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Nowadays, more and more sellers recognize the importance and great benefits that joining to sell subscriptions brings to their online business.
As a result, they begin a completely new subscription business model or integrate it with their available one.
So, if you’ve already chosen your best subscription eCommerce platform, you will need to move to the final step. That is to sell subscriptions.
To accompany you on the way to starting your own subscription business, we will show you why you should start selling subscriptions and some tips to attract more customers to collect substantial recurring revenue.
Why should you start to sell subscriptions right away?
In general, if you intend to sell subscriptions, you must, at the same time, guarantee to provide your customers with top-quality products on a regular basis.
Therefore, a great user experience and flexible subscription eCommerce management are what make your business stand out and achieve abundant benefits.
How well your subscription eCommerce management function is based on which platform you choose.
However, you may still wonder what a Shopify subscription box is and how you can successfully create one for your company. If so, you can take a look at how to effectively create a Shopify Subscription box to get a brief understanding.
1. Recurring Income
The most outstanding benefit when you choose to sell subscriptions is the ability to collect recurring revenue.
When customers acquire your subscriptions, they are committed to making purchases for predetermined lengths of time, sometimes up to several months or a year.
As a result, your company will receive a regular flow of money from your clients who pay for a specific product until they pause or stop the subscription service.
Moreover, receiving payments on a regular basis enables you to forecast your sales. This will greatly increase the predictability and sustainability of your eCommerce business operations.
2. More customers
If you offer your items as subscription plans, you can have more chances to attract customers.
That’s because the subscription-based business model will give your clients better convenience when shopping online.
For instance, if customers frequently purchase a product from your store, they just need to register with your subscription service. Then, you will send them the item they want on a regular basis.
Otherwise, they will have to come back to your store and repeat previous orders manually.
Subscription registration vs. one-time purchase
Furthermore, customers can receive more discounts and promotions from subscription-based businesses.
Besides, recurring payments help them save more money than one-time purchases do in the long run. Still, sellers can earn the same amount of money.
3. Simple inventory management
Nowadays, many entrepreneurs choose a business model that can relieve them from the pressures of inventory management. And that is also what you will get when you start to sell subscriptions.
Reducing the pressure of inventory management is what you get when you start to sell subscriptions
Because your customers subscribe to a product for lengthy periods of time, it enables you to estimate the number of products required to meet all of their recurring orders.
Therefore, in addition to providing a steady stream of income, offering subscriptions can save you more time in calculating storage space. Besides, it lets you control your inventory more easily and effectively.
4. Brand loyalty
It is true that starting to sell subscriptions can increase your brand loyalty.
By offering your customers the subscription service, you can concentrate on keeping current customers satisfied and turning them into loyal clients.
Meanwhile, with a subscription business mode, you will spend less money on rendering services to keep old customers when compared to running campaigns to attract new ones.
With the decision to sell subscriptions, you can develop a significant level of brand love and raise clients’ lifetime value
For example, some Shopify subscription apps nowadays offer users the ability to send personalized emails to their subscribers. Thus, it helps to improve the customer experience and raise the level of customer care to sell subscriptions.
5. Up-selling and cross-selling
Last but not least, if you’re about to sell subscriptions, it will be more likely for you to up-sell and cross-sell your items.
Subscription boxes make it easier for you to keep selling related products to users you already interact with, rather than investing time and resources in finding new clients.
Besides, if your clients agree to purchase your up-selling and cross-selling as well as other subscription plans, it may be a positive sign that they truly have an interest in your business.
Effective ways to sell subscriptions
There are lots of ways you can choose to successfully sell subscriptions in your store. Their common objective is to convince clients that frequently purchasing your goods offers them a better value. Therefore, you just need to find out which way will be most effective for your eCommerce business.
There are many methods you can use to encourage your clients to subscribe to your subscription plan
Let’s explore how you can entice more loyal subscribers to your subscription services.
1. Install Shopify subscription apps
The first effective way to help you successfully sell subscriptions is by adding Shopify subscription apps. There are several trustworthy and high-rated apps you can find on the Shopify App Store.
If we need to give you one option, we’ll highly recommend you SubBox: Subscriptions by OneCommerce. It’s a Shopify app created to help online merchants successfully sell subscriptions.
We will suggest you SubBox if you’re looking for a suitable subscription app
Though it’s a recently-build app, SubBox has all of the fundamental and up-to-date features to start a Shopify subscription box right away.
Moreover, this app is totally free and the development team will give you a detailed description as well as comprehensive tutorials of this app.
Grow endless recurring revenue with SubBox
2. Consider 10x vs 10%
What actually makes your customers decide to purchase your subscriptions is how much value they will get back from every successful transaction.
That’s because making the commitment to send recurring payments is always more difficult than one-time purchases.
Hence, you need to make your subscription plan much more attractive by offering the clients 10 times the value instead of just a 10% saving.
But, how can you increase the value by 10 times to sell subscriptions to more customers?
Here are some examples you can use as references for your subscription business:
- An orientation program without charge
- Discounts and special promotions on the next orders
- Included gifts
- Advanced tools for subscribers to manage their subscription orders
3. Offer the freemium option
Offering the freemium option is an effective way to encourage customers to purchase more subscription plans and services.
With freemium subscriptions, sellers provide their clients with something helpful, but it still lacks the advanced functions to meet all of their needs.
For some users, the freemium membership will be sufficient to gain what they need.
However, your target audience will have a higher level of demand and need your cutting-edge subscription services.
For example, Canva provides users with some basic features and easy-to-use tools to create high-quality design artwork in a short time.
Canva provides users with basic tools
Nevertheless, Canva limits the ability to apply premium templates. You can only unlock them if you pay for a subscription plan.
4. Have a logical impact on customers’ emotions
Many customers can be influenced by their emotions at the same time when they decide to buy a product. This rule also applies to the case in which you want to sell subscriptions.
When you sell subscriptions to your clients, they are also allowed to postpone or stop the subscription service at any time.
Therefore, you need to make sure that your subscription plan is still appealing and creates a positive experience for them. For instance:
- The advantage of unfettered access to your products over a freemium plan’s constrained features
- The investment return provided by the plan in which you sell subscriptions
- The convenience of having goods delivered to customers’ doors instead of making two weekly trips to the store
5. Limit your customers’ options
Some buyers don’t really enjoy the fact that they have to make recurring payments every month. In contrast, they want to be more independent and make one-time purchases whenever they want.
Many customers prefer making one-time purchases to buying subscription plans
If so, you may want to think about a new sales strategy. That is, selling your products solely to clients who have memberships.
However, it depends on how eager you are to sell subscriptions online. Meanwhile, you may face the risk that the items you choose to only offer as subscriptions will be tougher to sell.
As a result, customers should choose to subscribe, or they won’t be able to acquire your products.
6. Give your customers a free trial
To build your brand’s loyalty and sell subscriptions in the long term, you will need to give your clients a free trial to have their first experience with your products.
In particular, you should think about offering a free trial if your product or service is difficult to explain. Or, it requires actual use for customers to fully understand the value of your product.
Then, they will be more likely to subscribe to your subscription service.
Nevertheless, the free trial should be distinguishable from the freemium option. It often has a start and end date, whereas a freemium offer is typically accessible to a customer forever.
7. Sell subscriptions as presents
The idea of selling subscriptions as presents to someone is really interesting and creative.
Instead of buying subscription items for personal use, customers can now purchase the product they want as a subscription gift.
However, gift subscriptions are very difficult to renew. That’s because the user of subscription products did not make the initial purchase. Consequently, they have to go through their own purchasing procedures to renew the orders.
Besides, the individual who bought the gift subscription cannot pay for someone else to continue receiving subscription advantages.
Finally, the advice here is that gift subscriptions can be sold as a method to “top up” an already popular subscription service. You shouldn’t use them as your main source of subscribers.
Final thoughts
In a nutshell, there are several ways to sell subscriptions. Each method will be suitable and beneficial for different company models and requirements.
However, you can choose to use just one of them or combine them all into your subscription eCommerce management. The ultimate goal is to successfully run your subscription business and give your customers the best shopping experience.
After getting some useful tips to attract more subscribers to your website, you may wonder how you can start to sell subscriptions right away.
Grow endless recurring revenue with SubBox
