Selling A Subscription Program

Implementing a subscription program means making a long-term investment in your business – one that should pay substantial dividends. How you market and sell subscriptions to your customers makes all the difference in the success of your subscription program. In this post, we’ll take a look at a few strategies for successfully selling your customers on subscriptions.

Get the word out

Customers need to know that a subscription program is available in order to sign up. This can be accomplished via email marketing, site banners, or simply an attractive option to subscribe on product details pages. Most customers are now well acquainted with subscription programs, so the content of the marketing materials can focus more on the benefit to the customer rather than the details of how the program works – as discussed in our last post, it’s incredibly important to sell customers on the value that the subscription program offers to them.

Offer the best possible experience

Poor layout and poor execution do not lead to confidence when it comes to signing up for a repeating order. Make sure that the user experience is absolutely top notch – after all, customers that sign up for your subscription program are your most valuable customers. A custom user journey where a customer is guided through options can be an excellent way to make sure that the experience is above and beyond. It’s also important to eliminate any friction at checkout – especially requiring the customer to check out with separate carts for subscription and non-subscription items. That’s a very poor UX and the extra steps discourage a customer from continuing the checkout process.

Overcome objections

This is incredibly important, but often overlooked. A customer may be interested in subscribing, and appreciate the the convenience, but have doubts about being able to change their subscription later on or cancel it if they need to. The best way to overcome any customer objections is to include a FAQ by the option to subscribe, so that an interested customer better understands the way the program works, and will be more willing to sign up.

These are by no means the only best practices when it comes to selling a subscription program, but they are an excellent start. It’s important to be agile in the implementation of such a program, and constantly consider improvements while evaluating the success of existing strategies. The ultimate goal should always be to provide the best value and experience to customers – if that’s achieved, then everything else will fall into place.