How To Deliver a Personalized Subscription Experience

According to a recent Brightbank survey, “98% of consumers subscribe to a streaming service.” With so many people taking advantage of subscriptions, more and more brands are emerging with their version of this service, vying for the attention of millions of customers by providing an exceptional customer subscription experience. Video streaming services are the most popular, followed by mobile apps, news and box subscriptions.

If you’re looking for a way to stand out, start with personalization. Your subscribers may pay for and receive the same service/products, but they will use them differently. Catering to that is critical.

Provide a personalized customer subscription experience by implementing these five tips.

READ — 5 Tips for Overcoming Customer Service Obstacles as a Small Business

Grow What You Know About Your Customers

Personalization isn’t possible without a deep understanding of your customers. You need to know who they are, how they feel, how they behave, what they’re struggling with and what prompts them to make their decisions to adequately personalize their customer subscription experience.

The first step is identifying your data sources and ensuring the information you gather is filtered to a central platform. That way, you can access and study all your customer data in an organized manner.

You can use a single customer view (SCV) to help you with this. An SCV is a way to collect and combine all your current and potential customer data into one source.

You’ll get a holistic view of your customer’s journey with your business, giving insight into why someone signed up for your service. With this information, you can make suggestions and offer add-ons that they’ll resonate with and that will enable them to continue having the best experience with your service.

READ: Determining Your Business’s Target Market – Why It’s Necessary and How To Do It

Reward Engagement

Throughout the onboarding process, and any step in the customer experience, reward your customers whenever they engage with your brand. This engagement helps you learn more about them and how to better their customer subscription experience.

People are more inclined to engage with your business and give you information about them when they know they get something of value in return. So, every time a customer fills out a form, answers a survey, fills out their profile or engages with you on social media, reward them for it.

These rewards could be as small as shouting out a customer on your social media page or as big as a free month of your subscription service. Give your customer’s the rewards they’ll truly love but that are also financially feasible for your business.

The more engaged your customers are, the more you learn about them, making the personalization process much more manageable.

Focus on Accessibility

Accessibility must be a priority if the goal is to personalize every customer subscription experience. Everyone’s abilities, backgrounds and experiences are different. Ensuring your customers have access to functions and features that accommodate their needs only fuels personalization.

Not only should your service be accessible, but the communications and platforms you use to promote your subscription service should be too.

READ — 12 Ways to Repurpose Social Media Content for Email Marketing

Incorporating accessibility settings on your subscription platform is an excellent first step. Your customers can adjust these settings to accommodate the disabilities they’re living with, like turning on captions for a person living with a hearing disability.

In addition, those not living with a disability can still use these settings to better their subscription experience based on their preferences. For example, an individual who prefers voice search instead of typing in their query can enable this setting to make their experience more enjoyable.

Listen and Act on Customer Feedback

Welcome customer feedback every chance you get. Hearing straight from your customer’s mouths what’s working and what isn’t is one of the best ways to fast-track personalization.

Efficient marketing is a great way to drive meaningful feedback from customers. You can even incorporate surveys into the marketing platforms. Not only is this a great way to reach out to new customers, but it’s a great way to show that you care about your customers.

You can also spark meaningful one-on-one conversations via email. Connect with customers at in-person and virtual events. And leverage social listening tools to see what people are saying about your customer subscription experience on social media.

Conclusion

As more and more subscription services roll out, you must do everything you can to capture and keep your customers’ attention. Leaning into personalization can help you do just that. Start with the tips above to deliver an exceptional customer subscription experience tailored to each individual.

 

Indiana Lee Bio PictureIndiana Lee is a writer, reader, and jigsaw puzzle enthusiast from the Pacific Northwest. An expert on business operations, leadership, marketing, and lifestyle, you can connect with her on LinkedIn.

Launching a Business During a Pandemic

A few years ago, my family and I purchased a hemp farm in Boulder. It’s one of the original Colorado homesteads, fed by pristine water flowing from Rocky Mountain National Park. We knew this place had the power to really help people.

Driven by our desire to help everyone, from grandmothers to Gen Zers, find balance and harmony in their lives naturally, we worked for years to build our dream: a premium, full-spectrum CBD business founded on the mission of making hemp extract an everyday element of wellness, active lifestyles and sports recovery.

Then, on the eve of launching Miraflora, coronavirus hit America. All of our conversations with retail distributors ground to a halt. Our launch party was cancelled. Packaging suppliers were shut down and logistics became a challenge. To outsiders it may have seemed like the time to throw in the towel or at least delay our launch. But we didn’t, for three main reasons:

To start, many of the world’s greatest brands began during severe economic downturns. Disney launched at the beginning of the Great Depression. Google and PayPal grew to prominence amid the dot-com bust. Square, Pinterest and AirBnB launched during the Great Recession. Starting a business during a global crisis is not what anyone would choose, but it’s not impossible. While I am not comparing Miraflora to these brands, I believe our success will be defined by our grit, perseverance and dedication to the mission.

Secondly, the coronavirus pandemic exposed existing consumer needs and made them more acute. Needs that we could help with! Adults were more stressed, anxious and sleep deprived than ever as they navigated unprecedented changes to their personal and professional lives. Also, many Americans were doing everything they could to avoid going to the hospital, where patients with the covid-19 virus were being treated. We were confident our products derived from natural hemp flower extract (CBD) spoke directly to these needs: accessible, non-prescription, natural remedies to achieve relaxation, wellness and balance. And we knew we our products were differentiated versus other companies already in market due to our consistent and clean extraction methods.

Finally, we were able to quickly able to pivot our business to a 100% ecommerce model. This meant a few things: our website had to be perfect at launch. We invested heavily in getting the messaging, look, feel and platform just right. We also ramped up an intuitive and fast ecommerce functionality. And we shifted our retail sales focus to online promotions instead. To date, this shift has worked well, our website traffic has been consistently increasing 500% every month.

Our hope is that if we can touch people during this extraordinarily challenging time in their lives, they will reward us with their loyalty in the future. And as a businessman who has worked with global food and beverage brands, I know that the economy always ebbs and flows. Coronavirus is an historic ebb, to be sure, but part of the adventure of running a business is figuring out how to adapt to those fluctuations. If we can strive through this period of time, I am filled with hope for Miraflora’s future.

Christopher Wynne is the CEO of Miraflora, a premium, full-spectrum CBD wellness business based in Boulder. Chris has an impressive track record building consumer brands and ecommerce sales, including propelling Papa John’s in Eastern Europe and Central Asia to more than $100 million in online sales.

Get back to business as unusual

According to The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, workers who report that they are stressed incur health care costs that are 46% higher, or an average of $600 more per person, than other employees. Offering stress management programs to your employees is a worthwhile investment on many levels. When events occur in life that are void of options, like the coronavirus pandemic and resulting shutdown, stress is a natural reaction. Whether you are a small business owner or large corporation there is specific protocol in place that you must follow in order to begin to open your doors and get back to business. However, it’s not business as usual but rather business as unusual.

Usual vs. Unusual

People gravitate toward what is familiar. Do you miss your office space? Client meetings at restaurants? Casual conversations with your colleagues throughout the workday? The ability to walk down the hall and check in with team members? Face to face meetings and interactions? You’re not alone. When common occurrences are suddenly taken away, there is a grieving process. However, that comes with an incredible opportunity to practice being adaptable and creative. A person’s stress increases as their available options decrease. Several of my coaching clients have expressed a desire to go back to business as usual. Let’s take a closer look at the word usual. Usual means something that is habitually or typically done. However, usual can get boring as it is void of inspiration and creativity. Healthy habits are important for optimal wellness in life; however, when habits are completed because it’s easier to do them rather than initiate change, we miss opportunities for innovation. And innovation is essential to the creative process for expansion in business and in life. Let’s take a closer look at the definition of unusual: remarkable or interesting because it’s different. What would it take to shift your focus from business as usual (actions that are typically done) to business as unusual (remarkable and interesting)? As a small business owner of 20 years, I have decided, during this time of uncertainty, to shift my mental focus from what’s not working out to what is working out in order to maximize my available resources. Remember, you are the landlord of your thought life. You can give free rent to negative behaviors or you can make the decision to focus on expanding innovation, creating positive behaviors. The choice is yours. Perhaps it’s time to evict a mental position that is keeping you stuck. You feel stress when you give away power to outside circumstances. Instead, define for yourself what you can capable of.

Jumpstart a creative mindset

If there has ever been a time for original and creative thinking in business, now is the time. Below are several coaching questions designed to jumpstart an innovative mindset:

  • What do you want now? State your answer in the positive: “I want to expand targeted marketing efforts in a cost effective way.”
  • What will it do for you specifically?
  • How is your life going to be affected?
  • How will you know when you have it?
  • What will it feel like and sound like and look like? You are making it real.
  • Where, when and with whom do you want this?
  • How will this affect other aspects and people in your life?
  • What prevents you from having this already? This question reveals how you get in your own way.
  • What resources do you already have to obtain your desired outcome?
  • What additional resources do you need to get what you want? This may include physical, mental, emotional or spiritual resources.
  • How are you going to get it? This is the big question that leads to the plan of action and writing down the steps you will take to get to your desired outcome.
  • Is there more than one way to accomplish the desired outcome? This question opens up options, which will boost innovative thinking and decrease stress.

Your perception of the world around you flows directly from your perception of yourself. Do you see the world as safe or unsafe? Do you face challenges with flexibility and curiosity or with assumptions and reactive behavior?

Grab & Go stress relief tip for business as unusual

When you shift your perception of self, your view of reality shifts. To be adaptable during the unusual work environment it is essential to honor the BRAC: The Basic Rest Activity Cycle of the brain. Your brain is high functioning for 90 minutes and then rests for 20. If you want to maximize innovative thinking, take a 20-minute break to rest every 90 minutes in your workday. Take this time to stand up, stretch, walk around, and breathe deeply. Mentally download and lean into a past positive professional experience you had in your life. Remember, whatever you focus on grows bigger.