Mar 19, 2024
The Subscription Stack: Reducing Churn and Increasing Loyalty
Overview:
The Subscription Stack's primary goal is to reduce subscription churn, and cultivating devoted consumers is the first step in doing so.
There are a lot of ways to encourage loyalty among your users, but you should only start implementing typical strategies like gamification, customization, community building, and loyalty programs when you have a firm grasp on your subscribers' journey.
The significance of user loyalty and its advantages for subscription optimization—such as enhanced word-of-mouth, referral schemes, and good reviews—are briefly discussed in this article before delving into the strategies that will boost loyalty.
The broader advantages of increasing allegiance
Of course, increasing loyalty will pay off in the long run in more revenue. But prioritizing loyalty will benefit your company in many ways throughout the Subscription Stack, supporting user research, user acquisition, and conversion rate optimization.
User endorsements
Social proof in the form of endorsements from devoted subscribers can be utilized on your website, in app store adverts, or in promotional campaigns to help you attract new users. According to paywall trials, Steve P. Young of App Masters suggests adding testimonials to longer paywalls because they tend to convert better.
Positive app reviews are invaluable, as we all know, and it goes without saying that devoted users write better app evaluations. Fifty percent of consumers won't download an app with a three-star rating, per Apptentive data. Eighty-five percent of consumers won't download an app if it has a two star review.
App store highlights include ratings and reviews, which may make the difference between a potential user downloading an app and passing on it.
Increased brand awareness results from word-of-mouth marketing, as previously discussed, but it can be challenging to gauge the success of your campaigns. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a widely used metric to gauge user attitude and possible word-of-mouth communication.
One question in a user survey, "How likely would you be to recommend (i.e. promote) this app to other people on a 1 to 10 scale?" is used to compute NPS.
Recognize the Subscriber Journey as the foundation for increasing loyalty
When you employ loyalty-boosting strategies, having a thorough grasp of the subscriber journey will present strategic opportunities to give value.
Examining the statistics is a smart place to start:
Where do users primarily spend their time on your site?
Exist any features that are not being used?
How does a consumer navigate the pre-subscription process for your app? after signing up?
A user research best practice is to validate the learnings from your data with quantitative and qualitative user research. Ask questions like:
What are the reasons users log out of your app?
What are the reasons users sign in to your app?
What do your users value most?
What motivates users to spend more time in your app?
Strategies to Boost User Loyalty
To enhance user loyalty, four primary strategies can be employed: gamification, personalization, community building, and loyalty initiatives.
Gamification is the process of bringing aspects and behaviors from games into non-gaming environments to foster the same kind of player devotion. Giving your consumers incentives to return through reward systems that resemble games is the aim behind this.
One illustration of this is the meditation app Headspace, which tells you how long you've been meditating for overall and how many days you've been consistent. These elements offer rewards akin to those found in games, increasing the likelihood that users will return daily to meditate.
Personalization: This refers to giving users access to tailored content and/or letting them customize their interactions. For instance, the New York Times Cooking app lets you make lists of the recipes you love and offers tailored recommendations based on the dishes you've tried.
Users can express themselves to others or enjoy a particular in-app experience with the help of personalization, which is a strong tool. Spotify's year-end recap playlists are a prime illustration of personalization's effectiveness.
Loyalty Program: Creating a loyalty program is a terrific approach to increase customer engagement and decrease churn by providing customers with an incentive to interact and remain. Customers are more inclined to use your app more frequently if they are aware that they can get rewards for utilizing it.
