Anne Janzer
The Zuora Subscription Economy Index contains sobering data about churn. The average annualized churn rate was 24 percent for business-to-business companies, and 31 percent in the business-to-consumer sector. (Location 150)
In the Subscription Economy, you’re only doing half of your job as a marketer if you focus on the sale and ignore the customer. (Location 157)
High churn numbers represent an opportunity. If you can reduce churn rates through marketing campaigns or customers success efforts, you can have a significant and lasting effect on revenues and growth. (Location 160)
Subscription marketers can reduce churn numbers by: (Location 164)
Traditional marketing strategies and techniques focus on leading people to the initial sale, turning prospects into customers. Subscription businesses shift their focus from the point of sale to the long-term, ongoing customer relationship. In effect, the subscriber remains a prospect, deserving ongoing engagement and nurturing. (Location 167)
Value nurturing happens after the initial sale. Its objective is to help the customer achieve and realize value from the solution. (Location 170)
In a successful subscription-based business: (Location 180)
This part also includes a chapter about that first moment of value nurturing, the free trial conversion. (Location 197)
As Robbie Baxter says so eloquently in her book The Membership Economy, “membership provides recognition, stability, and convenience while connecting people to one another.” (Location 224)
Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora and a vocal advocate of the Subscription Economy, makes this bold claim: “In five years, you won’t buy anything, but subscribe to everything.” (Location 328)
To determine where to invest effort and resources for a subscription business, ask the following questions: (Location 485)
How does this shifting relationship change marketing responsibilities? (Location 512)
Today we live in a more enlightened marketing era. Marketing practitioners create useful content based on buyer personas. We add keywords to content so that it appears when prospects research online. (Location 523)
In the Subscription Economy, you’re just getting started when someone becomes a customer. (Location 529)
Given the long-term revenue potential of customers in the subscription model, marketing must shift its focus past the point of the sale to the ongoing customer relationship. (Location 530)
For marketers with a funnel mindset, the tasks of customer engagement start broad and quickly narrow down. (Location 546)
How Subscriptions Kill the Funnel (Location 556)
The funnel metaphor ignores the other feedback loops built into the subscription marketing process, such as: (Location 563)
The customer journey may be a better metaphor than the funnel. (Location 569)
The journey metaphor puts the customer’s experience at the center of attention, not their status with your company. (Location 570)
The demise of the funnel brings opportunities to tell stories and engage with customers, and to forge an expanded role for marketing. Subscription marketers should add processes and campaigns that support the ongoing customer journey. (Location 579)
Rather than focusing on how many leads you generate, consider how to attract the prospects who will find success with the solution and remain loyal customers. This may mean forgoing the thrill of the lead-generation “hit” and focusing instead on generating fewer, highly targeted prospects. To find the best-converting customers who stick around, pay attention to the behaviors of your most successful customers. Then, figure out how to change your marketing practices to attract more people like them. (Location 586)
Value nurturing is the act of supporting the customer’s experience of value. (Location 601)
Marketing can gently nudge customers to recognize the fact that they are being successful. And, creative marketers add value outside the solution, through content, community, additional services, or the quality of the relationship experienced by the customer. Value nurturing turns customers into loyal or repeat customers, and successful customers into advocates. (Location 604)
Many business activities can fall under the value-nurturing umbrella: (Location 611)
Value nurturing as defined here is a specific set of activities that take place after lead generation, lead nurturing, and customer conversion. It is the next logical step in subscription marketing. (Location 617)
The better you are at making your customers successful, the more successful your business will be over the long run. (Location 639)
In the book Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending, authors Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton posit that we are happiest when we pay for something up front and then continue to enjoy it afterward. (Once you’ve paid for that all-inclusive vacation, you are going to savor and enjoy every moment.) (Location 645)
Value nurturing is about optimizing and engineering the post-sale experience of value. It’s a quest for customer happiness, (Location 648)
The Five Big Ideas of Value Nurturing (Location 649)
These strategies range from sending gentle reminders to delivering personalized data. All share the aim of reinforcing the experience of value (tangible and intangible) in the customer’s mind. (Location 657)
They add value outside the product or service through content, community, and data. (Location 660)
Design the launch plan to get customers working with and realizing value from your solution as quickly as possible. (Location 691)
As behavioral economist Richard Thaler writes in his book Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, “People have a natural tendency to search for confirming rather than disconfirming evidence.” We look for those experiences that prove us right in choosing to subscribe, so the early days of a subscription are a valuable opportunity to supply that confirming evidence. That’s why the “customer onboarding” or welcome experience is so critical. The first interactions confirm that the subscriber made a sound decision to use the service. (Location 694)
If a customer doesn’t start using your solution within ninety days, there’s only a 10 percent chance they’ll become a loyal customer. (Location 701)
Your launch plan might start with a series of emails with links to videos or other useful resources. Give people a way to opt out. Treat every email, every transaction, and each bit of communication as an opportunity to reinforce the reasons for choosing your business. (Location 703)
Pay attention to the details of how your customers unwrap and explore the experience. The customer journey does not end at the sale; rather, the point of sale is where the story starts to get interesting, (Location 708)
Your launch plan might be as simple as a well-constructed welcome email. You do have one, right? (Location 717)
After searching through my email, I found a welcome letter that refreshed my memory and got me started, including: (Location 721)
Another great welcome example comes from Buffer, the social media sharing and scheduling service. Once I signed up for Buffer’s “Awesome” plan, two emails arrived right away. (Location 725)
Remember what I said about the job of subscription marketing: earning trust and nurturing value? In its two welcome emails, Buffer declared its intention of doing both. Well done. (Location 731)
If you want to see examples of the good, bad, and ugly of user onboarding, check the “teardowns” published by Samuel Hulick on his site, useronboard.com. (Location 738)
Use Videos to Accelerate Success (Location 756)
Embed Guidance in the Solution Even the simplest solutions have a learning curve. Your mission is to help customers navigate that curve quickly, reaching the point at which being a customer is easy and rewarding, rather than a difficult cognitive effort. If software is part of your solution, consider embedding online guides and pop-up help to direct people through the learning process. (Location 762)
From its earliest days, the people at Slack understood that rapid user success was key to its growth. What good is a collaboration tool if you’re the only one in your team using it? In an interview with Kara Swisher on the Re/Code podcast, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said that customer success was the company’s prime engineering objective: “We focused all of our effort on the new user experience, and I think that’s what’s made the difference.” (Location 767)
You don’t have to build a bot; you could embed tips and suggestions that show up the first few times someone logs on. Or, create a timed email campaign that sends weekly suggestions for the first few weeks after someone subscribes. (Location 775)
Guide Customers Through Critical Milestones (Location 777)
(To read more, visit Murphy’s site at SixteenVentures.com or read his book Customer Success.) (Location 781)
The Fogg method, as he outlines it, consists of three steps: (Location 791)
Encourage New Habits with Gamification (Location 805)
Choose Training Based on Customer Needs Design and present the training in the right formats and doses to match the customer’s needs. For example, in the business software world, administrators or power users may seek out intensive instruction, while everyone else can get by with a few videos. (Location 826)
Customer stories can also play an important role in value nurturing. If you’re already creating these stories, use them to enhance the perceived value delivered to existing subscribers. (Location 842)
Although marketing organizations ask existing customers to participate in case studies, we often forget that they may also be interested in receiving them. These stories are potent illustrations of how others have achieved success. (Location 844)
Think of this strategy as a free trial of value nurturing, using content you already have at hand. (Location 847)
As a member of the discount warehouse Costco, I receive the monthly Costco Connections magazine, where the company profiles many of its small business members. In addition to providing useful content, the magazine showcases the members and their activities. Profiling current customers is a great way to add value to subscriptions. (Location 852)
By speaking out, those customers become advocates for your business. They internalize and “own” their success as a customer. (Location 856)
Customer stories are one component of advocacy marketing, or getting loyal customers to testify on your behalf. (Location 857)
The Zendesk blog includes a series of posts tagged “Story Room.” In these posts, customers tell their own stories, either through an interview or by directly submitting a written post. (Location 860)
The fastest way to demonstrate value to a customer is to do the math for them. Put a number on the tangible or intangible benefits of a subscription. (Location 866)
Demonstrate Value with Customer Usage Data (Location 871)
Chances are that you’re collecting usage data about your customers that could reinforce or strengthen the customer’s perceived value. Try to convert usage into measures of the benefit to the subscriber: time saved, healthy meals prepared, blog posts published, (Location 874)
make it interesting. Many companies send “year-end wrap-up” emails that put usage data in a fresh context. For example, I received a year-end report from the ride-sharing service Lyft, presenting data for the year, including my total rides, miles traveled, and other stats, as well as “badges” that I have unlocked. (Location 878)
One of the cardinal rules of value nurturing is this: Don’t be creepy. You don’t want customers to feel that you’re stalking them. (Location 883)
Build Celebration into the Experience (Location 906)
Fitbit sends badges to celebrate certain milestone achievements, such as a maximum number of steps taken in a day, or lifetime distance covered. One day you may receive an email telling you that you have walked the entire length of Italy or India. (Location 914)
As David Meerman Scott writes in The New Rules of Sales and Service, “Once someone is signed up as a customer, information delivered at the right moment makes for a happy customer who renews existing services and buys more over time. And happy customers talk up companies on social networks.” Take the content marketing strategies you use before the sale and extend them after the customer signs up. Continue to deliver value through content, and customers will remain engaged. (Location 929)
For inspiration, read Jay Baer’s book Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help, Not Hype. This quote from the book sums up his general approach: “If you sell something, you make a customer today; if you help someone, you make a customer for life.” (Location 934)
If your business only interacts with customers intermittently, a content subscription increases loyalty and reinforces value. (Location 938)
Adobe publishes an online site, CMO.com, for chief marketing officers and marketing professionals. (Location 951)
The content hub serves multiple marketing purposes, including brand awareness and value nurturing. (Location 954)
Consider creating a podcast series by interviewing people your customers find interesting. (Location 962)
For inspiration, check out the book Stop Boring Me! How to Create Kick-Ass Marketing Content, Products and Ideas Through the Power of Improv by Kathy Klotz Guest, (Location 993)
Businesses are waking up to the power of community around their solutions. (Location 999)
In-Person Gatherings Connections made at in-person events are often stronger than those made online. Salesforce is deeply committed to virtual communities, but it also hosts one of the largest in-person gatherings in the technology industry, the DreamForce conference. (Location 1030)
Attendees realize a sense of belonging and community. If the event didn’t pay off, I doubt the company would continue to invest in hosting it each year. (Location 1036)
Subscription companies can learn from creative consumer goods companies that live or die by repeat purchases and brand differentiation. (Location 1038)
Advocacy marketing is the practice of nurturing and developing the fans and advocates in your base. Done well, advocacy marketing is a prime example of value nurturing. Done poorly, it can backfire. (Location 1052)
Your challenge is to turn subscribers into fans and fans into advocates, while sustaining the trust you have earned and delivering real value to those fans and advocates. Marketing teams and customer success teams work together to develop campaigns and programs to: (Location 1055)
These may include the following: (Location 1067)
When you submit a review, Amazon thanks you for helping other customers. If another shopper marks the review as useful, Amazon lets you know. This is one way of reinforcing the behavior of people who contribute reviews. In other cases, loyal fans may appear if you create programs to attract them, such as bonus points for referrals. (Location 1072)
The day after Christmas I placed an order. (Emergency holiday tea shortage!) To my surprise, I received the tea the next day. Because I was so delighted with the speedy service, I sent out a tweet. Adagio thanked me (on Twitter) and credited my account with loyalty points. (Location 1077)
If you are delighted by a service and tell a friend about it, you have done something generous for both the friend and the company. It feels good, and that is your reward. (Location 1093)
Advocacy Programs Well-designed advocacy programs benefit everyone: (Location 1108)
Hootsuite is a social media management dashboard. The Hootsuite Ambassador program combines free training, exclusive access and promotions, and online recognition, plus the ability to claim membership with an Ambassador badge. (Location 1111)
Salesforce recognizes and supports the MVPs with elevated status in the community, invitations to speak at events, access to exclusive networking events and product briefings, training, and certification, and Salesforce MVP–branded shirts and things (swag). (Location 1116)
Have a new release coming out? Want input on a marketing campaign? Ask your customers for advice, whether for product direction or marketing messaging. (Location 1122)
“The most effective way to attract consumers today is to invite them to share and help shape your brand narrative. Brands are finally starting to notice that loyal consumers want to be part of their brand’s storytelling.” (Location 1144)
Pley.com is part subscription box, part sharing economy, and completely delightful. (Location 1146)
The marketing organization should write the end-of-life plan for customers; leaving this moment to chance is risky. (Location 1160)
By all means, find out why they’re leaving and try to address any problems they have. But then let them go with dignity. They might return. (Location 1163)
Welcome Returning Customers When happens when you resubscribe to a business you’ve left? (Location 1170)
When you leave, your account is frozen rather than deleted. If you sign up after an absence, the company connects you with resources (Location 1182)
“The mistake people make is thinking the story is just about marketing. No, the story is the strategy. If you make your story better, you make the strategy better.” (Location 1196)
The trial isn’t just about what’s in the box or part of the solution. It’s about the experience. (Location 1319)
When selling a subscription solution, marketing organizations have two key objectives: demonstrating value and earning trust. (Location 1321)
The free trial is when lead nurturing becomes value nurturing. Start applying the concepts of value nurturing to help trial customers achieve an early success. (Location 1339)
For example: Provide training resources, videos, or email campaigns to encourage trial customers to discover the features that will provide the most value. (If you have segmented customers, you’ll have a better idea of where to steer the prospect.) Observe the trial user’s online behavior and trigger campaigns, emails, or phone calls if people appear to be lost or off-track. Offer assistance periodically (but not with annoying insistence) during the trial. (Location 1341)
Free Trial vs. Freemium Take care not to confuse a free trial with a freemium (short for “free/premium”) model. (Location 1347)
In contrast, businesses using a freemium model expect that a large number of customers will remain unpaid subscribers, while a smaller percentage will upgrade to a paid offering immediately, and others eventually convert as their needs grow. If you execute a freemium model successfully, those free users amplify your marketing reach. They will be so delighted with the free version that they become advocates, recommending your service to others. (Location 1349)
The customers of the free version became the application’s most outspoken advocates. (Location 1354)
For the freemium model to achieve these goals, the following must be true: (Location 1356)
During the thirty-day trial period, Rainmaker provided a huge amount of training in various formats, including videos, written guides, webinars, and guided tours. The company did not try to “sell” me once. When I had a question, the support team answered it promptly. Three days before the end of the trial, the company sent me an email that began like this: (Location 1372)
revenue numbers. If you have to build a case for value nurturing, find out if your business tracks any of the following metrics: (Location 1389)
If you can make a measurable difference in customer churn rates, you can have a major revenue impact over time. (Location 1400)
Because retention and churn compound over time, relatively small, incremental improvements result in major revenue differences. (Location 1404)
The larger your business grows, the more difficult it becomes to replace subscribers who leave, simply because the numbers grow larger. When revenues reach $10 million annually, you would need to find a million dollars of new business to replace revenue lost to a 10 percent churn rate. (Location 1416)
How can value nurturing change those equations? (Location 1419)
A loyal customer is a growth accelerant. (Location 1424)
The Net Promoter Score (NPS®) is one of the most common metrics for tracking loyalty. This metric quantifies loyalty through customer responses to a single question: (Location 1426)
Increasing Customer Lifetime Value How much is a customer worth in revenue to your business over time? What would happen to your revenues if you increased average customer lifetime value by 5 or 10 percent? The math behind customer lifetime value gets complicated quickly if you dig into the details. But in general, a customer’s lifetime value depends on three variables: (Location 1436)
Spending: How much the customer spends each period (monthly, yearly) Margin: How much is left after the cost of serving that customer each period Churn: The probability of the customer leaving Effective value nurturing increases customer lifetime value in multiple ways: (Location 1439)
One way to reframe the financial discussion around marketing priorities is to look at marketing spending in relationship to overall revenue opportunity rather than gross revenues. You could rightly argue that marketing should spend time and money on areas with significant revenue potential as opposed to current revenues. (Location 1448)
A small investment in customer value nurturing protects and increases potential revenues. (Location 1454)
Customer value nurturing is an additional marketing task, not a replacement for what you’re doing already. You never get permission to stop generating leads, building awareness, or doing any of the other tasks that drive revenues today. As a result, value nurturing may be a hard sell in marketing organizations already feeling pressured by competing demands. (Location 1456)
Remember that it’s much less expensive to keep and develop existing customers than to acquire new ones. Reducing churn effectively boosts growth by ensuring that customers you do acquire aren’t simply replacing ones that leave. (Location 1465)
This is the most insidious objection of all: The system is rigged against value nurturing. When that’s the case, it’s time to re-rig the system. (Location 1468)
For example, many customer success experts recommend that sales compensation should depend on loyalty, with a full commission paid only when a customer renews. (Location 1471)
Even if you haven’t convinced others, you can choose the easiest, low-hanging strategies: the customer welcome plan, sharing customer stories. (Location 1477)
For your first campaigns, choose the strategies that match existing marketing skills and strengths. (Location 1484)
Content marketers apply a disciplined approach to creating content that meets specific prospect and customer requirements. The practice requires an understanding of the following: (Location 1488)
According to Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and author of the book Epic Content Marketing: “Goals to keep customers longer, happier, and/or spending more are the most noble content marketing objectives.” (Location 1495)
a social media presence isn’t enough to build community. It’s what you do with that presence that matters. (Location 1501)
Email Marketing and Marketing Automation Many of these subscriber-focused strategies rely on email marketing and marketing automation to operate at scale. For example: (Location 1504)
Your First Value-Nurturing Campaign If it feels strange to direct your marketing efforts to current subscribers, start small and expand. (Location 1510)
For example, let’s say you’ve decided to send customer stories to your existing subscriber base. You find stories depicting representative or high-value use cases, and send them to your subscribers. Check one value-nurturing strategy off the list. Now look at that from the customer’s perspective. A subscriber might want to know how she could use the solution in the same way. What kind of additional content could you provide to guide her? (Location 1537)
If you’re selling software, for example, work with your customer success teams to create follow-on content that answers questions or provides instructions. (Location 1540)
Who Owns the Customer Experience? The core practices of value nurturing extend beyond the marketing organization. Marketers need to collaborate with customer success teams and other parts of the organization. Everyone is responsible for the customer experience. From the customer’s perspective, your business is a single organization. (Location 1550)
If your business has one, the customer success management (CSM) organization is the first place that marketing should visit in its quest to implement value-nurturing strategies. (Location 1563)
“When you have tens of thousands of subscribers, you cannot possibly hire enough CSMs to affect adoption or advocacy in a personalized, high-touch way. You need someone with marketing chops.” (Location 1574)
For example, if marketing incentives are based on lead generation, those teams are less likely to allocate budget to nurturing the existing customer base. When marketing doesn’t step forward, customer success teams hire in-house operational expertise to run email automation campaigns to reach subscribers at scale. Sometimes customer success teams use separate email marketing or marketing automation software, creating silos of customer data and interactions. (Location 1578)
Customer success and marketing teams can collaborate along many dimensions of the ongoing subscriber experience: (Location 1583)
everyone: The CSM remains the primary contact for the customer, and customers are more likely to open, read, and act on the emails that come from a person they know. For example, Eizips has found that webinar invitations coming directly from a CSM’s email address lead to higher open rates and webinar attendance. (Location 1589)
If you reward marketing teams based exclusively on net new sales, then in the end, that’s what they will focus on, to the exclusion of existing customers. Consider aligning performance incentives and measures with the customer experience rather than department-specific metrics. For example: Sales compensation linked to how long a customer remains subscribed Marketing performance judged not only on net new sales but also customer loyalty and retention (Location 1612)
Onboarding or customer welcome plans New feature rollouts Voice of the customer/customer feedback (Location 1626)
ServiceRocket hosts webinars for existing customers and prospects at the same time, inviting prospects to listen in to the questions and experiences of current subscribers. According to Brown, webinars, podcasts, Ask Me Anything (AMA), and other activities provide value to customers while inspiring prospects to better understand the value of subscribing. (Location 1639)
His customer success team has created automated, visual dashboards that display current data about the customer experience, installing them in common areas on each floor of the company’s headquarters in Vancouver, Canada. One dashboard displays rotating customer quotes about the service, including comments submitted to the company or discovered on Twitter. It represents the subscriber experience in the customers’ own words. Another display constantly updates Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) relevant for the service: number of customers, number of conversions created through the customers’ Unbounce pages, active users, loyalty scores, and so on. (Location 1644)
it’s easier to ask for forgiveness after doing something than permission before taking action? (Location 1654)
keep the following premise in mind: After the initial sign-up, your core challenges are sustaining trust and nurturing value. You can damage your business through any actions that betray customer trust or erode value. Most often, when businesses misstep, it is because they have focused their own objectives and lost sight of customers’ goals. If you sustain trust and nurture value, customers will stick around and help your business grow. Your business is engaged in a long-term relationship with its subscribers, and everyone knows that relationships are tricky. Some people don’t like change. Others are demanding. Subscription success depends on navigating the needs of those customers while also serving your own business interests. (Location 1664)
Potential customers and current subscribers have seen other businesses that try to trick or trap customers. They will compare your practices to those past experiences, looking for signs of malicious intentions. Earning and sustaining their trust will be more difficult. (Location 1694)
the single root cause of most subscription execution problems, it would be the presence of organizational silos and barriers. From within the business, these issues are often difficult to detect. Marketing teams cannot see subscriber interactions with customer success teams, (Location 1699)
Successful subscription marketers collaborate consistently with those outside their own teams. (Location 1709)
The data you collect from customers is a terrific source for value nurturing. You can deliver usage data to individual customers, or aggregate data and share it with the world at large. (Location 1710)
In July 2014, Homejoy shut down, a sudden demise after a meteoric rise in the otherwise stodgy home-cleaning services industry. (Location 1726)
According to anonymous employees, few of the customers who signed up for the promotional rates stuck around; retention rates were horrific. In chasing growth, the company ignored, or even damaged, its retention. It’s the curse of the well-funded start-up that tries to prove itself to investors. In chasing growth, start-ups often neglect retention. (Location 1729)
“The idea of nurturing the customer is great. But I really need to focus on acquiring new customers right now. I’ll think about value nurturing later.” For a start-up that doesn’t focus on its subscribers, “later” may never come. (Location 1732)
Every start-up must face two key realities about growth and retention: You will never feel like you have “enough” new leads or customers. As you grow, you reset the bar for what “enough” looks like. Retention is essential to growth. For every subscriber who leaves, you must find a replacement to stay even before you can start growing. Plus, those satisfied customers are your best source of leads and referrals—a growth engine. (Location 1734)
Slack’s users became the Slack sales and marketing force. If you’re interested in growth-hacking strategies, take a long, hard look at the value you provide to subscribers, no matter how small you are. The best time to build value nurturing into the culture is at the outset. (Location 1740)
The morals of this story are: If you choose a freemium model, make sure it’s one that you can sustain through growth. If you have to change a pricing model or service, try to avoid framing it as a loss. For example, if you raise prices, can you add features at the same time? Is there any way to present the situation as a potential gain rather than a certain loss? (Location 1754)
Pricing is one of the trickiest parts of a subscription business. The price must sustain the business, offsetting the cost of customer acquisition as well as covering ongoing service delivery and leaving room for profit. The price should reflect the customer expectations for the value delivered from the service (the Economic Value to the Customer) Pricing levels also serve to set customer expectations and determine which customers you attract. (Location 1758)
Here’s the interesting part: Cognitive science tells us that having too many choices often leads to regret. (Location 1770)
To support and nurture customers after the sale, abide by a few basic rules: Value starts with the customer Be human, but consistent Handle mistakes with grace Don’t be creepy (Location 1797)
Rule #1: Value Starts with the Customer Run a quick litmus test on every value-nurturing campaign: Is it about your business or the customer? To find long-term success, your business must meet your customers’ needs. (Location 1801)
Value nurturing begins with the customer’s perspective. (Location 1805)
Value nurturing puts the customer at the center of the story. In the book Winning the Story Wars, Jonah Sachs writes about the long history (Location 1810)
Sachs contrasts this approach with what he calls “empowerment marketing,” or marketing in a way that helps customers on their own paths to growth or maturity. When you practice empowerment marketing, the customer is the hero of your stories. (Location 1816)
Consider Apple’s advertisements that show people doing wonderful or creative things with the iPad. The device is the enabler, while the Apple customers are the stars. (Location 1819)
If you rely on empowerment marketing, then your messages continue to resonate with people, urging them to step up into the leading role. Value nurturing is all about joining and supporting the subscribers on their journeys. If your solution empowers customers, then your business will also succeed. (Location 1822)
Marketing messages, tone, and style create expectations for interactions beyond the sale. Marketing defines the personality for the overall brand, and the rest of the business must live up to it. (Location 1830)
One way to ensure consistency is to create a brand style guide and share it throughout the company, beyond the marketing organization. Tone and style extend beyond your written communications to online interactions, phone conversations, and website pages. (Location 1834)
Customer marketing isn’t a “nice-to-have” function—it’s essential. (Location 1867)
Marketing is no longer just about getting to the sale. To keep subscription customers renewing and reengaging, you have to provide real value and solve problems. Doing so requires a deep understanding of the customer. (Location 1885)
Successful subscription businesses adopt a long-term perspective toward customer relationships. Thus, the subscription business model weakens the short-term profit focus that drives our current financial system. (Location 1891)
The Automatic Customer by John Warrilow (Portfolio). This book identifies and labels nine distinct variations on the business model. (Location 1934)
The Membership Economy, by Robbie Kellman Baxter (Location 1952)
The New Rules of Sales and Service, by David Meerman Scott (Location 1955)