An Executive’s Guide to Optimizing Subscription Billing

Subscription billing is a model that has grown in popularity over the last decade. Companies across a multitude of industries have caught onto the fact that a subscription model helps generate recurring revenue, meaning you no longer have to depend on repeat customers stopping into your store or visiting your site week after week. With so many third-party providers for retail products, SaaS, and others, getting customers locked in on a subscription is becoming a popular payment method—but just turning it on won’t give you the results you want. The following tips will guide you through not just managing, but optimizing subscription billing.

Improve Revenue Yield

You’re in business to make money; your customers subscribe because they value your product or service and the convenience of being automatically billed. However, when you don’t have a robust subscription management tool to track turnover, new subscribers, and more, it’s hard to improve your yield. To run a successful and efficient subscription billing model, you need robust reporting capabilities to analyze, set prices, and optimize your yield.

Up-sell and Cross-sell Opportunities

Could you be making even more money from your current subscriber base? In most cases, the answer is yes. Whether you’re a cable company, software company, ISP, cellular company, or meal delivery service, you need to know your customers’ buying behaviors. With visibility into your client base, upsells and cross-selling of products and services is much simpler. This benefits you from a revenue standpoint but also gives your clients more options and functionality that they may need.

Unlocking Customer Data

While it may be nice to think that you can go individually to each customer and find out how they feel about your product/service, the truth is that it’s not efficient. After you properly manage your existing clients, only then can you grow the business. Access to data and insights can help you make tweaks that will eliminate your churn rate, adjust prices, and, ideally, increase your profit margin.

Challenge of Managing Subscribers

While it would be nice if every subscriber was on the same billing frequency, at the same rate, for the same period—it’s just not the case. Successful subscription billing requires management. A popular product for optimizing subscription billing in NetSuite is 360’s own 360 Subscription Billing. There are many aspects that make the tool stand out from other similar products, but one of the biggest differentiators is that it’s a Built for NetSute Native SuiteApp—eliminating the need to train your team on a new solution and it runs on the same system as your financials and customer database.

 

---

---