There is a lot involved in running a subscription business. Discover the benefits of automating your tasks and processes with subscription management software.
There’s growing appeal for starting a subscription business or offering subscription options in your business. Among these are automated billing and recurring revenue, which improves business efficiency and makes it easy to predict revenue.
But there are a lot of processes and tasks involved in managing a subscription business, all of which must work together harmoniously. This is hard to accomplish with spreadsheets and manual systems.
The solution is to invest in subscription management software that automates and ties together the different aspects of subscription management. This article discusses the many other benefits of using subscription management software.
What is subscription management software?
Subscription management software automates the different tasks and processes of running a subscription business, from when customers first sign up to when they cancel their subscription.
The software automates and streamlines subscription management. Among the components of subscription management that the software automates and streamlines are:
- Subscription plan creation,
- Subscriber account management,
- Billing and payment collection,
- Analytics and reporting.
A well-chosen subscription management software combines tools for all these tasks and processes into a robust, all-in-one platform. Here are some of the benefits such a subscription management platform brings:
10 Benefits of using subscription management software.
You can have a great subscription business idea with product/market fit, but if all your workflows are run from spreadsheets, you will struggle to acquire, engage, and retain subscribers and as your customer base grows.
Here’s how subscription management software solves most of those issues:
1. Simplifies subscription plan creation.
Depending on the complexity of your subscription offerings, you must create different packages and price points and modify them as your business grows and your customer preferences change.
The best subscription management software allows the creation of flexible subscription plans, which customers love. For example, allowing customers to create custom subscription boxes aligns your offering with their needs.
2. Automates billing.
If you can’t accurately and flexibly bill customers, your business is in trouble. Either of or both your bottom line and customer experience will suffer, meaning your business will struggle to survive.
Generally, customers are uneasy about sharing their payment information. Imagine if, after winning their trust, they receive their bills at irregular intervals and with inaccurate amounts.
Automation with software streamlines recurring billing and removes errors and inefficiencies associated with manual billing processes and the anxiety those errors cause customers.
Besides preventing human errors that are inevitable with manual processes, subscription billing software gives you complete control over billing cycles. This enhances scalability and helps you create billing cycles tailored to your customers' needs, which boosts their overall experience.
3. Helps with compliance.
Tax compliance is easier if your subscription management workflows are automated. Prevailing taxes are automatically computed and levied, ensuring that your business doesn’t get into the crosshairs of tax authorities.
Recurring billing also reinforces the importance of safely storing customers' payment information and setting mechanisms to track payments to ensure PCI compliance. Using PCI-compliant subscription management software also means you won’t have to obtain PCI certification, a costly and time-consuming process.
4. Enhances the customer experience.
To keep your customers subscribed, you want to create and manage flexible subscription experiences for them. This is challenging without data on how customers engage with your product and respond to your decisions.
An all-in-one subscription management platform can collect and aggregate this data into reports you can pull on demand. You can use this data to make better decisions and ensure flexible and happy customer experiences.
5. Aids integration.
The best subscription management software integrates with other software you use in your business easily. This includes your CRM, email marketing, accounting, and inventory management software.
By seamlessly connecting your subscription management software with your CRM, you can design promotional offers that are based on subscribers’ recent purchases and actions.
For example, a subscription cancellation can trigger an email sequence that seeks to learn the customer’s reasons for cancelling, uncovering insights that can help you improve your products and the overall customer experience.
Integration with your CRM also gives your customer service teams direct access to customer details, like their shipping address and subscription plans. When these details change, customer service can respond quickly and with the right context.
6. Improves the marketing and sales functions.
The job of salespeople does not stop when they close the first sale. Great salespeople add value to their clients and build relationships. It is from such that they can get referrals and repeat sales.
The best subscription management software sends out notifications to customers when a recurring payment is processed and even when payments fail. These notifications are important customer touchpoints that must be harnessed to keep customers connected with the brand.
So, the right subscription billing software helps streamline the sales process and gives marketers useful data they can use to understand subscriber preferences, design better offers, and identify emerging trends.
7. Saves time.
You can only do so much in a day. Separate all the tasks involved in running a growing subscription business, and the manhours you need to accomplish them all become apparent. It’s a lot of manhours.
Subscription management software automates many of those tasks and processes, saving you hundreds of manhours. Not just that, but it also ensures you serve customers faster and more efficiently and can easily identify emerging trends and respond with improved offers, which can give you a competitive advantage.
8. Reduces your costs.
Without the right software for subscription management, you will have to rely on generic payment systems that need a lot of manual effort to align them to the needs of a subscription business.
You will need a much bigger staff to handle all the extra manual processes. Maintaining that extra staff is costly and a management challenge. So, investing in subscription management software reduces the administration overhead, improving the bottom line.
Trying to build a proprietary subscription billing software is even costlier because of the specialized equipment and expert developer skills it requires.
9. Improves reporting.
Modern businesses run on data. Subscription management software can help collect data on how customers interact with the business across the subscription lifecycle.
You can access this data by pulling real-time reports and use it to improve your systems and highlight accounts that need your team’s attention. This includes failed payments, paused accounts, plan upgrades, discount coupons redeemed, and cancellations.
You can also customise the sales data and integrate it into your product pages to display the number of current subscribers to convey the picture of popularity that can help convince prospects to sign up.
10. Creates transparency.
Imagine a customer querying a charge on their account and not knowing how to explain it because you don't have their account history readily available!
The customer may have paused or cancelled their subscription. These details will take you some time to dig up if your billing system is manual. But if you use software for subscription management, you can easily pull up the customer’s account and refer to their history and quickly determine if they paused or cancelled their subscription.
You can respond to customer queries quickly and with accurate information, which can help diffuse a situation with a customer that can turn them away from your company permanently.
The right subscription management software, therefore, enhances your customer communications and presents your company as transparent.
Choose a subscription management software designed for growth and scalability.
With how critical it is to the success of your subscription business, it is essential that you choose a subscription management software that grows with your business and fits the subscription billing model you have chosen.
Just as critical is choosing a subscription billing management software that is designed for scalability. It should make it easy to add more subscription plans and accommodate new subscribers.
Your business relies on other systems to operate smoothly. Your subscription management software must easily integrate with those.
The Intasend subscription management and automatic billing software simplifies integration through our user-friendly developer tools and API. Using our API, you can connect the software directly to your website, allowing you to integrate all your subscription business workflows.
Sign up and connect to the Intasend subscription management platform to automate and streamline your billing, enhance customer experience, reduce costs, and improve accuracy and efficiency in your subscription business.
