Have you ever tried to navigate a boat without looking at a compass? That’s how it feels to run a subscription business without consumer insights. Subscriber insights make your marketing strategy more targeted, give you a better idea of what to focus on, and show you how to design an action plan.

In this article, we’ll review the benefits of subscriber data and five consumer insights examples where insights played a crucial role in subscription growth.

Why you need to use customer insights in your subscription business strategy

Customer insights combine analytics and market research data to help you better understand subscriber needs and preferences, helping you craft the ideal consumer experience.

• Take control of the customer experience: Use consumer data analysis to identify the right audiences, design detailed buyer personas and customer journey maps, and develop strategic customer-backed improvements that solve their pain points. 

• Personalize products and communications: Once you get a deeper understanding of your subscribers, start tailoring their experience: make or plan pricing adjustments, extend or reduce free trial lengths, offer the right promotions, and find the perfect time to offer an upsell or cross-sell of products. 

• Identify highly-profitable subscribers and maximize LTV: Recurring revenue businesses rely on predictable revenue and customer loyalty to grow. The cost to acquire subscribers is significant, and payback on these costs happens over a subscriber’s lifetime.

Learn how to use consumer insights to identify high-performing subscribers and maximize revenue.

Subscription customer insight examples to check on

Let’s put the theory into practice. Here are five examples of how subscription businesses leverage consumer insights to drive growth. 

TeacherVision improves subscriber experience and reduces churn

TeacherVision is a teaching resource platform for professors to find timely, accurate materials to best support their students. 

Playing a student role, the company tested hypotheses on packaging, pricing, and promotions by cohorts–then kept what was working. Aware of “subscription fatigue,” they offered cancellation alternatives to prevent churn and learned that none of the paused accounts have churned since. 

Deep analytics uncovered actionable insights that helped TeacherVision test different subscription tiers, personalize its promotions, and find an effective way to retain more subscribers. The result? An involuntary churn rate of 1%.

Digital Reach optimizes its processes and plans ahead

Digital Reach is a digital marketing agency with expertise in search, analytics, web development, and marketing automation.

Like any other subscription business, their efforts focused on tracking revenue streams. Customer insights helped the company identify its most successful plans, discover growth opportunities, and analyze churn rates over time to improve dunning processes. 

Analyzing the data helped Digital Reach boost its revenue in the short and long term, helping plan its future investments of time and resources.

Returnloads.net understands and addresses seasonality better

Returnloads.net is a UK-based online freight exchange website connecting haulage companies with empty vehicles with businesses that need goods moved.

With a mostly seasonal business, having critical subscription and customer data helped them monitor and compare customer retention over time to identify sign-up and churn peaks.

With data in hand, they designed a more targeted marketing strategy, subscription packages, pricing structures, and trials aligned with subscriber behavior patterns from previous years.

ShipStation makes retail shipments more efficient

ShipStation provides web-based software to optimize order processing, fulfillment, and shipping from all the most popular marketplaces.

The company understands the importance of exceptional customer service. To better serve their subscribers, ShipStation developed a more personalized solution–ShipEngine–to adjust to retailers’ particular needs. Since their launch, they’ve monitored recurring revenue and other metrics to measure the product's performance.

True Royalty TV plugs the hole in the “leaky bucket”

True Royalty TV is a royal content library platform that covers the British monarchy's background, context, and truth.

Streaming video-on-demand is a competitive space. True Royalty TV tested packaging and pricing options to find the best fit for its audience and leveraged consumer data to make smart decisions on acquisition and retention.

With thousands of subscribers in the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland, this "Netflix for royal watchers” has become a household name. 

All the insights tools you need in one easy-to-use platform

When talking about subscriber insights, the more, the merrier. However, relying on several tools might be challenging to track and report.

Recurly customers have found a single source of truth in Recurly Analytics, an intuitive reporting and analytics hub with personalized dashboards, KPIs, and graphs that help you optimize your plans, subscribers, and revenue streams. Our easy-to-use dashboards allow you to:

1. Evaluate net subscriber change data, churn rate, and LTV over time to identify subscription behavior trends.

Customers section in Recurly Analytics dashboard

2. Identify your best-performing plans and inspect business growth trends over time. 

Subscription preferences section in Recurly Analytics dashboard

3. Report on key revenue metrics like net billings, average revenue per customer, and monthly recovered revenue.

Revenue overview section in Recurly Analytics dashboard

Customer satisfaction is the ultimate goal of every subscription business, especially when competition is more challenging than ever. Gain a competitive advantage with subscription insights.