Customer Experience with a Recurly Subscription
Customer Experience with a Recurly Subscription
A subscription service is one of the most personal customer experiences. It is all about creating a consistent, long-lasting, and regular relationship with your customer. The customer experience is beyond a one-time interaction; there is a cycle of value that needs to keep your users engaged and satisfied over time.
You might have read this opening paragraph and thought, “I don’t use a subscription model, so this isn’t for me.” The subscription approach is a win for consumers and businesses alike. The average US consumer spends $133 per month on subscriptions. This subscription-based economy has grown 435% in the last decade and is projected to be worth $1.5 trillion in 2025.
The subscription model is here to stay. For customers, it represents flexibility, and for businesses, it provides continuous revenue streams. Both offer a way to enhance customer loyalty and satisfaction.
There is an aspect of a subscription that often gets forgotten: community.
Subscriptions go hand in hand with a community.
When customers subscribe, they are not just buying your product or service, they are joining a community.
Customers today don’t just want products; they want an experience. When you combine your services with a community, you create a continuous experience linked to your brand that results in a better brand experience and increased customer retention.
Combining your community and subscription allows you to create more touchpoints and better customer experiences. You can achieve this by creating:
1 - Exclusive access
Subscriptions can be tied to exclusive content within a community platform. This members-only access creates a sense of privilege, helping your customers and community grow and feel like valued insiders. For those who have access, this exclusivity strengthens their loyalty to the brand, allowing them to create meaningful relationships with other customers. For those who don’t have access, this exclusive content can be a way to encourage further sales.
2 - Experiences beyond your product
With the right plug-ins, your community can be used to create virtual events for your subscribers. Meet-ups, workshops, webinars are all ways to give additional value to your customers. When these happen on a community platform, the shared experiences can create memorable touchpoints that go beyond your product.
3 - Continuous feedback
When you pair a subscription with your community, the feedback you can gain from your customers is immense. Subscribers will share feedback and help you develop new features. With recurring purchases and the combination of a community platform, your customers can develop a sense of shared ownership over their products. Their feedback goes directly to you and the brand and allows your users to feel like they directly influence the service’s evolution.
The right community platform will allow you to build your subscription model into the same space. This might sound unnecessary, but with your customers having to actively choose to leave their community to move away from your brand, you will find retention rates much higher than average. You can even offer the option to pause the functionality of your service but continue access to the exclusive customer community for a certain period of time to encourage a user to return if they only require a temporary break in service. Pausing prevents cancelling.
Combining community and recurring subscription services gives you the chance to improve your retention by personalising each customer’s journey while automating much of the process. Exclusive content, news about new features, loyalty perks, and gamification within the community will lead to more sticky customers.
A well-designed subscription model integrated with a community creates a seamless, valuable, and engaging space for your customers to experience your brand.
All of this can be done with 4 Roads, we now have a Recurly extension for Verint Community.
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