Benefits of subscriptions in Shopify

Subscriptions are a selling technique that is with recent years rapidly growing. Not only can they help your business grow, it can also be a huge deal for your competitors. Having subscriptions and setting up subscriptions correctly can be a huge deal. But why exactly? Why having subscriptions model in your store can make such a significant change in your store? This is exactly something we will explore in this article.

First, let's explain what a subscription model is and later we will show you the key things that benefit you as a merchant and also your customers.

What is a subscription model in Shopify?

Product subscriptions is a way for your customers, where they can sign up for a recurring payment plan and receive products in a specific interval on a regular basis, for example weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc… The main advantage of this model is automation, since customers won't have to manually buy products every time they want, but they simply checkout a single time and then they get charged on a specific interval.

In today's e-commerce world, offering product subscriptions is becoming increasingly popular among the businesses. By providing a more personalized shopping experience, subscription-models have been proven to deepen the relationship between a product and customer. Let's take a look of the most important benefits that you will gain, simply by using subscriptions in your store.

Benefits of having subscriptions

Enhanced customer satisfaction

Of course, when implementing a new selling model in your store, you would like to see that your customers are using it seamlessly and are happy with using it. By allowing customers to customize their subscription plans according to their unique preferences and needs, business can make customers feel closer to buying products from your store. This includes allowing them pick the frequency of deliveries, selecting specific products, adding/removing products and more. Customers appreciate the flexibility to adapt their experience to suit their lifestyle. Additionally, by providing more options to customers means to not only form relationships between a brand and a customer but also cultivate a sense of trust towards the brand.

In short, when a customer picks exactly the plan they want and by managing their subscriptions freely, your customers are happier and more satisfied with the service than they would be if you just offered regular one-time products.

Increasing monthly recurring revenue

Flexible subscription plans offer more than just a way to accommodate customer preferences. They also provide a way for you to drive sustained revenue growth for your business. By offering customers a subscription options, your business can guarantee a consistent income each month because of recurring subscription fees. Let's say that if you offer a range of subscription options to different needs and budgets, this way your business can appeal to a wider audience and you can capture segments of the market that you didn't capture before subscription model in your store. Moreover, by using a variety of tools that are often provided by subscription apps (such as Analytics option in Seal Subscriptions), you can constantly analyze your revenue and adapt your pricing, features and offering based on real-time feedback and this way, you are able to optimize your business for maximum revenue generation.

Competitive Advantage

In today's world, there are probably similar businesses to you that sell either the same or similar products. If the customer knows both brands, they will decide on a variety of factors such as the selection of products, price, quality of the products, etc…We live in a competitive market and standing out from the rest is quite essential for success. Businesses often must find ways to differentiate themselves from others, and offering subscription services might just be the right solution. Businesses that offer flexible options to customers with subscription plans are simply better positioned and are more likely to get deeper connections with customers and foster loyalty among their subscribers.

Improved customer retention

Probably the most important benefit when offering flexible subscription plans is positive impact it can have on customer retention. Flexible subscription plans are a way to enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention rates. By allowing your customers to customize their plans, you are showing your commitment to meeting individual customer requirements. It's also good to note that customer preferences shift rapidly nowadays and people are constantly changing their minds. You should offer as much flexibility as you can and that way adapt to your customers. This not only will make it more likely for your customers to stay with their products, but also reduce the likelihood of churn.

Easier management

For the end it's always great to mention that having subscriptions in your store makes everything simply easier. And that goes for both sides, you as a merchant and also for customers. The whole setup is really easy, especially with the best subscription app in Shopify Seal Subscriptions. With just a few clicks your subscription rules can be ready to go and your customers can start subscribing to their favorite products.

Not only the creation, but also the overview of all your subscriptions is also very clear and easy to understand. This is all from the merchant's side but if we look at things also from customer's side things are very straightforward as well. Your customer can edit and manage their subscriptions through a page called customer portal, where they can see, cancel, pause and edit their subscriptions. Of course, if you allowed them to do these things. There are many different settings that you can enable or disable in Seal Subscriptions where you define what exactly would you like your customers to do in customer portal. If you are still not sure, you can refer to our other article about best tips and practices for setting up subscription customer portal.

How to get started

Picking the right app - Seal Subscriptions

Now that you know all of the benefits that subscriptions can give your business to grow in many ways, you are probably thinking in how you can get started by implementing subscriptions in your shop. The first step is selecting a subscription app from the Shopify app store. If you are overwhelmed there and not sure which app to pick or which factors to look for when selecting an app, don't worry, you can check this article where we explain best subscription apps in Shopify, and you will quickly see that the obivous choice is Seal Subscriptions. 

Create a subscription rule

The first step is to select which products would you like your customers to be able to subscribe to and between which selling plans would you like them to select. There are many different things you can setup in subscriptions with Seal, such as:

• Selecting the products that you wish to have a subscription option,
• Setting prepaid selling plans, where customers can pay in advance for more than just one delivery,
• Setting delivery intervals (such as weekly, bi-weekly, monthly etc…).
• Setting up requirements (such as minimum required number of payments and maximum allowed payments before cancellations),
• Setting up different discounts, such as fixed amount discount, percentage discount, fixed product price,
• Set up automatic discount modification, where you can change the discount after a specific number of payments,
• And more!

Creating a subscription rule is a first step when it comes to creating subscription model in your store so make sure you think it through and setup the rules you think are fitting for your business!

To get started go to Seal Subscriptions → Subscription rules → Create rule

Set up additional settings that can help you expand your subscription business

Seal has many other options available rather than just creating subscription rules. All of the following is available with Seal + more:

• Setup cancellation flow to know why exactly are your customer cancelling their subscriptions. You can provide some common reasons where customers can pick from them and also you can give customers an option, to give their own reasons. Cancellation flow is an important process that can help your improve your shop.

• Another big thing that Seal offers you is an amount of customization features that it offers. From customizing the widget to customizing the customer portal, you can do a lot with Seal. Common customization options include changing colors and text, however if you would really like to completely customize it, you can do that with CSS customization, if you have some CSS knowledge.
   

• Configuration of custom portal is a big deal. You can enable or disable options that you wish your customers can do in customer portal. Common options include adding/removing products, canceling and pausing subscriptions, changing product quantities, changing subscription interval, and more. It is good to set this up to your liking so you and your customers will be more satisfied with the use of customer portal.

• Setting up notifications & emails can be important. With Seal you can setup over 20+ different emails and notifications that customers and admins can receive when particular actions happen. Those emails include customer notifications such as billing failed e-mail that gets send to customer when the automatic billing fails, new subscription e-mail that gets sent to customer when their new subscription gets registered in the system, and admin notifications such as a notification that gets sent when a new subscription is created by customer, notification that gets sent when customer modifies products and much more!
  
   

• You might be shipping your products to different countries. Delivery profiles allow you to set custom delivery profiles for your auto-charging subscriptions. This way you can set different rates for specific countries and even offer free shipping to customers.
   

• Another great addition to your subscriptions are automations such as Loyalty discounts, where you can give additional discounts to your loyal subscribers, or product swaps where you can add, remove or replace products automatically at certain intervals, and automated interval changes where u can set the app to automatically change intervals in your subscriptions.

Conclusion

Now that you know the benefits of the subscriptions and just how important they can be for your business, and that you know the first steps to starting subscriptions in your store, we don't think there's anything that can stop you from start using subscriptions in your store. Not only will you quickly see the difference in sales, but you will also see more satisfied customers and grow more as a business that will overpass all your competitors.

We hope that this article helps you discover what really is the best for your brand and help you grow even more in the upcoming months and years.

Happy subscription management!