Robbie Kellman Baxter is author of The Forever Transaction and The Membership Economy, two books which have sealed her place as the number one expert in the world on subscription and membership-based businesses.  

Nearly every company is at least thinking about moving to a subscription model, or incorporating subscription models into their business strategy. The benefits are clear - recurring revenue,  disruption-proofing customer loyalty, and more. But taking the leap can be scary.  How do you move forward quickly but mitigate risk to your core business even as you change, well, everything? 

Baxter stresses the importance of defining an ongoing value proposition – a “forever promise” that provides an ongoing benefit to customers and causes them to use your product as a habit, and something they can’t do without. 

Too many companies offer a one-time benefit that incents people to sign up for their subscription or membership, but pay insufficient attention to providing ongoing, indispensable value to customers. 

You have to earn the customers trust again and again, because every day the customer can cancel.  One way to build trust is to make it easy for customers to cancel their subscriptions. Nothing burns bridges like having a difficult cancellation process – we’ve all experienced that. 

Another mistake companies make is having too many promotions to entice people to subscribe. That just teaches customers to game the system – to wait for a better promotion before joining. 

Organizations know that subscription pricing can yield great benefits but are scared to make the massive change in business strategy it would require. We can look to companies like Adobe as exemplars of how to make the shift effectively. 

”Adobe did a ton of experimentation before they moved to a subscription-based model,” Baxter says, “They really understood and could anticipate what the behavior of their different customer segments was going to be. And they were very clear in communicating to their board, which customers were okay to lose, and which customers were not okay to lose and what they were doing to manage that.”

Learn more about Baxter’s work, and about how your organization can transition to a subscription model, at RobbieKellmanBaxter.com, or connect with her on LinkedIn. 

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