6 second take: Offering subscription services can help you win new customers, while ensuring clients continually return to your business.
Subscription services for products have been popular for many decades, everything from Amway detergents to Wen shampoo to Stitch Fix clothing boxes — and often, businesses will seek to convert prospects using subscriptions.
The last few years, we’ve seen a proliferation of subscriptions for services.
In fact, a current trend in online courses is that course creators are opting to give students access to their entire libraries of content for a reasonably priced monthly subscription instead of a high priced single payment that gives lifetime access.
This experimentation with pricing models is in part an attempt to reach deeper into their target market, but the marketer must consider how to keep the subscription going.
They can’t rely on people subscribing and forgetting. The value must be so obvious that the user is happy to pay — and, maybe as a bonus, is also an ambassador bringing on new customers.
How to Convert Prospects Using Subscriptions
To capture a user’s attention for years and not just a few months, a service, much like a product, must become a part of the user’s routine systems and processes. For software-as-a-service (SaaS) products, this is easy.
If you stop your subscription to QuickBooks Online, you’ll lose your ability to access your financial information on the servers in the cloud.
This is more difficult when it comes to thought leadership services such as access to an online library of courses.
In order to capture the marketing message that will convert your ideal clients and keep them subscribed, you have to package it in a way that they will clearly see how it integrates into their day-to-day life, leaving them better off with it than without it.
Todd Herman, founder of the 90-Day Year, coaches his clients to build trademark-branded systems and communicate them to their clients through making sure they include words such as blueprint, formula, or method.
