5 Lessons Learned From A Subscription Model Business — Day 19 of 365 Leadership Blogging

Subscription models are ideal for both products and services. We started out by wanting to create a steady income and chose this business model as a way forward. Using an online magazine as a lead magnet to attract visitors to our web pages, we created a funnel to offer a subscription package. In this article, we share five lessons from our experience. Fast forward we now consult in digital marketing and offer advice to business start-ups.

Lesson 1

We were active on social media, at least 20 times each day. We reaped a reward of engaged followers which was our aim. We were not fixed on numbers authentically just on quality engagement to lead customers through our sales funnels. We attracted 640k page visits and built email lists to market to our subscribers.

Lesson 2

Using an automated system helped us track the customer journey. At the time we looked for the best option for our budget using a number of automated emails before we converted. Our lessons were that too many emails lost our conversion email rates. Also, looking back we had packages that could support data analysis was key for identifying where we lost customers and how to re-engage them in the process.

Lesson 3

Investing not only in the back end but equally, if not more, the front end. At the time we used a mixture of organic posting, curating on topic and paid advertising. Our organic marketing always worked well because we engaged our audiences. Something which we know works well, offering genuine inbound conversation and good social listening were true winners.

Lesson 4

We put together a beta test subscription-based model — the concept was to replace the free magazine with dripped short-form content. The problem we spotted is that we did not have enough funding to see this through the production of content and so we put off marketing the subscription-based model and offering marketing and business coaching packages separately. We had different tiers but not an internal hub. We became creative with our resources.

Lesson 5

The final lesson as a takeaway is leadership is not always about winning. It’s a very evaluative process and from this experience, we re-invested our time into training up on Facebook Marketing and with a professional development institute three months after our son was born. Over the year, we saw the opportunities and losses with a subscription-based model and by leaving content online free we have constant visitors to our site, so much so we have decided to write a business plan that would help the community we serve in video business/leadership training as well as use the resources we have for the original subscription base. We do have an audience and by investing in the right resources we would be able to grow our subscription base.