The size of the worldwide subscription market for e-commerce is expected to reach $904.2 billion by 2026 (Forbes).
The unprecedented rise of subscription businesses has been termed the ‘subscription economy’, but how can you best optimize your subscription offering?
What is subscriber optimization?
Subscriber optimization involves increasing either the number or the length/type of subscriptions with strategic data-informed interventions.
The first step is to better understand how users are interacting with your online product or service. This involves modeling data to a user level and looking at how individuals (and eventually user segments) actually use what you offer.
The next step is to make strategic interventions and analyze these people or groups respond.
Being able to understand the behavioral signals of prospects and subscribers can help drive acquisition and retention – creating the famous ‘flywheel’ growth effect.
Typical objectives of subscriber optimization
This can vary between companies, but common objectives are:
- maximizing the value of your subscriber base
- better retaining users
- upselling more users to premium tiers
- converting non-paying members into paid subscribers
- creating more referrals
A warehouse-first approach to subscriber optimization
When companies start out, they often use packaged analytics tools like Adobe or Google Analytics. This data is not optimized for data warehouses or lakes, and can cause issues as data teams struggle to prepare the data for use.
A warehouse-first approach sees a data creation tool being used to collect data from your sites and apps which is then sent to a warehouse, lake or real-time stream.
This allows data to be modeled into the exact tables needed to answer your business questions and offers a degree of accuracy, flexibility, and customization simply not possible with all-in-one or ‘packaged analytics’ tools.
Why choose Snowplow for subscription optimization?
Snowplow offers the ability to capture ultra-granular information about the end-to-end behavior of subscribers. This can be analyzed both in the data warehouse and in real time.
Every subscription service is unique – Snowplow provides fully customizable behavioral data that lets you understand your customer journeys, and understand how your customers’ activities link to churn or upsell.
Snowplow’s real-time capabilities allow you to present signals to users within their current session, so you don’t have to wait until the following day or send a follow-up email. This enhances the user experience and makes an upsell motion feel more seamless and less forced.