If you think getting customers to sign up is already difficult, imagine how much more challenging it is to keep them subscribed. Businesses that offer various subscription services ranging from phone service and broadband internet to monthly delivery of goods lose plenty of potential income because of customers terminating their subscriptions with them.
There are a few major reasons why customers would want to bail out of their subscriptions. Some find the service to be too expensive to keep, others find better deals from competitors, and some even find the payment process frustrating that they think it’s not worth the hassle. If you want your customers to stay subscribed, you have to convince them that your services are worth keeping. Try the following tips, for starters:
1) Give Your Customers Options
The main reason why people subscribe to you in the first place is because they are satisfied with the amount of value they get for what they are paying. However, what they find satisfactory may change over time due to a variety of factors, including the emergence of better-value subscriptions from other companies.
You need to give your customers the option to make adjustments to their subscriptions as they see fit. Offer multiple alternatives to their current subscription model so that they won’t have to start looking elsewhere for the same services.
2) Be Reasonable with Price Changes
Sometimes, it’s your company that needs to adjust its prices in order to keep earning profits, but even the slightest increase in your prices can mean losing a lot of customers. You have to make sure that you absolutely need the price change and that the increase in price also translates to an increase in the value of your services.
If there’s no other option other than a price hike, a good way to help soften the blow to your customers is by offering lower-priced alternative subscriptions that they can switch to. This would also be perfect for customers who want to downgrade, but not completely unsubscribe.
3) Don’t Make Payment a Hassle
Customers can get easily frustrated if they’re having trouble paying for their subscription on a regular basis. This is a big problem for companies with unreliable or limited payment options and can be more than enough to make customers pick another brand. This is where advanced subscription billing and customer retention technologies can come in handy.
Such systems are designed to automatically deal with failed transactions, minimizing the chances of customers having to process their subscription bill multiple times. In case the primary payment method keeps failing, the customer can still pay using a variety of secondary payment methods. This keeps your customer’s mind off payment issues and helps them focus on the convenience (and value) of their subscription.
4) Connect with Your Customers
The more attention you give your customers, the more aware they are of how much you appreciate their loyalty. The best way to connect with your customers is to constantly ask for feedback from them. Provide an easy way for customers to get in touch with you—either through online forms, email, or phone hotline—so you can always hear out what they have to say.
Getting customer feedback is essential in improving your services as a whole. You can address specific concerns to create more streamlined subscription packages or even add features that your customers would be willing to pay for. The more “tailored” your services are to your customers, the more likely they are to stay subscribed.
5) Don’t Pester Your Customers
Connecting with your customers is good, but there is such a thing as too much. Many customers find it annoying to deal with the hassle of answering survey after survey or receiving a ton of brochures or junk mail providing them with updates. Do keep on providing regular updates, but make them just frequent enough that you don’t look too pushy.
The same thing can be said for people who are already planning to terminate their subscription. Sometimes there are situations when they’ll have no choice but to cancel, but if you keep badgering them to reconsider, it might even be the reason why they’d never want to subscribe in the future.
Completely avoiding cancellations is impossible, but keeping these tips in mind can greatly reduce the number of customers terminating their subscriptions, in addition to increasing the likelihood of customers returning to do more business with you in the future.