• A unified view of your data in a matter of hours (not weeks)
• Integration of the tools you rely on today (such as Salesforce) with our ecommerce platform
• Freedom from the burden of building and supporting custom-coded integrations
• Simplicity and cost savings associated with connecting disparate systems
• Automated processes, reducing human error

For more information on Integration Services, click here. Read on for our latest blog post on customer retention!

Acquiring new customers is costly, so companies need to hang on tightly to existing ones. This can be hard work, but comes with a major payoff: even a small increase in customer retention can significantly raise profits. And you’ve probably got many of the tools you need for the task already.

All it takes is a little creative thinking …

Consider your CRM. Like most of us, you probably use a CRM solution like Salesforce to close and nurture new customers. But that CRM can also be a valuable tool for increasing your customer lifespan after that initial purchase.

Read on for a few simple ways that your team can use its CRM to improve customer retention.

1. Centralize all your customer data in one place

Disparate departments rely on each other now more than ever. How a Customer Support Rep processes a return may dictate whether the transaction is included in the Controller’s revenue recognition or whether a Sales Rep is notified to follow up with a personalized offer. Historically, these teams (and their data) have been disconnected.

But these data sources can easily be integrated, with your CRM acting as a central hub.

Here’s an example: say your Marketing team uses Marketo, your Sales team uses Salesforce and your Customer Service team uses Zendesk. You can integrate Marketo and Zendesk with Salesforce to add their respective data to each customer’s contact record in Salesforce, effectively creating a unified view of every customer.

This creates new opportunities for automation and delivers transparency through the entire sales funnel. Everyone’s on the same page – and you can be that much more effective at customer retention.

2. Personalize customer communications

Countless customer touch points are stored within your key information systems, including your marketing automation platform, analytics platforms, your ERP and even EPM systems. In the course of your relationships with your customers, you’ve probably gathered quite a lot of valuable data. But how to apply it?

Here’s one thought: by integrating all that data into your instance of Salesforce or other CRM, you can personalize communication to resonate better with customers. Personalizing is an easy way to make your customers feel special.

Add the activity tracked by other analytics tools such as search history to those customers’ contact records in your CRM. Armed with this info, your Sales and Marketing teams can customize bespoke emails and other forms of outreach based on customer preferences and behaviors.

This is a great experience for the customer. Why? Because they know if they open an email from you, they’ll receive offers tailored to their interests.

3. Monitor customer interaction

Real-time data is critical when delivering valuable customer communication. And it’s especially important if you want to increase the value of your relationships. If a customer hasn’t made a purchase or accessed any of your content in months, you’re at a high risk of losing them. Use your CRM to stay alert and keep customers coming back.

Nurture and reignite those relationships by setting up CRM notifications to alert you when a customer is interacting with your website or product. Sales reps can then reconnect with or extend offers, making the buying experience more targeted, timely and streamlined.

As an added bonus, many analytics tools, such as HubSpot and Kissmetrics, integrate with popular CRMs to deliver even richer customer behavior insights.

4. Re-engage your inactive customers

Inactive customers represent a huge opportunity. Though it might seem counter-intuitive, customers that have cancelled your service or haven’t shown activity in some time are still more likely to purchase than net new prospects who don’t know your business or brand.

Writing inactive or cancelled customers off as lost forever is foolish.

You are likely sitting on a sizable list size of inactive customers. Connect your CRM with your marketing automation tool or email platform and export that list as its own segment for future outreach and special offers. For example, our Marketing team integrates our Eloqua instance with Salesforce to reconnect with inactive customers.

Keystone

A business that wants to move fast and increase revenue needs real-time access to the data that powers it. And customer retention is an area where enhancing the flow of that data can deliver big wins.

Make it easier by using your CRM as a unified data source to personalize customer communication, track customer interaction, and engage with inactive customers. Remember: understanding and responding to customer behavior can make or break a long-lasting customer relationship – and one of the best tools for the job is right in front of you.

One final caveat: integrating your CRM with other business systems on your own can be complex, costly and time consuming. We recommend streamlining all of this by using a data integration service that removes this burden – freeing you to focus on customer retention strategies.

Andrea Bailiff-Gush is the Product Marketing Manager at cleverbridge

The post Four Simple Ways to Boost Customer Retention With Your CRM appeared first on cleverbridge.

Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday are, without a doubt, some of the best times to get a large number of new customers to your site and hopefully signed up for your subscription product.

People are searching for deals right now, and your traffic will increase substantially. In some cases, sites will see over 100 percent increases in their traffic during the holiday season.

With all that traffic, it stands to reason that you’ll get quite a few new signups.

But here’s where things get interesting — what happens next year?

Let’s say you give a discount for your subscription during your Cyber Week promotions. Will a newly-acquired subscriber receive the same discount next year?

If not, and you provide another discount the following year, will the subscriber churn and repurchase to get the new discount? How do you retain your holiday consumers while ensuring higher Customer Lifetime Value?

Don’t Get Caught Chasing Your Customers for Higher CLV

We all remember the classic children’s book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, a circular tale that illustrates that there is no end to the vicious cycle of caving into demands. So here are a few ideas to avoid reducing CLV during this holiday season and the next.

Extend the value

Most subscriptions renew annually, and typically your customers are set to renew on the anniversary of that first purchase.

In an effort to push those holiday consumers off that schedule, why not offer an additional six months with the holiday discount? This way, when it comes time to renew the customer will no longer be in the holiday mindset and less likely to expect a deep reduction.

This will also help to prevent customers from churning early to receive a new holiday discount as they’d be forfeiting their free months.

Monthly over annual

In most cases, monthly subscriptions are more expensive for the consumer when compared with the total cost of an annual subscription paid up front. To protect your CLV during the discount-happy holidays, don’t reduce the (already lower) cost of the annual plan; discount your monthly plan instead.

If you offer $10 per month or $95 per year, you can discount your monthly subscription to $8 per month and still earn the more revenue than you would with an annual subscription. This will also make it easier to up-sell new subscribers to your annual subscription a few months down the line, since they’re already used to paying slightly more than that amount.

Customer experience

As always, the best way to grow customer lifetime value is by providing a superior customer experience. If you consistently remind customers of your value, when you communicate the cost of your next renewal you’ll have a better chance of renewing them at a higher price point. Not to mention win future opportunities to up-sell your customers to new and better products.

Keystone

There are lots of ways to increase CLV in spite of holiday discounts. The important thing is to be smart and avoid devaluing your solution in the long term.

Todd Garcia is a customer experience nerd and a Senior Account Executive at cleverbridge.

Follow him on Twitter!

Or read more of his musings on optimizing ecommerce on Medium.

The post Grow Customer CLV This Holiday Season (And the Next One, Too … ) 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.

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.

You also need a new way to relate to subscription metrics. With subscriptions, KPIs are no longer simply about conversion rates.

But how do you define subscription metrics? And how do you ensure they correspond to the subscriber journey? Finally, how do you use reporting on your subscription metrics to derive meaningful insights?

Subscription Metrics 101

Subscription metrics are a set of measurements focused on your developing long-term customer relationships and building a stream of predictable revenue. These metrics are jointly owned across an organization, meaning the Sales team, the Customer Success team — even the CIO — help meet strategic KPIs.

There are many subscription metrics to be aware of, but we’ve outlined the most critical subscription metrics to track.

• Monthly recurring revenue
• Churn rate
• Customer lifetime value
• Customer acquisition cost

Want more metrics? Download Mapping & Measuring the Subscriber Journey 

Monthly Recurring Revenue

A calculation of your subscription revenue amortized by month. It is the most important metric your subscription business needs to calculate.

MRR = Amount paid / Number of subscription months 

Churn Rate

The rate at which customers are canceling their subscriptions.

Churn rate = Number of customers who canceled in a billing period / Total number of customers at start of the billing period

When it comes to addressing the churn rate, the focus is usually on voluntary churn. This occurs when a subscriber willingly cancels a subscription. It’s important to consider involuntary churn, which occurs without action on the subscriber’s part. Many times, this occurs when a credit card expired or due to loss or theft. Luckily, there are revenue retention strategies available to prevent involuntary churn that utilize a strategic, multi-step approach.

Tackling churn by focusing on retention can significantly boost your online revenue. Read our guide to learn more best practices on customer retention.

Customer Lifetime Value

An estimate of the average total value of a customer over their lifetime (from signup to churn). This is one of the most difficult metrics to calculate, but is vital to getting a better picture of the overall health of your business.

CLV = (ARPA x Gross Margin %) / Customer Churn Rate

ChartMogul does an excellent job of explaining how customer lifetime value can be estimated, how to respond if it is low or high, and why one that fluctuates over time can be a sign of instability.

Customer Acquisition Cost

An estimate of the costs to acquire a customer.

CAC = Sum of all sales & marketing expenses / # of new customers added

Building Subscription Metrics Into the Subscriber Journey

The subscriber journey documents the touchpoints your buyer may experience on their way to their decision to purchase. The subscriber journey powers your ability to understand your customers: where they start, what challenges they’re facing, and how fast they’re moving. It’s important that your metrics are in line with the journey of your subscribers and that they center on recurring revenue.

Your subscription metrics should help you answer key business questions like:

• How quickly are customers adopting your product/service?
• Does your customer experience allow your organization to hit revenue targets?
• Knowing that no single buyer journey is exactly the same, how do you model the sales cycle?
• With an eye on recurring revenue, are your numbers telling you whether your customers committed?
• What do renewals look like?

Considering the subscriber journey as you measure your subscription program forces you to pay attention to your customers’ behavior to prevent losing them. It will also help you to avoid the pain of churn by watching for red flags. You’ll also know how to engage with your users at critical points in their subscription lifecycle – trial, subscribe, renew and upgrade.

Bringing more value to customers is more important than ever, and you cannot risk them churning away. Get more tips for attracting and acquiring new subscribers.

Reporting Subscription Metrics

Subscription-based reporting is a powerful tool for identifying trends, measuring customer satisfaction, and improving the health of your business. Combining key subscription metrics with the right reporting provides important business insight. If metrics show customers are losing interest in your product, then reporting will alert your team to the issue. Reporting provides the insight to identify the potential loss of recurring revenue and to put preventative measures in place.

Maintain a current view of your business by reporting on monthly recurring revenue, churn, customer lifetime value and customer acquisition costs. Then run all of these metrics through your ERP tool. It’s even possible to connect the billing tools your team uses most for more accurate analytics — regardless of where your data sits — and then run customer-centric subscription reports that can be presented to the board or across your organization.

Use these reports to answer your most important questions: Which customers are past due on their billing? Which marketing channels send us the most valued customers? How much revenue are up-sells contributing to our bottom line?

For further details, look at how we integrate with ChartMogul to offer real-time subscription analytics specifically for subscription businesses.

Keystone

Running a subscription business requires a shift in thinking about your customers, your products and your metrics. Reporting on subscription metrics helps you build a better, more predictable business. It also makes it easier to forecast future revenue and provide visibility into the health of your business. All this will make your business more responsive to customer demands. Moving quickly to respond to those demands cements strong and long-term customer relationships, which are the foundation of growing recurring revenue.

Andrea Bailif-Gush is the Product Marketing Manager at cleverbridge

The post Subscription Metrics Defined 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.

The key to building a strong customer relationship is to view your marketing through the lens of the customer lifecycle. Every message is a touchpoint in building a strong relationship. Just like a relationship with a friend, establishing, building and maintaining that relationship takes time and attention. And just like a real friendship, communications will be different in different circumstances. Customers moving through the acquisition stage, the retention stage and the building stage respond to different types of interactions. Making the investment in your customer relationships can seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be.

Below are ten simple, but important tips for all stages of customer lifecycle campaigns, beginning with the best ways to leverage email marketing for new customer acquisition.

Customer Acquisition

Tip one: List signups on your website

Don’t wait for a customer to complete a purchase before adding them to your database. Email signup should be as easy as possible for visitors when they arrive at your site. Add a link or signup form on the right hand side or bottom of every page. If possible, enable a popup to trigger after landing on your page with a form for the potential customer to quickly enter their email address.

Tip two: Newsletters

Use your monthly newsletter to promote new products, capabilities and features. Be sure to include a link directly to a shopping cart or signup page. In the ecommerce platform, create a coupon code specific for the newsletter. This enables accurate tracking of conversions attributable to your monthly communications.

Tip three: Trial campaigns

When a potential customer downloads the trial version of your product, require them to enter their email address to receive the download link. You can then initiate a free trial campaign with several email cadences. In the first email immediately after download, note product benefits the subscriber will receive during the trial period. Throughout the life of a drip campaign, increase the urgency of your messages. Combine your email campaign with revenue tracking parameters to see which email cadence coverts the best among your new customers.

Tip four: Cart abandonment campaigns

When a customer begins a checkout, but does not complete it, it might seem like a total loss. But since the subscriber started filling out the shopping cart, you can capture and use this information to create a truly dynamic email for that potential customer. Tailor the message from the product they selected in the cart and send one or two emails with a level of urgency or coupon code to facilitate the sale.

Download our complimentary e-book, Attracting & Acquiring New Subscribers

Customer Retention

Once a customer is acquired, you only have a short window of time to impress and retain them. Customer retention begins with a positive product experience. Below are some steps you can take to turn new buyers into loyal customers who continue to repurchase your product.

Tip five: Welcome emails

Immediately after a customer purchases your software, send a triggered email thanking them for their order. Include product information, activation instructions and links to technical support should they encounter issues. While often overlooked, a welcome email series is an opportune time to establish a relationship with your new customer so they stick around.

Tip six: More newsletters

Tip two notes that newsletters are great way to notify potential customers of new product offerings and capabilities. But don’t leave your current customers out of the loop. Share these updates with them as an opportunity to continue nurturing your relationship. Be sure to create a coupon code to accurately track sales stemming from your newsletters.

Tip seven: Renewal emails

As a customer approaches their product renewal date, send personalized emails reminding them of their subscription expiration. Include pertinent order information and, if possible, how much they’ve used the software and how the program will continue to assist them in the future. If one email isn’t enough, build a drip campaign with product benefits ending with a coupon code to retain the customer.

Learn more in our e-book, Retaining Subscribers and Optimizing the Renewal Process

Build the Relationship

Never rest on your laurels. Just because a customer sticks around for now doesn’t mean the work of nurturing the customer relationship is over. More seasoned customers require a different tone in their messaging — one that’s more collaborative. In fact, these customers can provide important feedback that only those who truly know your brand can offer. With a longer track record and more data in tow, your company also knows these customers better, and can send them more highly targeted and relevant offers.

Tip eight: Product surveys

Send surveys to your customers asking for their input on your product and how you can help to improve their experience. Listening to feedback from your most loyal customers will support a long-standing relationship. Mention the customer feedback and product updates in your newsletters to let your subscribers know you’ve heard their suggestions.

Tip nine: Brand loyalty

Subscribers who have positive experiences with your company become loyal to your brand. Those who are faithful to your brand are more likely to be repeat customers. They’re also more likely to recommend your products to other potential customers who either do not know about you yet or have not had positive experiences in the past. Customer testimonials in trial emails may provide some insight, but genuine online or word-of-mouth reviews have a greater impact.

Tip ten: Special offers

Send an email campaign specifically for your repeat customers. Provide a dynamic coupon code in a special promotional campaign for your subscribers who opened your last six newsletters or have been returning customers for the last three years. If they don’t immediately act on this offer, send reminder emails noting their importance as a customer, and prompt them to complete their purchase.

Keystone — Relationships Drive Revenue

Put simply, supporting the customer lifecycle means nurturing strong customer relationships. Make it easy for customers to sign up. Work to keep their business. Be sure to solicit feedback from your customers and communicate back to them the value of their comments. Use positive customer experiences to strengthen your brand. Finally, reward your loyal customers with special offers and discounts. Taking these simple steps can enhance your relationship with your customers, leading to greater customer lifetime value and increased recurring revenue.

Understand essential subscription KPIs in our e-book, Mapping & Measuring the Subscriber Journey

The post Ten Tips on Customer Lifecycle Campaigns appeared first on cleverbridge.

If your focus is on offering the best customer experience, whether in terms of your product or billing, 2017 is going to force you to focus on some crucial questions.

• What is the true cost of managing customer billing and payments in-house?
• How can you effectively acquire and retain cross-border shoppers? Are there any risks?
• How do subscription businesses increase customer lifetime value?
• How does an API-based ecosystem improve my business?

The following compilation of subscription billing ebooks will help you answer all those questions and others.

What Are the Hidden Costs of Your In-House Subscription Billing Solution?

It may seem like building a subscription billing solution is something you can handle on your own. But maintaining a homegrown solution carries with it significant hidden costs. As your business grows, can you scale with your increased volume? Will simply maintaining your infrastructure take resources away from improving your core offering?

Don’t let the hidden costs of an in-house solution bleed your business dry. Check out our microsite to learn more.

7 Tips for Growing Your Global Subscriber Base

Selling subscriptions in international markets is more complicated than simply translating your marketing website and order process into new languages. To grow your global subscriber base, customers need to be approached in a way that makes sense in their local context. In fact, there are seven key areas every subscription business must address when they start selling in new regions.

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

Aligning Your Subscription Business With APIs

Manually keeping your product catalog, marketing strategy, subscription reporting and customer self-service options aligned across multiple systems costs resources and ultimately erodes your bottom line. But there is a better way. A subscription business using APIs is aligned to maximize customer satisfaction and recurring revenue.

Download the ebook to learn more about reducing time and effort managing billing and payments.

Increasing the Lifetime Value of  Subscribers

Getting a customer to subscribe doesn’t guarantee that they’ll stick around forever. If you want to retain their business for as long as possible, make sure that you’re offering ongoing value to your subscribers. This guide dives into optimizing for long-term subscriber relationships and profitability.

Inside the ebook you will find for more tactics for increasing the lifetime value of subscribers, such as:

• Reducing subscriber churn
• Deepening subscriber usage
• Increasing upgrades and add-ons

3 Compliance Risks for Global Subscriptions

You want to boldly venture into new markets, but wily dragons in the form of ever-changing global compliance regulations lurk at every turn. Violating these regulations can damage your business’s reputation and your bottom line.

This ebook covers everything you need to know about increasing global revenue while effectively managing your risk. That starts by:

• Offering shopping experiences that comply with local legislation
• Obtaining customer consent for email and other marketing efforts
• Ensuring data privacy and information security by complying with a variety of industry standards (PCI DSS, ISO27k and GDPR)
• Collecting and remitting taxes

Do Subscriptions Make Sense for Your Business?

How can you be sure that a subscription model is what’s best for your business – and for your customers?

This ebook covers everything you need to consider, like:

• Which type of subscription model best fits my business?
• What are the pros and cons of subscription billing?
• What do all successful subscription businesses have in common?
• Will a subscription model ultimately benefit my customers?

Subscription Metrics and Reporting Tips

Financial and revenue metrics are the responsibility of your Finance team (they love that stuff). But in today’s subscription environment, the role of your Finance team is changing. They’re no longer just the cost accountant, measuring overall business health; now they’re actively driving growth across all functions within your organization.

In this ebook, you’ll learn tips and tricks for developing a subscription metrics and reporting strategy that enables your Finance team to:

• Measure value with subscription metrics
• Assign useful subscriber identities
• Analyze and report by cohort and subscriber role
• Determine the most meaningful insights for your business

Keystone

For us, the focus is on the customer experience. Something that seems as simple as a monthly or annual renewal means that the design and function of your site, marketing emails, sign-up process, payment and billing, renewal and cancellation events are all acting in concert. By solving these challenges, you can expect greater recurring revenue and less churn.

The post 2016 Roundup: Subscription Billing Ebooks 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.

In this video, Subscription Billing and the Era of Customer Experience, cleverbridge Co-Founder Craig Vodnik elaborates on what it means for subscription businesses to focus on customer experience.

Transcription

You’re actually in the area of customer experience. What I mean is that your product is not a one-time transaction or a one-time sale. Where it’s going, if it isn’t there already, is a subscription-based product — a product that you deliver through the cloud where the customer interacts on a daily or even weekly basis.

For that, you need to start caring more about how that customer experience is on an ongoing basis, rather than whether they’re happy when they buy the product that one time, that once a year, like it is in a transaction world.

The question I would ask to you is, “Do you care about conversion rates, which is the revenue that you would make from a customer initially, or do you care about the lifetime value of a customer?” What we really want to think about for a subscription-based company is, “What is the lifetime value?”

If you’re focused on giving great service and giving a great experience to the customer, you’re likely to have much more success than if you’re focused on just making some money that one time and not worried about you’re going to be one year later or two years later.

Analysis

This video contains two messages for subscription businesses. The first says focus on customer experience. The second says that when you focus on customer experience you have to change how you measure success.

Customer Experience

Essentially, Craig is saying that subscription businesses need to fundamentally change the way they look at the value they are providing customers. When you demand that customers pay $10, $50 or $100 every month or every year to continue using your service, you better make sure that every time they have to interact with your business that it’s a positive experience. The key to the era of customer experience is knowing that positive UX isn’t only found in the product or service. It’s everywhere users touch your brand. And that happens a lot more than you’d think. Especially with subscriptions.

There are thousands of opportunities for customers to interact with your brand.  You have sign-up pages and trial registrations, and the payments, and the entire My Account section. And then comes license management and renewals and upgrades and downgrades and even (gasp!) cancellations. Even when they cancel you have to provide world-class service. Your reputation is on the line. So it’s imperative that you offer customers not only a great product, but a great customer experience in all respects. And that means caring about the details and making sure that every click from trial to renewal results in a smile. If that’s too much, at least keep your customers from facepalm.

Conversion Rate vs. Customer Lifetime Value

Embracing the era of customer experiences means changing the way you think about and report success. In the old world of perpetual licenses, companies measured their ecommerce success by conversion rates. Were visitors coming to the shopping cart and completing the order? That’s a win! Oh they’re not using the product? Who cares? We got the sale. It was all about the Buy Button.

With subscriptions, the sale is the start of the relationship. Not the end. In today’s world of cloud computing businesses are lucky enough to know how much and how often their products are used. They know what the most popular features are and they know what the least popular features are. They analyze customer complaints to discover recurring problems and correct the issue immediately. They’re not waiting to release new important features for version 2.0 two years down the road when they can hopefully cash in on upgrade fees.

This is what Craig means later in the video, when he explains that this whole new approach to business value, the era of customer experience, goes hand in hand with a shift in how to look at your data and which metrics to focus on. When you focus on one-time transactions and look to raise conversion rates without factoring in how those conversion rates affect CLV, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Maybe that’s too strong.

But if all you are concerned about is getting as many people into the store as possible, and then testing to figure out the best way to get those visitors to pay you for your product, if you’re only focus is that initial transaction, you are missing the big picture. There’s been a powerful but subtle change brought on by the wave of cloud computing and subscription billing. When you demand recurring revenue you are expected to deliver recurring value. And the ones who succeed are those that pay attention to every last detail. The ones who see this change understand just how important it is for them to make sure that their loyal subscribers, their dedicated paying customers, experience such exquisite attention to detail that they don’t even know it.

More resources

If you’re interested in learning more about some of the topics mentioned in today’s video from Craig, check out Andrea Bailiff Gush’s post from last week New Model, New Metrics – Subscription Metrics Defined. Andrea explains some of the concepts behind these important subscription metrics that Craig mentioned.

For an even more in-depth look at the entire subscriber journey and the important KPIs that accompany the main events of a subscription, please read Mapping and Measuring the Subscriber Journey.

The post Subscription Billing and the Era of Customer Experience [Video] appeared first on cleverbridge.