Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It

“The more niche you are, the more you have to differentiate through some kind of aspect, and we do that through community. We have a very big brand team who focuses on engaging our audience,” Crunchyroll marketing lead Reid DeRamus said to the editors of our Subscribed Magazine.

To scale a sales team intelligently, you need to do two things—you need to set up a hybrid sales model, and you need to invest in automation. What do I mean by a hybrid sales model? Well, lots of companies see a self-service sales model and selling through salespeople (commonly called “assisted sales”) as two completely different worlds. Self-servi

Borrowing from the retail sector, they score every one of their readers on the multiple of three factors: recency (when did they last visit?), frequency (how often do they visit?), and volume (how many articles have they read?). Low scores indicate churn risks that their promotions group can approach with discount offers.

We have new expectations as consumers. We prefer outcomes over ownership. We prefer customization, not standardization. And we want constant improvement, not planned obsolescence. We want a new way to engage with business. We want services, not products. The one-size-fits-all approach isn’t going to cut it anymore. And to succeed in this new digita

Run. As a subscription company, you succeed or fail based on how well and how long your subscribers take advantage of your service. Anything you do that doesn’t feed into the customer success flywheel is detrimental to the growth and value of your business.

All these new services aren’t just about adding convenience, they’re about accelerating outcomes.

The churn rate for companies employing usage-based billing is about 10 percent less on an annual basis: 26 percent for usage-based billers in comparison with 37 percent for non-usage-based billing companies. These lower churn rates reflect higher customer satisfaction and engagement with companies that fulfill the central tenet of the Subscription

We’ve found, for instance, that companies running on subscription models grow their revenue more than nine times faster than the S&P 500 (check the Subscription Economy Index at the end of this book for the latest data on that topic).

Service features billed by usage are usually the core value metric of a subscription service offering: the most valuable feature to use, and the most expensive to deliver. If a company charges for use of something that is not clearly providing value, there is the potential to enrage rather than engage!