Our team enjoyed interacting with other companies to hear about their current challenges managing churn, payments and selling internationally, and the opportunity to share insights from our rich experience in international ecommerce and subscription management.

Below I’ll give my take on the most important themes of the conference.

Minimize Churn, Maximize Revenue

From the numerous discussions I had in the halls of SaaStr and at our booth, the question of churn reduction was an underlying force. In order to reach your full revenue potential as a company, you must focus on reducing churn — something you can prevent by providing the best experience possible to your customers throughout their interaction with your products and services. There are many tools available that allow you to monitor, analyze, predict, and manage customer experience, like FullStory, Gainsight or ChurnZero.

Focusing on customer experience is a terrific idea—it correctly highlights that the SaaS space is not just about customer acquisition, but also about customer retention.

With the Customer Success function rapidly evolving since its inception not long ago, this role is vital. We’re living in an age of the educated buyer and user who have higher expectations than ever before. VP of Customer Success from Teamable touched on this in his session on Customer Success. We must align our Sales, Marketing, Product and Customer Success teams into a well-oiled machine that will help our organization keep customers happy and grow accounts.

Scale Your Sales Team, Fast

If you want to achieve growth, you must provide a great customer experience. The next step for many vendors is about scaling their sales organizations and sales capacity fast. It’s logical: the more Sales Reps you have on the frontlines sharing the value that your product provides, the more customers you’ll have. This translates into more money for your company that you can put toward your overall growth as a SaaS business. And the beauty of scaling your Sales team is that you can do this as your product continues through different growth phases: MVP, product/market fit and beyond.

Many sessions at SaaStr touched on metrics to measure the maturity of a company, from annual revenue and product development lifecycle time to employee size and time-to-market. These sessions also advocated best practices for building a high-performing Sales team and how this directly contributes to future success.

Go Global, Act Local

Expanding sales internationally was an important theme for many at SaaStr and there was also high participation from companies based outside of the USA. As one notable example, the government of New Zealand helped sponsor more than 100 SaaS company representatives to attend SaaStr and hosted local meet-ups for months in advance as well as during their visit to San Francisco to enhance their overall experience. Many SaaStr sessions were also focused on how to achieve scale beyond borders as well as achieve entrance into the Global 2000. It certainly is no small feat to build an organization that supports selling abroad, as well as one that can deal with the pressures of hyper growth (and how to manage through it).

Money Talks

The last day of the event was referred to as “Money Day,” when VCs came to the forefront as thought leaders to share their tips with hungry startups. From navigating the uncharted territory of artificial intelligence to shifting mindsets, from surviving to thriving, these talks were focused on helping SaaS leaders succeed now and anticipate what’s next as they strive to build a billion-dollar business. They must navigate an increasingly competitive landscape, determine which market segments to focus on, figure out the right time to hire the executive team and build the right culture (from the start). As ServiceMax mentioned in its session, all of these factors contributed to a recent $1 billion acquisition from GE.

As you can see, there was no shortage of learning at this year’s SaaStr Annual for SaaS companies. I’d like to leave you with a recent tweet from David Cancel of Drift, “The number one limiting belief I see at almost every company: ‘That won’t scale.’ Kill this limiting belief fast.” In order to win in the market as SaaS companies, it’s about economies of scale and relevance. Examine every aspect of your business to ensure it’s designed to scale.

Doug Caviness is VP Sales Americas for cleverbridge

The post SaaStr Annual 2018 Recap appeared first on cleverbridge.

These different instrument groups require different skills to play, and their music may even be written differently. If a violin player plays a French horn part without transposing the score, they’d be playing incorrect notes.

Yet somehow, when they take the stage to perform, we see these different sections work in perfect coordination. The reason may be self-evident; they have the help of conductors. These conductors help the orchestra sections prepare efficiently and coordinate their output, yielding beautiful harmonies.

Now, I hear you saying, “I’m an executive in the tech field. Why are you telling me about oboes?” That’s simple: Because your business is a busy orchestra. Your CRM is your string section. Your ERP is your percussion. Your email marketing platform could be your woodwinds. Each section may make a sweet sound individually, but are they coordinated? Do you have conductors communicating between your platforms?

As any orchestra needs conductors to connect the sections to produce a coherent piece of music, so too do your disparate business systems need a robust set of APIs to play in perfect harmony.

More on APIs and subscription business

APIs Defined

API stands for application programming interface. They are small snippets of code that allow two systems to communicate even if they are coded in different languages or were not originally designed to interface with each other.

For example, Facebook and Twitter are two different platforms. Because they are coded in different programming languages and have different data architecture, they are not able to communicate directly with each other. In order for a user to access data from one program in another, they need conductors who are fluent in Facebook and Twitter, and can smooth out the cooperation between them. Because both companies opened up their systems with APIs, a Twitter user can post a tweet and have that message simultaneously post to their Facebook account – and vice versa.

Imagine if these platforms were not allowed to talk to each other. Users would have to update both applications manually. That takes time and effort. More likely than not, users would stick with the application they prefer most and stop using the other. Strategically, these two companies, who compete with each other for users and advertising revenue, open their platforms with APIs to give people the flexibility to use the platforms in ways that work best for them.

APIs Applied — Subscription Reporting

Of course, the above example may seem trivial. But imagine applying APIs to your business. Let’s take a complex task like subscription reporting.

APIs can pull important data from your marketing, subscription and CRM platforms, and plug that information into a reporting tool that best serves your needs.

For example, an API can combine data from the email marketing platform with data from the subscription management platform to measure email marketing KPIs along with trends in your recurring revenue.

You can see how much revenue was generated through each different type of email campaign that you send (renewal, winback, dunning or credit card expiration emails), which payment types lead to more sales, and which regions of the globe perform best.

Analyzing these segments of data gives you powerful insights. What is the renewal and churn rate of customers who subscribed in February versus the renewal and churn rate of those who signed up in November? A reporting API that calls a database of transactions can help you build better cohort reports.

Keystone

Don’t waste time and valuable resources transposing between your business systems. Not only is that expensive and error-prone, it can lead to a less profitable business altogether. Employing the right APIs means having a coordinated business. With your business systems all vibrating in harmony, you can sit back and listen to the rich melody of increased revenue.

Download our free ebook, Aligning Your Subscription Business With APIs, today

Andrea Bailif-Gush is the Product Marketing Manager at cleverbridge

The post APIs — The Conductors of Your Business Orchestra appeared first on cleverbridge.

To reiterate: Building a solution on your own takes a lot of planning, development and maintenance. So when you choose to implement a commerce solution, you’ll be looking at three main categories of providers:

• Billing / payment solutions
• Subscription management solutions
• Full-service solutions

The various types of commerce solutions support your ability to offer payments options, manage subscribers, and handle miscellaneous ecommerce capabilities. As you begin researching your options, keep these questions in mind: Are you offering the best possible customer experience to all of your subscribers, no matter where in the world they are? Are you maximizing your renewals for every billing event? Are you able to scale all of these operations and processes as you start to increase your market share?

Much of your success is determined by making the right decisions about building or buying commerce solutions. And the last thing you need is to be locked out of your markets because your systems limit your ability to compete.

Category: Subscription Management Point Solution

Recurring billing and subscription management point solutions focus on the function of managing when each customer is due to be billed and for how much.

Use Case: Subscription Management Point Solution

If you’re going to offer a complex or high volume subscription product, this type of solution offers relatively simple integrations and quick time-to-market. While it requires you to have the resources for building or sourcing other pieces of the ecommerce puzzle, this is a great fit for many companies.

Think, for example, of a newspaper or magazine subscription where the publisher needs to know when a subscription is expiring. The publisher either collects the annual/monthly fee or stops delivering the publication if the customer doesn’t pay by a certain date. A recurring billing platform will manage this information for the publisher, though they won’t necessarily act as the merchant of record and collect payments.

While many subscription commerce/billing platforms are great if you offer a complex or high volume subscription product, or are looking for quick time-to-market, the challenge some companies discover is that most of these solutions only support a fraction of the capabilities that your business might require.

To access all the necessary parts of a fully functional ecommerce ecosystem (payment processing, multivariate testing, localization capabilities, marketing capabilities, fraud prevention, affiliate and reseller support, customer support, etc.), you would have to mix and match several vendors to achieve complete coverage. This also leaves you at the mercy of the quality of connections between your subscription management solution and other third-party vendors.

Keystone

Ultimately, subscription management is only one part of a much larger ecommerce picture. If the subscription management layer is all you are looking for, and your existing systems can handle the integrations, this is a great fit for many companies. However, if that’s not the case, and you don’t have the resources for the development and integrations, a full-service digital commerce solution might be your best bet for reducing the costs of your commerce.

Ryan Greives is the Public Relations Manager at cleverbridge.

The post Evaluating Commerce Solutions: Subscription Management Tools appeared first on cleverbridge.

With an array of options, it can be easy to get locked into a provider that doesn’t meet your company’s specific requirements. Or, even worse, the wrong solution becomes a limiting factor in responding to future shifts in products/services, pricing or market opportunities.

Depending on your current infrastructure and in-house expertise, you’ll have to decide between building or buying a solution to handle payments, subscription management and other miscellaneous ecommerce capabilities.

Building a solution on your own takes a lot of planning, development and maintenance. So when you choose to implement a commerce solution, you’ll be looking at three main categories of providers:

• Billing / payment solutions
• Subscription management solutions
• Full-service solutions

We will explore the first category in this post, and then we will follow up with our analysis of the other two types of commerce solutions in future posts.

Category: Billing / Payments Tools

A payment gateway provides the technology to securely capture and transfer credit card information from a website shopping cart to the merchant account. A merchant account handles the financial processing of the credit card transaction with the banks and card brand (VISA, MasterCard, etc.). It is very typical to have one company supply the merchant account and another supply the payment gateway because very few companies supply both services under the same roof. Some payment gateways have even evolved to offer simple recurring billing features.

Use Case

This solution can be the best option for small businesses and startups that don’t have the volume to obtain a merchant account or for companies with largely physical goods looking to experiment with digital business models. If you’re doing simple plan-based billing, then you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how quick and easy it can be to configure one of these gateways to do just that.

Many payment and billing platforms have been fine-tuned over decades to support the core commerce management of one-time purchases of physical goods.

Some of them have even evolved and launched simple recurring billing modules on top of their payment gateways. This solution can be the best option for small businesses and startups that don’t have the volume to obtain a merchant account or have simple subscription needs, or for a company largely selling physical goods looking to experiment with simple digital business models.

Unfortunately, the management of subscriptions can be quite complex in the digital world. Subscription models used by companies like Salesforce offer customers different levels of functionality for a variety of prices per seat, per month.

Scheduled flat fees might not be too complicated to calculate, but what happens when a customer adds or cancels seats in the middle of the billing period and prices need to be prorated for partial months? Or the credit card on file expires and renewal billings fail? What’s the tax rate on that service? Can you track each plan’s churn rate?

Moreover, usage-based subscriptions require billing unique amounts with each renewal, which requires a system to calculate usage.

Subscriptions also require advance customer notifications in order to reduce churn and keep cash flowing. As you can probably imagine, the complexity of managing subscription information for thousands – or even millions – of customers increases exponentially.

In these cases, a payment or billing platform falls short.

Because many of these solutions were born out of the one-time purchase world, they can lack the specific or robust subscription capabilities to support business models built around digital goods or services. If you’re not looking to develop those capabilities in-house, the next two solution offerings might be a better fit.

Keystone

A billing/payment solution can be the best option for companies of all sizes with simple digital business models as it’s the cheapest option to get you started with accepting basic recurring payments. However, if you’re going to offer a complex or high volume subscription product which requires robust subscription and recurring revenue capabilities, you will be better served with one of the two following options.

For a sneak peek at the other two types, check out Navigating the Solutions Landscape.

Ryan Greives is the Public Relations Manager at cleverbridge.

The post Evaluating Commerce Solutions: Billing and Payment Tools appeared first on cleverbridge.

In order to understand the complexity of subscription billing, we must first break it down into its parts. The graphic below sets out the basic combination of factors that define various subscription billing models.

• Billing interval – Subscriber is billed when they use the service (on-demand), or at a regular interval, like monthly or annually, etc. (scheduled)
• Fee type – Subscriber is billed a predetermined price (flat), or based on their exact use of the service (usage-based)

Quadrant 1: On-Demand / Flat Billing

A company who charges subscribers a set price for on-demand services is using the on-demand / flat billing model. The real-life example most relevant to this billing method would be in-app purchases for a freemium game.

In games that use a freemium model, subscribers do not pay for basic access to game play. However, premium features in the game (access to special powers, the ability to connect with other users, the ability to add additional avatars or users to your account, etc.) are available for in-app purchase. It’s on-demand because the subscriber is billed immediately, and it’s a flat fee because the price is predetermined.

Because the company sets the pricing ahead of time and are not beholden to subscribers’ fluctuating use of the service, they can better predict incoming revenue streams. The real value to the company using a freemium model that bills upon demand is the vast wealth of user data that customers will provide just to use the service. Free users provide their email addresses, creating an avenue to market premium purchases to them. Their use of the program also helps to weed out glitches and supports the developers’ efforts to improve the service.

It’s also easier to market to customers with this subscription billing model. Timely offers, discounts and persuasive messaging encourage customers to make more in-app purchases. Meanwhile, free users having a good experience become your advocates among their social networks and friends.

There are two potential downsides to this model. First, you may have an overabundance of free users, whose costs are not offset by incoming revenue. And second, because on-demand purchases are not guaranteed, revenue is not as predictable as in a scheduled / flat billing model.

Quadrant 2: On-Demand / Usage-Based Billing

On-demand / usage-based billing occurs when a subscriber is billed for the exact services rendered at the time of their use rather than a flat fee. The ride sharing service Uber may be the most familiar example of this billing model. The subscriber is billed for the amount they use when they use it.

Customers favor this model because they are in direct control over how much they use and pay for the service. In addition, customers are not tied to a billing cycle and literally pay as they go.

This type of billing works well for Uber because they must also pay the contractor (the driver) for their services. The funds are available from the subscriber as soon as the service has been rendered, allowing the company to distribute payment to the contractors in a timely fashion.

The downside for the company with this model is that subscriber use can fluctuate. And traditional marketing tactics are not as effective in encouraging incremental increases in customer use. There is no email that might entice a rider to order their cab to take another spin around the block just to increase Uber’s revenue. This is distinguished from an on-demand / flat billing model, where traditional conversion rate optimization tactics explain the additional value loyal users will derive from purchasing paid features.

Quadrant 3: Scheduled / Flat Billing

When a subscriber is billed a regular amount at a regular interval, that type of subscription is called scheduled / flat billing. Spotify, who bills a set monthly fee to their subscribers, uses scheduled / flat billing. This is the simplest subscription model and provides some key advantages to both businesses and their subscribers.

The regular billing interval and amount means that your company’s revenue is predictable. Likewise for the subscriber, their financial obligation is easily anticipated. For those customers who like to know what they’ll be paying, this model allows for maximum satisfaction.

For a business, the pitfalls include the fact that a customer will be paying the same amount for low usage as they would for heavy usage. The costs associated with using your service may be hard to predict and not tied to the revenue you are collecting.

Quadrant 4: Scheduled / Usage-Based Billing

Finally, when a subscriber makes their payment at a regular interval, but the cost of their subscription is based on metered usage of the service, this is called scheduled / usage-based billing. Anyone with a utility account with their local electric company is familiar with this model. It’s scheduled because the bill is due the same time every month, and it’s usage-based because the amount you pay is defined by the electricity you use.

The advantage for the customer is that they are only paying for what they’ve used. They can control how much they pay by curtailing their usage in a given billing period. Customers who enjoy only paying for what they’ll use are the most satisfied with this model.

Services with costs that increase as usage increases are prime candidates for this billing model, which allows the business to scale their revenue in direct proportion to the customer usage.

The downside to this model is that price fluctuations may have an impact on customer churn. After high-use periods, or an uptick in prices, customers will feel the impact of higher charges immediately. These fluctuations may encourage subscribers to find other providers or reduce their usage (and your revenue).

Keystone

Whether you are in charge of the financial stability of your organization, or nurturing customer relationships and maximizing customer lifetime value, you will inevitably run into the complications posed by subscription commerce. Exploring the types of subscription billing models in terms of their billing frequency and pricing strategy can help your team discover the pros and cons of each and select the right model for your business.

To learn more, download our guide, Top Three Subscription Billing Challenges today.

The post Subscription Billing Models Defined 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.

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.

In short, whether your online sales strategy is very very nice or very very naughty over the next few months will determine whether you wake up to a stocking stuffed with shiny new subscription revenue … or an inert, lusterless lump of unengaged users.

We’re sure that you already have a plan in place (it’s the end of October, after all). But as an early gift from us to you, we’d like to share some tried-and-true tips for maximizing online sales over the next few months. They’re easy to execute and nearly error-proof – what could be better?

Check out our festive infographic below to learn:

• Key statistics on subscription sales during the holiday season
• The best days for blasting promotions to your customer base
• How to use affiliate marketing to acquire more free trial users
• How to leverage email campaigns to increase recurring revenue
• How strategic social media marketing can boost brand awareness
• And more, of course!

The post Growing Subscription Revenue for the Holiday Season [Infographic] appeared first on cleverbridge.

But they do. And if you’re not strategically planning to handle these types of issues, they can cause big headaches in the future. So it’s important to mitigate risk where and when you can.

In our latest video, cleverbridge Co-Founder Craig Vodnik further explores the vast world of subscription billing and what it takes to protect your subscription business from an ever-changing regulatory landscape.

Transcription

So you’re a subscription business. Your customers are able to buy your product and do it on a monthly or annual basis only.

If you have a solution that is limited to just monthly and annual subscriptions, you probably have a lot of other hidden issues that you’re not aware of, such as being able to deal with foreign taxation, understanding how to have great customer experience in international markets, knowing what the privacy rules are on a global basis, and complying with a variety of other international and domestic standards that you may not even be aware of, such as offering your customers a way to cancel without ever interacting with an agent.

What I’m telling you today, you need to know and you need to find a flexible partner and flexible solution that helps your business today and where you want to go in the future.

Analysis

Let’s first review what we’ve learned about subscriptions in past videos. The first thing to know is that subscription success depends on building long-term customer relationships. You have to think about each stage of the buyer’s journey and create a positive customer experience across each significant interaction. This isn’t just about the look and feel of your website. It’s also about ease of use. That means knowing how each step taken by your customer leads them to where they need to go.

An engaging customer experience includes signing up new users, collecting payment, processing renewals and cancellations. Something that seems as simple as a monthly or annual renewal means all of these parts — the design and function of your site, your marketing emails, the sign-up process, the payment and billing, the renewal and cancellation events — are acting in concert.

Once you understand the importance of building long-term customer relationships, you have to think about growing recurring revenue streams. In a previous video, Craig emphasized that it’s crucial for businesses to disrupt their own business model. Otherwise, your competitors will do it for you.

Next comes the decision to implement new pricing and billing models. Think about the type of solution you need in order to efficiently manage hybrid models with products that combine regularly scheduled billings with variable prices or set prices combined with on-demand billing.

Now, to make the situation just a little bit more difficult than you wish it were, throw taxes (sales, VAT and consumption), data privacy and information security on top of creating a seamless customer experience and implementing complex billing scenarios. Are you starting to see how tricky this gets?

Keystone

The road to global subscription success is paved with knowledge and understanding. Beyond creating seamless customer experiences and implementing complex billing scenarios, you also have to know what compliance issues you will face on your road to global customers and understand how to mitigate that risk.

Learn more about global compliance risks and subscription billing by downloading our ebook today.

The post Going Global With Subscription Billing [Video] 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.