How to Use Email to Boost your Subscription-Based Business
We can not express enough how much information consumers receive from various business every minute of every day.
To effectively reach your consumers, you need to break through the noise and communicate a meaningful message to them! How can you do that you ask? With one of the most valuable channels in the game, email marketing! Email marketing is an absolute must for subscription-based businesses.
What Is a Subscription-Based Business?
It’s a business model where customers pay a recurring subscription price in order to access products or services. It can also be used for every-day products people buy over and over again. Today, consumers buy fresh produce, digital music, clothes, dog food, and more all by subscription.
Subscription-Based Businesses You May Already Use
Popular subscription-based businesses you might recognize are FabFitFun and Netflix. FabFitFun is a quarterly subscription service that sends the latest in beauty, fashion, fitness, and wellness once a season. Consumers can pay $49.99 for a one-time subscription or $179.99 for an annual membership. Netflix, on the other hand, has its consumers pay a low monthly fee to gain access to thousands of movies and shows. Other super-popular subscription-based businesses you’ve probably heard of are:
- Spotify
- Hello Fresh
- Amazon Prime
- GameFly
How To Boost Your Biz
Companies like Netflix and FabFitFun have die-hard fans that feel connected to the brands and so can you! With email marketing, you can add a valuable element to your business. Email marketing has the ability to tie customer relationships together and drive more online sales.
- Build relationships with your customers. With email marketing, you have the ability to drive long-term customer behavior and not just the initial sale. Relationship building with email marketing can look like the regular movie and TV show recommendation emails you get from Netflix. It feels like a special, custom experience!
- Collect real-time data. Learn what interests your customers by what they click in your email newsletters and messaging. What products and what wording are driving new subscriptions? Gain insight into what works and what doesn’t. This can help you make your marketing to new clients easier – you know what your customers actually value.
- Make renewing easy. Collect as much data as you can about your consumers then email them personalized offers that will coax them to renew. Just make sure you’re GDPR compliant! This is helpful if your subscription model renews more frequently (quarterly, for example), or you’re just introducing a subscription model.
- Boost sales by promoting products or services. Craft emails that influence subscribers to take immediate action. Even when they aren’t looking for services at different times of the year, you can send emails to promote items that they might not realize they wanted or needed. This can also be used to drive people to your higher-tier subscriptions.
- Convert Leads. Not everyone who joins your email list will always be immediately ready to make a purchase or sign up for your services. Email marketing gives you the opportunity to capture their attention and nurture a relationship with informative and helpful content. You can use drip campaigns, automated sets of emails that go out based on user actions or specific timelines, to stay in touch with subscribers.
- Increase brand recognition. Email marketing allows you to put your brand’s name, logo, graphics and more in front of your audience more often. Seeing your brand elements in every email will help to build brand recognition and give your brand top of mind awareness.
What Emails Should You Send?
Long gone are the days where you can send the same generic email campaign to every single person on your email list. You need to segment your email list and send personalized emails to boost your business. There are several ways this can be done but here are four emails your subscription-based business needs to send.
A Welcome Email
First impressions are everything. This means your welcome email needs to catch your new subscribers attention and move them down the sales funnel. Since this potential customer has subscribed to your email list, they are expressing interest in your products and/or services. Triggering an on-brand welcome email that includes an incentive immediately after they sign up will both catch their attention and help to move them down the sales funnel.
An Order Confirmation Email
Post-purchase messaging can be just as important, if not more important, than before-the-sales emails! Order confirmation emails mark the beginning of the customer relationship so adding value to them is essential! Your confirmation emails should include a ‘thank you’ to the customer for buying from your business, an order summary, and your business’ contact information if they have any questions. To drive additional sales, add personalized recommendations to encourage the purchasing of more items or add a referral button so they can direct their friends to your business.
The Subscription Reminder Email
Imagine your product lifespan is typically 3 months, meaning it takes the average customer 3 months before they run out and need to order a new one. With this information, you can trigger an email autoresponder to remind your customers around that 3-month mark that it’s about time to order a new one. You can even throw in an incentive like 10% off if they order within the next week, or free shipping.
Promotional Emails
Schedule special promotional emails to go out. These can take the form of announcing special time-sensitive deals or monthly sneak peeks. For example, sending an email about your upcoming Black Friday sales right before Thanksgiving. Make sure these emails are on brand, are filled with valuable content that will interest the reader such as new products or sales, and include a call-to-action (CTA) that will drive them down the sales funnel.
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