A flight of craft beers. Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ckgolfsolutions/
The best way to start this process is by talking to people who are in a similar position. You need to find and connect with your peers. Continue reading
As an entrepreneur, you always want to make sure you see a solid return on your investments. This is true whether you’re talking about a traditional financial investment, or something harder to quantify, like an investment of time. When you look back at those investments, you want to see positive results. At a minimum, you want to see that you’ve gotten more out of those investment than you put in.
The same is true of your customers. Continue reading
When you run a membership-based business, it’s all too easy to overlook one of the most powerful selling points you have: Membership itself. In the right context, being a member or a subscriber means more than simply paying a regular fee in exchange for a service. It means being part of a group, or even a community. As membership-based businesses grow, it’s important to keep in mind that the community is often just as important as the service. Continue reading
Planning your retention strategy is one of the most valuable and important things that anyone in a renewal-based business can do. You can take my word for it. I’ve been on the front lines.
Early in my career, when I was working in enterprise-level sales, one of the products I worked with was a subscription-based service. As a rep, my primary task was to hunt new business, but I was also responsible for maintaining a set of renewals. Continue reading
If you want to boost your membership retention rates, you need to understand the motivations of your subscribers. A bit part of this is simply asking current members about what they value about your service, and asking returning members why they came back. The more open and comprehensive the dialog, the clearer the picture becomes.
Of course, not every subscriber will be strongly motivated to share their feedback freely. In that case, you might need to create an incentive to encourage participation from a wide range of customers. Even something like a free month or a discount on their next renewal can be compelling. Continue reading
Once your business reaches a certain size, it becomes impossible to know each of your customers personally. There are simply too many of them to keep track of. Instead of tracking the movements of individuals, the more reasonable approach is to keep track of groups of customers with common traits like age group, gender, or income range. We call these “segments,” and they’re incredibly useful for things like creating targeted marketing campaigns.
But when it comes to the highly personal stuff of understanding customer motivation, segments simply aren’t intuitive enough. If you want to understand why a subscriber or customer acts in a certain way, it helps to give that segment a face and a name. The result is called a customer avatar. Continue reading
When you have a membership or subscription-based business, one of the most valuable sources for information you will ever have are those people who tried your service, but didn’t renew. There was a failure of alignment between what they needed or were looking for, and what your business provided. It’s not always possible to connect with those folks, but there is a subgroup within those canceled memberships that can provide an even better level of insight: Returning subscribers.
Those are people who were once members, later dropped their membership, and then ultimately returned. Not only can they shed light on what’s not working with your product or service, but they can give you great feedback about how to retain more of your subscribers in the first place. Continue reading
Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/
Inevitably, some of your subscribers will leave. That’s the nature of any subscription-based business. But if that retention rate really starts to slip, you’ll need to be proactive about making changes to your member communication, your value proposition, and even the specifics of your service or product. Continue reading
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Company culture and vision has been on my mind recently, and I was curious how this small startup seemed to knock it out of the park. Most companies struggle to even create a meaningful, clearly communicated vision, and never manage to embed it in the overall culture of the business. What was this startup doing differently? Continue reading
If you’ve gone to the trouble of really clarifying your vision for your company, you might think it would be easy to get your employees to rally behind it. Most companies don’t have a strong vision driving them, after all. Yours does, concisely explaining the goals you’re all striving towards, and the defining direction you’re headed in.
So why don’t they care? As carefully crafted as the vision is, the employees just aren’t interested. They don’t talk about it, they don’t think about it, and they definitely aren’t being guided by it. Continue reading