SUBSCRIPTION MODEL DEVELOPMENT

Our Subscription Model Experts Can Fill in Up to ALL of the Pieces of This Puzzle. Let us Help You Develop a Highly Profitable Membership Business!

Creating a recurring-revenue, subscription model is best accomplished by expertise equipped to help you do all of the relevant parts as right as possible. Doing it right means avoiding wasteful expenses of time & money, while setting up key parts to work together toward maximizing revenue & profitability. Those parts include many details of ideal business structure, product development, website development, legal matters, marketing, sales, planning & execution, accounting, infrastructure and so on.

Our team has extraordinary strategic & nitty-gritty experience in some of the best-run subscription models in the world. For example, we are expert at helping you:

• minimize cost of acquisition while maximizing ARPS (average Annual Revenue-Per-Subscriber) & lifetime value,
• correctly package your idea(s) as a "WOW!" subscription product or service,
• assembling Internet technologies to simplify the demands on your business while maximizing subscriber benefits,
• construct crucial website layers to help you maximize lead capture, customer conversion & retention, cross selling & upselling, lead qualifying, etc,
• create your launch marketing plan and impressive marketing creative to motivate the targeted market to buy, Buy, BUY!!!,
• identify cost-efficient sources of customers predisposed to purchasing your kind of offerings via subscription,
• "penny-pinch" test into new, sizable sources of potential subscribers, including the enormous multitudes who are total strangers right now,
• implement sales model solutions proven to work well in subscription & membership models,
• implement well-proven retention strategies to help you KEEP as many subscribers as possible,
• install a best-in-class product development model to maintain a steady stream of new offerings in your pipeline,
• consult on best practices and insider innovations to help you with ALL of the rest... so that you do everything right,
• Etc. (there are many more)

Could you try to do everything on your own? Of course! But the reasons to hire talent like ours is for the:

• expertise to do it right... which also means the experience to help you avoid making costly mistakes from DIY approaches. AND,
• speed/agility to desirable results by you working with those who know vs. anyone best guessing & hoping.

In all new business thrusts, you either hire "been there, done that" help to maximize your chances of success or you are wild guessing, with much too much reliance on hope that it will work out to your satisfaction. With so many crucial variables in this particular kind of strategic thrust...

You are best served by engaging experienced & objective talent vs. gambling so much on DIY. We can help you save lots of money (by avoiding common mistakes) and make big money by doing it all right. Expert guides can get you to the good parts FASTER than trial & error.

CRUCIAL SUBSCRIPTION BUSINESS METRICS TO MONITOR

In creating a business model, one should always identify a list of crucial metrics to help manage the business. There are many key variables to be tracked by the subscription business entrepreneur. For example:

• Newly acquired subscribers: we often simplify this to the term "newstarts," as it represents how many brand new subscribers have been added (started a subscription) in the latest subscription offering period. Many companies measure subscription periods in monthly terms, so this is often answering the question: how many new paying subscribers joined us in the last month?
• Cost of Acquisition (COA): average cost of acquiring each new subscriber across all mediums. Novices almost always imagine this to be considerably less than reality. Established enterprises often spend up to all of this to "buy" a new subscriber, knowing the real money is in the subsequent transactions... be that future renewals or via cross-selling (additional product or service sales made to this base of buyers). We can help you figure out your optimized COA.
• Average Revenue-Per-Subscriber (ARPS): this is average annual revenue realized from each subscriber, which is the key metric to help you think about how much each subscriber is worth to your business in the short term. Often the bulk of the profitability of a subscription model is centered in this metric. It is VERY IMPORTANT to make the most of your ARPS strategy & implementation. Many DIY-subscription models miss tangible opportunity here (often by not even thinking about ARPS), leaving a great deal of recurring PROFIT on the table. Don't make that mistake.

• Lifetime value (LV): this is usually an estimation of the total average revenue you can make from each subscriber while they remain a subscriber, though some companies use this term as a calculation of total revenue made from each subscriber to date. The former estimates value based on the future while the latter works only from today backwards. Both are good to know... especially in how they influence marketing spend and time allocations.
• 90, 60, 30 days to expiration: these 3 numbers are primarily used to focus final efforts on renewal campaigns, as a good subscription model puts tremendous effort into keeping as many customers as possible. Established enterprises know it is cheaper to keep a customer than to replace them with a new one, so smart membership models give great focus to renewing every single subscriber. These metrics drive ramping up of efforts to "save" every possible customer from expiration. That's money- often mostly profit- about to be lost. Is your model optimized to keep EVERY possible subscriber?
• Active subscriber base: this represents your total number of active (currently paid) subscribers. This is sometimes more formally called "active paid subscriber base" or just "actives" to distinguish it from lists of names you may have in your database who haven't actually purchased anything (often called leads).
• Cancels: the pool of people who purchased something but have since canceled their subscription.
• Expires: the pool of people who have been subscribers but let their subscription lapse. Expireds didn't cancel- they chose not to renew.

• Lead database: the number of unique people in your database who haven't actually purchased anything. For example, a website might encourage visitors to register for something(s) in hopes of being able to promote those people in other ways to convert them into paying subscribers at some point. These are better than unknown prospects (unique website visitors) because you have some contact information (and thus a better chance at selling them something with some direct marketing efforts).
• Etc. (the above is a good sampling of important subscription business metrics, but there are a number of others we can also share with you)

These kinds of metrics gauge the relative health of your subscription business. They quickly answer questions about whether it is trending in the right direction at any point in time. Growth in metrics like newstart quantities, ARPS and active subscriber base will objectively reveal such answers at-a-glance. If the trends are moving in the wrong direction, metrics like these can flag a problem early, giving you maximum time to dig in and correct any weaknesses to turn things around. It's always much better to detect a wrong-way turn/trend as early as possible, rather than letting it fall into some deep chasm before you fully realize it. If you already track these metrics and see any such turns, let us take a look: our deep experience should quickly recognize ways to fix problems... or push the accelerator on new opportunities, practices or tactics.

The next page covers...

• Applications of Membership & Subscription Business Metrics: how to put some of these to good use in your business.
• A good comparison & contrast of a startup (first) year vs. subsequent years.
• The most important ally of subscription model businesses.
• The most important trait of subscription model leaders/managers/owners.