Dose #30: This Thanksgiving, I’m Grateful for Data

Matt here with your weekly Subscription Prescription ??

Dose #30: This Thanksgiving, I’m Grateful for Data

This week's prescription is all about gratitude. Specifically, gratitude for great data. :)

Diagnosing problems in your subscription program has to start with data.

If you don’t know what’s wrong, how can you fix it? And how do you find opportunities to scale what is working?

Let’s start with a few questions to drive this point home:

1. What channel drives the most subscription conversions?

With subscription purchase as a tracked event in Google Analytics, you should be able to clearly see what channels are driving traffic, and ultimately conversions, on your website.

2. Out of those channels, which ad, article, or affiliate is driving the most subscription conversions?

This is a bit trickier, but you should be able to drill down by campaign into specific ad sets or pages that start a user journey on your website, resulting in a subscription purchase.

3. What is the cost of running that channel? That specific ad or campaign?

This gives you a simple ROI picture for each channel, and you can get even more focused to see which ads or campaigns are driving the most success for your subscription acquisition.?

With attribution becoming more difficult, these numbers are not as accurate as they could be (let’s not go too far down that rabbit hole now), but this is a lot better than nothing. It is a starting point you can use to make more informed decisions on spending.

I’m going to blow your mind on something really important.

Having different campaigns, and seeing what is most effective from a cost/conversion standpoint, is just the beginning.

What data do you have on churn? Are you collecting the reasons why customers cancel? How well do you understand the reasons that motivate subscription purchases and keep customers around?

This is where things can get trickier—and sometimes difficult to swallow from a brand standpoint—because you have assumptions not only on who is using your product but who you would like to use your product.

I hear all the time that “we want to sell to active hikers” or “we want to sell to stay-at-home moms.” The truth is you should be selling to the people that are buying and loving your product. Those groups are not always the same.

The real power to unlock growth on subscriptions is to step back from what you want to do for the brand and see what is actually happening.

You have data on what channels drive subscriptions.

You have data on why customers subscribe (or you should—more on this later).

You have data on why people cancel.

Put these three things together to drive better acquisition and improve retention.

For example, let’s say that price is the #1 reason for churn with your pet food brand. Over time, many customers go with something cheaper. But one of the biggest reasons for subscribing is the quality of the product. You have a variety of ads running, and some of your videos do pretty well on Facebook.?

What do you do? Double down on quality. Improve the videos and add elements of how the product is made and what goes into making it quality (and therefore more expensive than alternatives).

Change messaging throughout the lifecycle of the subscription, emphasizing this quality over and over again and why it’s important for pets to have high-quality food.

You won’t save the people that cancel due to price, but you’ll do better at attracting and retaining customers that care about quality.

Ultimately, data is about understanding customer behavior. You need to be collecting it throughout the customer journey. If you aren’t already, doing surveys post-purchase is important. Look for creative ways to gather feedback, even if that means you’re calling customers.

That’s it for this week’s dose on data. I’m really grateful for everyone on this subscription journey with me and look forward to keeping this going. If you’d ever like to discuss strategy, just hit me up; I’m always open to talking.

If this dose helped, please forward it to a friend, and stay tuned for Dose #31 next Tuesday!

- Matt Holman ??

Head of Growth, QPilot