The customer has a chance to ask questions and will not feel like they were rushed off the phone. If the customer is satisfied, they may take the pacing cue to end the call. In either case, the representative can easily pivot to meet the customer’s expectation.

Keystone

The Five Fundamentals of World Class Customer Support are more than guidelines for your support team. When employed consistently, their positive effects on customer satisfaction can be easily tracked. By using the Five Fundamentals, the cleverbridge support team regularly garners customer satisfaction ratings above 90 percent. In addition to increasing customer satisfaction and reducing costs, providing World Class Customer Support increases customer lifetime value by extending the lifetime of a customer’s relationship with your business.

Want to learn more? Download our Six Guides on Ecommerce Essentials today.

The post Five Fundamentals of World Class Customer Support appeared first on cleverbridge.

You have two options really:

You can guess and hope for the best.

Or …

You can test variables in your user interfaces (UIs) and make data-driven business decisions.

Obviously, one of those choices is better than the other (if you’re not sure which is which, we have bigger problems to discuss).The problem is that many well-meaning and ambitious organizations are hampered by in-house or third-party solutions that don’t allow them to test their UIs for maximum performance. Even if your current payment and billing solutions have some testing capabilities, those solutions aren’t very efficient, and they don’t let you make changes on the fly.

Optimizing Customer Experiences Requires a Flexible Solution

It would be so much easier if we could speak a machine and say, “Hey Robot! Optimize this UI for maximum performance,” and the machine would just automate the process of testing and updating your web pages while you sit back and watch your revenue grow.

But that’s not the reality we live in quite yet. Testing your billing and payment UIs requires proactive decision making. And making data driven decisions about optimizing your UIs is not a set-it-and-forget-it process. You have to check in on it daily.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t solutions available for making data-driven optimizations more efficient than what you’re doing today. If you want to optimize your UIs to improve conversion rates and grow online revenue, you need to a flexible solutions that helps you:

1. Test many different variables
2. Make changes quickly and easily based on data analysis
3. Create consistent user experiences efficiently

Okay, so practically speaking, what UI elements do you have to focus on?

If you want to maximize conversion rates and average order values, it’s important to focus on common elements you’ll find in billing and payment UIs, like product and shopping cart pages. That includes things like:

• Pricing and payments
• Promotions
• Design elements
• Branding and messaging

Pricing and Payments

What if you could increase orders by pre-selecting relevant payment methods for different regions? Or conduct user tests to discover the optimal price of your product in the Japanese market?

Raising revenue through these kinds of tests depends on your ability to make consistent changes to your various UIs efficiently and effectively.

Offering Promotions

Offering a seasonal promotion takes a lot of coordinating between different UIs. If you want to offer a Black Friday promotion, for example, you will have to update your homepage, various landing pages, and other marketing material to create a consistent experience. And then when the promotion ends, you’ll need to revert those pages to their original content.

If you’re investing a ton of manual effort into displaying these promotions, it can cost you time and money.

Design Elements

Does using a breadcrumb navigation in your checkout process leads to higher conversion rates?

Maybe you want to split test your shopping cart page to see if a blue buy button converts more visitors than a red button.

The easier it is to swap out these elements in your UI, the more quickly you can make lucrative business decisions.

Consistent Branding and Messaging

When your checkout process UI is not consistent with the rest of your brand, it interrupts your customer and increases cart abandonment.

If your ecommerce solution only offers a generic looking third-party UI for your end-user that is not consistent with the rest of your brand, you are leaving money on the table.

Keystone

If you’re hosting your checkout pages in-house or cobbling several ecommerce and payment point solutions together, the user experience may not be seamless, and you won’t have the flexibility to maximize your business opportunities.

But your success depends on providing the best possible customer experience. That means not just knowing what to do, but being able to execute quickly.

Make sure that your payment and billing infrastructure is flexible enough to optimize user experiences effectively and efficiently, and implement a solution that lets you test important UI variables quickly to see what converts best.

Stephanie Milovic contributed much insight to this blog post.

The post 3 Platform Capabilities for Creating Better Customer Experiences appeared first on cleverbridge.

Subscription Billing

Uber pilots subscription pricing to lift loyalty | The San Diego Union-Tribune
There are lots of ways to slice and dice subscription pricing and billing. As Craig noted in our video on subscription billing last week, it was only a matter of time before Uber disrupted their own business model by looking at alternative ways to generate recurring revenue. Uber traditionally used on-demand, usage-based billing to monetize their service, but according to this article from the San Diego Union-Tribune by Jennifer Van Grove, Uber is piloting pricing and billing that is based on a regularly-scheduled flat-rate model. Begin asking yourself if there are any opportunities to provide more value to both your business and customers by experimenting with your pricing and billing models. Disrupting your business model might mean the difference between growth and stagnation.

Customer Experience

From Brand to Buy: Build Everything Around the Customer’s Experience | Advertising Week
To increase recurring revenue, you need to nurture customers through the entire customer journey from attract, engage and acquire to retain and grow. This article from Advertising Week uses an excellent metaphor of a bowl of spaghetti to explain that journey. Your buyers take a long and winding road toward becoming loyal subscribers, and it’s an eternal struggle for marketers to figure out what message results in a mutually beneficial long-term relationship between buyer and seller. That struggle is compounded by trying to figure out where and when to deliver that message. To reduce costs and the burden on your IT team, it’s necessary to create a network of connected data sources including your CRM, email marketing tool, payment platform and subscription engine.

Once your infrastructure is aligned, your job is to focus on what your customers need and what value you can provide. That value isn’t just about the user experience in the product. It’s about convenience at every stage of the journey. As the article says, it’s more than likely you don’t have the resources to approach each and every customer individually. That means you have to use your resources wisely.

Segment your customer database to support different needs at different times. You have free trial users, super users who need to upgrade plans, casual users who need to renew, and expired or canceled subscribers who you want to win back to your business. Each type of customer needs a different type of message. Your goal should be to increase customer satisfaction by providing a consistent brand experience from subscribe to renew.

Global Compliance

Data privacy and information security

PCI DSS – It Takes a Village | CSO
Do security standards like PCI DSS hinder or facilitate business growth? On the one hand, complying with these standards places a significant burden on merchants who rely on credit card payments for their revenue. On the other hand, without these standards in place, these businesses would be at greater risk from hackers and cybercriminals. This article from CSO makes the latter argument. While acknowledging PCI DSS as a work in progress, the author explains the different ways it protects businesses. The author also shows how PCI SSC works with businesses to reduce the burden of compliance.

Online sales tax

Goodlatte’s Internet Sales Tax Plan Is Better, but Still Falls Short | The Daily Signal
One of the major headaches for online businesses is staying current on constantly changing tax laws. Your tax exposure depends on the location of your business and customers, the type of product or service you provide and other variables. The debate in the U.S. has been going on for a while. Congress has tried several times to pass legislation to address the disadvantage brick-and-mortar retailers have traditionally felt against online businesses, but those bills tended to die along the way. Now it looks like a new bill will be introduced to establish “simple” federal rules for how online businesses calculate, collect and remit sales tax. This is clearly just the beginning of a long debate, but stay tuned for how it impacts your business.

If you are interested in learning more about the connection between subscription billing, customer experience and global compliance, check out our Resources section.

The post August Subscription Digest appeared first on cleverbridge.

But no matter how heavily you invest in your marketing or product experience, your product or service isn’t a fit for everyone.

Instead of desperately trying to hang on to a customer like some overly obsessed spurned lover, once a customer decides they want to part ways from you, you should make that separation as painless as possible.

A short-sighted approach to solving the problem of customer churn (one which we see brands using all too often) might go something like this: “Too many customer’s are canceling? Let’s make it harder to cancel!”

via GIPHY

What’s wrong with this tactic? First, based on legislation like CAN-SPAM and ROSCA companies must provide a clear and simple way to unsubscribe from emails or to cancel a relationship. Second, the frustration from unsatisfied customers will only multiply, leaving your brand vulnerable to growing dissatisfaction.

This blog post examines the unsubscribe process, and our goal is to analyze what makes a good customer experience for subscribers looking to leave.

Easy Unsubscribe Process

Adobe Creative Cloud’s marketing marketing messages are the textbook example of an easy unsubscribe process. They have a clear line in the footer text of their emails presenting an option to unsubscribe.

Just because a company makes their emails look correct does not necessarily mean that the process works as it’s supposed to. In the case of Adobe Creative Cloud, though, the process happens without a hitch. When a customer clicks on the “Click here to unsubscribe” link, they are taken directly to a simple confirmation page. There are no further steps to take, no additional buttons and no confusing phrasing that might be there to trick a customer into not unsubscribing.

It is important to note, this process means that Adobe does not have a chance to ask a customer to reconsider their decision to unsubscribe. From the customer perspective, especially if one is frustrated by too many marketing emails, making the unsubscribe process as seamless as possible is preferable. Adobe must have calculated that the positive user and customer experience outweighs the missed opportunity to keep a subscriber in the marketing email fold.

Difficult Unsubscribe Process

We’ve removed the branding from this unsubscribe process from a service provider who shall remain nameless, but our reaction to unsubscribing from this marketing email was something along the lines of “OMG, this is the worst unsub ever.” Now while that is an exaggeration, this unsubscribe process is a classic example of a brand thinking that their customer data is more important than their customer experience.

Clicking on the unsubscribe link in this company’s marketing email brings a customer to the above landing page. The pre-selected options after clicking the unsubscribe link allows the user to to continue receiving emails without interruption. When a customer truly intends to unsubscribe, landing on this page is confusing or frustrating. It requires the user to navigate a complex set of instructions in order to achieve their intended outcome.

The more barriers your put in front of a customer trying to complete their obvious objective, the less likely the customer will take your desired action. If you ask for too many irrelevant pieces of information, your conversion rates will drop. If you ask customers to put in extra effort in order to get away from you, you’re probably not incentivizing them to remain.

Optimizing the Unsubscribe Process

Here’s what you need to do. Take a look at your unsubscribe process. Is there a clear call to action for your subscribers to cancel? If not, then you’re probably not compliant with various laws in different countries.

Next, when a customer clicks the unsubscribe button, are they immediately unsubscribed or do they have to take further action and provide you more information before you agree not to send them any more email? If they have to take action to confirm that they want to unsubscribe, is the pre-selected option to continue receiving email or is there a simple click to confirm that they meant to cancel?

If you have decided that you need a customer to jump through hoops to cancel their subscription, take a look at your data. Is it providing you meaningful insight, and are you taking meaningful action based on that insight? If not, then it’s likely that you’re providing a frustrating user experience without any benefit to your overall business.

Keystone

User experience, and overall customer experience, is important at every touchpoint — including when customers are leaving the fold. Different companies take different approaches. Whether a company uses multiple steps in a positive way or a frustrating way defines the kind of user experience their customers will have.

Learn how to nurture and monetize every stage of the subscription lifecycle with our illustrated ebook: Retaining Subscribers & Optimizing the Renewal Process

The post User Experience — The Unsubscribe Process appeared first on cleverbridge.

We thought about the implications of Mary Meeker’s internet trends report, and we wondered how these trends affect the way that subscription businesses create effective customer experience to drive recurring revenue.

Then last week we posted a thought provoking video from cleverbridge Co-Founder Craig Vodnik. In it, he advocates for subscription businesses to examine their billing and pricing models to see if they are at risk for disruption from a competitor with a similar product but more attractive business model.

The Subscription Digest this month covers some new territory in our mutual quest for recurring revenue success.

Subscription Billing — Pricing Models and Customer Relationships

Angie’s List Officially Drops Subscription Requirement to Browse and Write Reviews | Consumerist

There are a lot of options for slicing and dicing the pricing and billing of your subscription business (For the sake of consistency: pricing = how much; billing = how often). You can bill on demand (think Uber) or at regularly scheduled intervals (think Netflix). And you can price your product or service at flat (Netflix again) or fluctuating (Uber again) rates. There are many other options you can employ, like a tiered pricing model or a base and overage model. As Craig Vodnik noted in this recent video, you need to get creative with how you charge customers lest you risk external disruption. That’s what’s so interesting about this article from Consumerist.

Angie’s List has clearly embraced this decision to experiment with and embrace new pricing and billing models. The business executives behind this subscription based, online community decided to deploy freemium marketing, raised and diversified their pricing structure, and included various levels of functionality and features for paid subscribers in a tiered pricing plan.

The end of this article contains another very important lesson for subscription businesses looking to experiment: short-term sacrifices must be made for long-term payoffs. Will allowing a bunch of free users to roam wild on their site increase costs for Angie’s List? Probably. But their long-term bet is that those are early customer acquisition costs that eventually lead to long-term customer relationships.

Whether you are looking to acquire more customers, grow long-term customer relationships, or simply experiment with alternative pricing models, your mindset should be firmly in the place of what recurring value can you provide to your customers that makes it worthwhile for them to provide you with recurring payments.

Subscription Business Models Are Great for Some Businesses and Terrible for Others | Harvard Business Review

According to this HBR article, there is an overarching category of commercial enterprise called the digital membership economy. Two core parts to this digital membership economy are subscription products and online communities. When companies embrace their subscription based digital good or online service as a part of the membership economy, it crucial that they have the right perspective. What’s more, the article’s analysis of what produces leaders and stragglers lines up with ideas previously stated in Three Keys to Success in the Cloud and Craig’s video about focusing on customer lifetime value of initial conversion rates.

The other noteworthy, possible counter-intuitive idea in this HBR article is that in spite of this emphasis on customer experience, you shouldn’t necessarily let long-term customers dictate the direction of your strategy. That means that as you monitor product usage or experiment with new pricing structures and billing models, understand that just because some inert users have certain preferences regarding features and functionality, that doesn’t mean their preferences are a recipe for a successful strategy.

Wondering how you can retain subscribers and optimize the renewal process? Read this guide we created.

The post July 2016 Subscription Digest — Pricing Models and Customer Relationships appeared first on cleverbridge.