Maximize Revenue with the Customer Engagement Model

How do you keep increasing your revenue in a marketplace that has reached its point of saturation? Dating apps like Tinder and Bumble, especially in wealthier countries like the US and France, have reached this point where they have become so popular among their potential users that they are now really struggling to find new users. In such a scenario, what subscription-based businesses like these dating apps usually do is they redirect their energies into improving their customer lifetime value by reworking their customer engagement model.

Keeping this new development in the SaaS world in mind, we will be dividing the blog into 2 sections to better help you understand subscriber engagement in general, and then explore ways in which you can devise/tweak your own customer engagement models to increase your business’s overall revenue. The sections are as follows:

1. Understanding the importance of engaging subscribers

2. What is a customer engagement model and how can SubscriptionFlow help you devise effective customer engagement models for SaaS?

Read more: The Attain & Retain Strategy for You—Membership Engagement to Boost Retention

Section 1: Understanding Subscriber Engagement and its Importance.

Simply put, subscriber engagement is a way of defining the degree of interaction, interest, and outright participation that the subscribers of a business have with the product and/or service that the business is offering. It is measured using various metrics. These include discerning the frequency of usage and the details provided by customers during feedback. For large subscription-based businesses like Adobe that have their own customer-led and company-moderated discussion forums, customer engagement is also measured by quantitatively counting the number of questions and answers that users write on the platform, and then qualitatively engaging with the content of those questions and answers.

How Important is Subscriber Engagement for Subscription-Based Businesses?

The most obvious reason why subscriber engagement matters is that it is a great predictor for your company to see how many of your customers are loyal enough to your service/product to stick to it in the coming years. It is highly unlikely for loyal customers to cancel their subscriptions provided their levels of subscriber engagement are maintained. With the exception of a colossal and unpredictable event like a global pandemic, a war or an economic recession, loyal customers having their needs met will stay.

The following are a few important advantages of having loyal customers for a subscription-based business:

1.     Higher Retention Rates and Lower Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)

Acquiring new customers is expensive in most cases, and so with a high rate of retention, you will naturally need to acquire a lot fewer customers as the existing ones will be helping you greatly in meeting your revenue targets. In other words, you will only be needing new customers to help you company grow and not just to stay afloat. Needing new customers just to break even is really not at all a sustainable way of generating income and subscription-based companies like these usually end up going bankrupt sooner rather than later!

2.     Enhanced Brand Advocacy and Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Likewise, happy customers are likely to spread good word of mouth for your business and, in doing so, will effectively be providing you with free marketing. Just think about Adobe and how many new clients does it get when millions of aspiring photographers around the world read an interview by a world-leading fashion photographer like Annie Leibovitz who, when asked by Vogue about how she makes her photographs look so good, does not shy away from name-dropping Adobe’s Photoshop and its wondrous suite of tools and effects that allow her to contour her work with even more meaning.

3.     Stability and Predictability in Revenue Streams

In any business, consistency really is key. Following a boom-and-bust cycle is really not workable in the long run as your business needs to start identifying consistent sources of revenue that it can rely on when making crucial decisions about its future (especially regarding budgeting and forecasting growth).

Sustainability, and the significantly reduced volatility of revenue that it offers, is actually one of the key distinguishing features why so many SaaS businesses are now increasingly choosing the subscription-based revenue model instead of preferring one-time transactions. This is because even where there are dips in the market and sales are not projected to look good, you can rely on your revenue to not fall below a certain point due to your having created a subscription-based revenue model and, more importantly, having invested in ensuring customer loyalty.

What is the Customer Lifetime Value and Why Does it Matter (in the long run)?

Arguably the biggest advantage of having an effective customer engagement model is that it increases your customer lifetime value. This metric refers to all the added revenue that a business can predict to earn from just one customer over the entirety of that customer’s subscription. Besides just measuring how much money the customer gives to the business, it also takes into account the following factors:

1. The customer’s purchasing behavior

2. Average order value

3. Frequency of purchases

4. The length of the customer’s relationship with the business

One of the biggest reasons why having a high customer lifetime value matters so much for business is because it allows them to invest in optimizing their operations and improving their service while knowing exactly the margins within which they need to stay to continue to remain profitable. And because businesses then start tracking customer satisfaction as if their life depends on it (because it literally does—a bankrupt business is a dead business!), they naturally enter a virtuous cycle where the more they invest in keeping their customers happy (by setting up good customer care, improving the product, etc.) the more their customer lifetime value goes up which, in return, generates more revenue for the business.

Section 2: How Can SubscriptionFlow Help you Devise Effective Customer Engagement Models for SaaS?

A subscriber engagement model is basically a guiding framework that consists of strategies and plans that you use to ensure that your subscribers remain involved with your product. Doing this helps with maintaining and ideally even continually improving your revenue.

SubscriptionFlow helps you devise effective customer engagement models for SaaS by doing the following:

1.     Automating Workflows:

SubscriptionFlow will streamline all efforts of you engaging with your end consumers by creating fully automated workflows. What that means it that it will organize your company’s plans by basing its organization on what your subscribers want from the product and where they are exactly in terms of their journey with the product. This will save you time and will ensure that you keep hearing regularly from your business’s end consumers regarding their feedback on the product.

2.     Automating Email Correspondence:

Sending emails is made as light as air with the help of SubscriptionFlow. What it does is that it personalizes your emails for your customers and dispatches them at just the right time. However, if you do not wish to even write your emails yourself, then you may also make use of ready-made templates for emails before having them customized for each subscriber. Sending automated emails to your end consumers is a great way to keep them informed and involved.

3.     Segmenting Customers:

Especially for growing businesses whose clientele is increasing at a rapid pace, it can be particularly helpful to have your customers be cleanly sorted into different groups whose categorization is based on what they like and/or how they interact with your business. Doing this ensures that the messages/emails that are being sent to the groups are all tailored to their specific needs since sending tailored messages is proven to be a lot more engaging than sending general mass-emails that most users tend to ignore if not outrightly put in their spam folder.

4.     Offering Coupons and Loyalty Points:

Lastly, SubscriptionFlow also offers a great variety of coupons or loyalty points that you can dole out to your customers to, firstly, reward them for their loyalty and, secondly, to incentivize them to be even more loyal in the future. Doing this ensures that your customers feel a sense of pride in their subscription of your company’s product as the otherwise one-sided transactional relationship of them paying to use a product becomes a two-way street with the product too directly benefitting them in terms of getting them useful coupons.

Read more: How Businesses Can Improve SaaS Customer Engagement

Conclusion

In this blog, we have established that innovative approaches to customer engagement are necessary to sustain revenue growth in a market that is approaching saturation. Businesses that do not do this often to do not survive for long and have no choice but to close shop and declare bankruptcy.

With its ability to provide automated workflows, personalized email communication, customer segmentation, and loyalty incentives, SubscriptionFlow emerges as a critical tool for subscription-based SaaS businesses. Through the prioritization of customer engagement and the utilization of SubscriptionFlow’s features, your business can effectively navigate challenges related to saturation, cultivate customer loyalty, and achieve long-term sustainable revenue growth. Book a demo with SubscriptionFlow now!