One can never pass a final afterword in matters digital. Consequently, the smartest B2C subscription business model is always just around the corner. But we can agree on what accounts for the smartness factor. In the B2C context, it is the customer who rules, and everything else should revolve around her every whim and fancy.
What works for a products-only digital market and a services-only virtual market is a dynamic subscription billing platform. Let us consider a few of the well-known subscription services today such as Dollar Shave Club, Netflix, and Amazon. These cover products, services, and an amalgamation of both.
B2C businesses that offer products by subscription or based on usage must guarantee that their billing encourages effective customer acquisition and retention. If not, revenue will suffer. That’s because acquiring and retaining consumers as clients requires far more billing agility than winning and keeping a customer as a business.
Types of Subscription Services
Different firms offer different standards of subscription services based on their industry, target audience and other such factors. The most common types of subscription services offered are:
1. Replenishment Subscription Service –
Replenishment subscription services offer regular, recurring deliveries of consumable products to customers. Replenishment services are the most successful form of subscription. The target audience often happens to be right in the millennial age range; there’s no wonder that replenishment services rock the everyday. The best example: Dollar Shave Club
2. Curation Subscription Service –
Curation subscription services offer collections of products to individual receivers based on their individual needs and tastes. Curation subscriptions attempt to amaze and entertain by rendering new items or deeply personalized experiences in attire, beauty, and food categories.
3. Access Subscription Service –
For Access subscription services customers must acquire a membership to access the company’s products. Accessibility subscriptions are mostly scattered between software and e-commerce. These subscriptions give access to content or products. Hence, services like Netflix and Amazon Prime are the best instances.
The Absolute Checklist for a Smart B2C Subscription Business Model
1. Dynamic Billing Solution
One might expect that an efficient B2B solution will primarily meet the demands of B2C businesses. Yet, it won’t. For B2C offerings, a comprehensive subscription billing solution plays a pivotal role in acquiring and retaining clients. It makes a significant difference in the B2C sphere, leading to subscriber base rises of as much as 25 percent over time.
2. Customer Loyalty
The subscription model capsizes conventional B2C models and quickly develops to support practically every type of product and service. Cultivating customer loyalty is as vital as the ability to persuade interested customers to sign up. In the subscription universe, the aim is to produce recurring revenue by obtaining and holding customers. An adequate subscription billing platform is central to transforming a relationship with an enthusiastic consumer into recurring revenue. Done correctly, it also produces a higher customer lifetime value to the dealer.
3. Market is Sales
Equipping your marketing team with pricing and promotion flexibility drives success because marketing is sales in B2C. To earn more subscribers, one needs to draw them to the product and provide a delightful offer. One launches campaigns and promotions to realize that goal.
Sadly, some billing solutions make it tough to launch and hone promotions. When every fine-tuning effort to a promotion demands a chunk of IT resources, your team’s capacity to promptly test and refine campaigns to create new promotional ideas becomes restricted. One might fail to obtain customers or, worse still, suffer existing customer losses as they get diverted to promotions offered by more resourceful competitor companies.
4. Agile Payment Integrations
B2C firms require a subscription billing platform that accepts virtually every current payment method and vigorously facilitates accepting new payment methods as they develop. Organizations attempting to race globally need a subscription billing solution that promotes billing and communications indigenous to every country and geographic region. And customers expect billing-related communications in their language and with references relevant to their locale and currency.
5. Omni-channel Experience
Implementing an Omni-channel experience to the customers is fundamental by today’s standards. The most practical means to do so is to serve with a device-agnostic subscription billing platform.
Retention
As one can retain subscribers for a longer time, the average customer lifetime value grows along with the revenue. To secure high retention, it’s imperative that all processes, including billing, help avoid customer erosion or churn. Churn envelops both voluntary and involuntary loss of customers. Billing problems are one of the principal reasons for involuntary churn, and your billing solution should help effectively counter it.
Concluding Remarks
As we can see, there is no one smart B2C subscription business model. It is all a game of trial and error to mix and match and play around with the results. The elements to guarantee a smart B2C subscription business are umpteenth and factoring in the right ones and in right proportions, depending on the nature and size of your organization, can help in setting up a glowing dais of business success.
