To survive in the subscription economy, you will first have to overcome the challenge of influencing customers to subscribe to your product or service. Once you have built a customer base, the immediate challenge of retaining customers evolves. To retain customers, you will have to choose the right customer retention strategies.
Studies have shown that the cost of retaining customers is low, which will be the exact opposite if your business will have to attract new customers every time. Thus, to be able to sustain in the subscription economy, you should start prioritizing your customer retention efforts.
To ensure that your retention efforts are fruitful, it is necessary to understand your company’s stage, which will help you decide how to balance the acquisition of customers and customer retention policies. However, customer retention might not be as easy as said especially in the subscription economy, with increasing numbers of competitors every day.
But subscription management software can cater to these worries of yours and retain your customers efficiently to help your business foster.
However, before we start understanding how subscription management software features can optimize your customer retention strategies and tactics, let’s take a step back to understand the importance of customer retention strategies and what subscription management software is.
Importance of customer retention strategies
Customer retention strategies increase the opportunity of providing utility and desirability for your services and products to your customers. Furthermore, it is also easier to extract a lot more value from satisfied customers when compared to those who churn.
Customer retention strategies also reduce cost as studies show that the cost of customer acquisition is five times higher when compared to that of retaining an existing customer.
It also helps in gaining loyal customers who make repeated purchases, as it has been identified that loyal customers will spend 67% more as compared to first time buyers. Moreover, 65% of a company’s business is achieved from repeat buyers.
Customer retention in return also creates brand ambassadors, as loyal customers are most likely to help your business flourish by spreading word-of-mouth.
What is subscription management software?
Subscription management software is a solution, which empowers businesses by automatic subscription billing processes. Implementing subscription management software will provide you the opportunity of managing recurring billing, renewals, recognizing revenue, and collecting revenue in the subscription economy efficiently. Subscription management also is known for suggesting up-sales and cross-sales, providing notifications to customers about new services of your company, recommending customers about pricing options, providing personalized billing along with giving accurate quotes to your sales team. Therefore, in simple terms, it can be said that subscription management software simplifies the challenges of handling customer demands in the substitution economy, which will help you in gaining customer satisfaction and retain customers in return.
Can subscription management software optimize customer retention?
Subscription management software can empower your business to improve its relationship with the subscribers, as a result of providing flexible options like customized subscription offers, discounts, vouchers, and free trials. This good relationship with customers eventually goes beyond a simple transaction.
Furthermore, apart from ensuring proper recognition of subscription revenue, the subscription management process improves customer satisfaction as well. Subscription management software in the background supports automated data flow, which enables customers to interact with it from the front end while empowering account managers and sales representatives to make adjustments and needed changes to customer subscriptions in the back end. As a result, subscription management software reduces the chances of human errors in such tasks, which can churn customers.
Subscription management software also reduces complexity regarding revenue collection, and tracking, which eventually helps in enabling interactions with other systems including customer information and history like financial systems and CRM. Thus, it becomes easier to collect customer data for providing customized services and gaining customer satisfaction and retention.
The features of subscription management software also let you optimize product pricing, and prioritize customer engagement, while ensuring seamless customer onboarding and aligning employee goals with retention strategies. This software also provides you the opportunity to diversify your product offerings, using automation for advanced processes, gathering focused data for customer services, and developing customer loyalty programs.
This software will also give you the opportunity of using automation to advance processes and best-in-market subscription management software will be able to automatically and appropriately produce invoices for each client regardless of the billing cycle. Furthermore, it will also help you in generating separate and consolidated invoices due to the capacity of this software to support more complex accounting data.
A proper subscription management software will also enable you to provide multiple payment options to your customers, identify different customer touchpoints and send notifications or reminders to your customers for keeping them updated.
Therefore, to answer the question, yes, subscription management software can efficiently optimize customer retention.
How to choose the best subscription management software?
Of all the benefits that subscription management software can give you, neither one on its own can help you achieve customer retention. To appropriately achieve customer retention, you will have to choose a subscription management software that gives you more than one option. Thus, it is recommended to choose an all-in-one solution, which will not only enhance your recurring billing but help you achieve all the above-discussed benefits while being easy to understand.
You can choose EQUP. It is a premium CRM software that will cater to your worries about subscription management software and help you to retain customers to increase competitive advantage and sustain the subscription economics.
