Running a successful subscription business can be extremely lucrative. If you get the pricing right, you can rely on a remarkable level of revenue consistency, leaving you with steady profit and the kind of operational stability that other business owners can only dream of.
But achieving that level of success is hardly a given. It’s a competitive industry, after all. There are plenty of companies that struggle to get results. Sometimes it’s because they offer mediocre products or services, but not always: sometimes it’s because they just don’t know how to convert their qualified leads.
They put huge amounts of time and money into bringing people in, but watch it all go to waste. This leads to immense frustration and stagnation. If it goes on for long enough, it can lead to the loss of motivation and dedication. Why try so hard if the results aren’t arriving? And once the upstream quality has gone, all chance of success has gone with it.
If you want to take your subscription business as far as it can go, then, you need to focus on converting your leads. To that end, this post will list five things you can do to earn more customers and reach the next level (you also need to get your attribution right to make your digital analytics useful, so keep that in mind). Let’s get to them.
1. Directly challenge the competition
There’s a moment of second-guessing that tends to occur close to conversion. When you’re about to commit your money, it’s natural to wonder (even if you’re quite familiar with the industry) if there’s a superior alternative out there. Think of it as cold feet for transactions. And when that happens, you won’t proceed until you’ve found some answers.
So when you’re filling the role of the almost-seller, it’s important to think about how you can mitigate this. What can you do to keep a prospect from leaving? One option that can work extremely well is anticipating and answering their questions about the overall market, and that means explicitly making reference to other companies in your niche.
Too many companies shy away from mentioning their rivals. They don’t want to be aggressive, perhaps, or simply fear that they don’t measure up. This is a mistake. If people aren’t going with you, they’re going with some other company, and you need to prompt them to stick with what you bring to the table. The way to do this is by laying down the gauntlet.
Mention your rivals directly, going into detail about what you do better: create a table to compare stats, or set out an infographic with a tool like Canva to add some visual impact. It’ll be a biased view, of course (they’ll no doubt have some edges over you, even if you truly deserve the top spot), but that’s not a problem provided the information you provide is accurate.
You can introduce their information at the last second if you’d like. When a prospective subscriber gets to the checkout stage, you can provide a set of bullet points noting what makes your service better quality and/or value than that of your nearest competitor. It’s a subtle addition they might only spot in their periphery, but it can make a difference.
In general, though, it makes more sense to introduce these comparisons much earlier in the funnel. If you can set out the industry landscape when a prospect is first showing interest, you’ll achieve two things: advancing yourself as an authority on your entire niche, and framing everything relative to your service. This will position you as the default (and safe) choice.
2. Highlight positive social proof
What holds people back from subscribing is they often don’t trust your brand. They may think everything looks great, but what if there’s a catch? Maybe it’s all a scam, or your brand is legitimate but nowhere near as good as you claim. There’s no shortage of companies making extravagant assertions that they inevitably can’t back up.
Those companies understand that plenty of people who subscribe to services won’t muster up the effort to cancel them unless they’re intensely dissatisfied. Some will forget about being subscribed at all, being fairly apathetic about the small monthly charges. Unfortunately, this makes life harder for companies that actually care about their reputations: unscrupulous brands can simply dissolve their companies and set up new ones when the criticism mounts.
So what can you do to convince the tougher prospects to convert? Well, you can lean heavily on social proof, which consists of evidence detailing the satisfaction of your existing customers. In most cases, this evidence comes directly from those customers in the form of reviews. Getting detailed comments is ideal, of course, but even a rating out of five will do much to help you.
The key thing about social proof is that you haven’t warped or tainted it. Any comments you make about your company will seem highly suspicious due to your vested interest in winning business — and the more positive you get (even if you have good reason to be positive), the more people will doubt the validity of your assertions.
When one of your customers expresses their happiness with your service, it says far more than you ever could. Can you incentivize them to say nice things about you? Paraphrase their comments to remove elements of negativity? Sure: the social proof system isn’t flawless. Yet it’s markedly better than the alternative, particularly if you make a commitment to using it honestly.
Effective social proof isn’t unrealistically glowing. It’s enthusiastic, but it features enough criticism to indicate two things: firstly, that you’re willing to confront your failures, and secondly, that the commentary overall is trustworthy. If you get nothing but five-star ratings because your service is so good, it can actually work against you by seeming unbelievable. Mitigate this by tasking your customers with finding constructive criticism.
3. Be proactive in offering support
Solid customer support is crucial to any business — and it’s certainly no different in the subscription industry — but simply responding to queries as they come is an outdated approach. Instead, you need to be proactive in identifying when prospective subscribers might need some extra support and anticipating what they’re likely to need.
So while a way of monitoring and prioritizing incoming support requests, such as Crisp’s ticketing system, is still essential when fielding product-related queries or dealing with subscription-specific quandaries, attracting new subscribers relies on resolving potential issues before they even arise.
Let’s say a customer is spending a lot of time on your pricing page. Could this be because they’re weighing up whether your product represents good value? Perhaps they’re gathering extensive information before making a purchase decision. Here would be a good time to offer a proactive solution — you could have a chatbot provide some more detailed pricing documentation, for example, or offer to schedule a live demo of your product.
This is just one example of proactive customer service in action, but there are many different ways to engage prospects through this proactive approach. For example:
- Providing access to self-service resources enables customers to find information which may help them make a purchase decision without the intervention of a support agent.
- Offering a live chat function that’s accessible anywhere on your site (and reminding users that it’s there) means they can quickly get answers to queries that might otherwise represent a barrier to conversion.
- Automatically offering a free trial when a user spends a significant amount of time browsing features can turn them from a fence-sitter into a loyal, paying subscriber.
4. Offer multiple pricing tiers
There’s an art to getting your pricing right, and more tiers aren’t always better, so it isn’t a matter of simply providing more options and getting more conversions — but if you only have one tier currently, you should think about changing that. The most common addition is to offer savings for those who make longer commitments. Subscribe for two years and get 10% off, for instance.
Even something that minor could radically boost your fortunes. The key is to avoid providing too many options, as that can easily lead to confusion. In most cases, it makes sense to have three or four tiers, with each one targeting a different type of user. You need to make this clear in the copy, though. Presentation makes a big difference.
One tier could target those with limited budgets, for instance, stripping away extra features to keep costs down. Another could be geared towards those looking for as many options as possible, charging extra for optimal power and accompanying support. The better you can match what a shopper is looking for, the happier they’ll be with your service.
At each point, you must stress what makes a tier great, so don’t present any tier as deficient in any way. Focus on the most basic tier being a strong foundation with an unbeatable value proposition, then introduce every other tier as building upon it in specific ways. Look at how your favorite subscription services detail their tiers, and use that as inspiration.
It also bears noting that having various tiers gives you handy options for cycling through temporary discounts. One month you could offer 10% off your basic tier, for example, while the next you could offer 10% off your premium tier. Think about how supermarkets drive sales by rotating deals so there’s always something being discounted. It’s a simple trick, admittedly, but that doesn’t mean it can’t work wonders for you.
5. Partner with relevant influencers
Now, this might sound more like a straightforward marketing move than something to help with lifting a conversion rate, but it isn’t that simple. Yes, it’s true that partnering with influencers will help spread the word — yet it’s also true that the attachment people have to the influencers they follow does far more than push them to consider certain brands.
As evidenced by the rise of platforms like Twitch, parasocial relationships (Healthy Gamer has an insightful piece about them) are incredibly powerful. Those who habitually watch content from certain creators come to care deeply about how those creators live their lives: the opinions they hold, the foods they eat, the games they play, and the products and services they use.
This gives those creators power beyond anything a traditional marketer could imagine. When they recommend purchases to their followers, they don’t just make a difference when they reach people who were always likely to be interested: they significantly compel all of their followers to put some effort into determining whether they might be interested too.
This introduces some problems, of course: some of those followers will express interest before reconsidering, negatively impacting your conversion rate. But on the whole, when you factor in those who decide to proceed and — most importantly — those who were captivated from the outset (this should be a strong group provided you choose the right influencers), you should find a potentially positive impact on aggregate.
What’s more, if you can offer decent introductory offers (inevitably with influencer-specific promo codes), all relevant prospects will be further motivated to convert. You’ll need to pay close attention to what the followers say about your partnership deals, though, as it’s possible to damage your brand by associating with the wrong people. Don’t expect to find the right deal on the first attempt. Keep looking, keep negotiating, and you’ll get there.
Wrapping up, we’ve highlighted five ways you can increase the conversion rate of your business, explaining their benefits and offering helpful resources to implement these tactics. The onus now passes to you to put the recommendations into action. It won’t be easy, but there’s nothing stopping you from making progress.
If you can manage to achieve just a few of these actions, you should notice a significant uptick in your conversion rate, so get started immediately. You should also keep in mind that the subscription industry changes quickly, and make an effort to stay apprised of developments and trends. Good luck.
