Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Good morning. Welcome to today's webinar on how to turn subscriber engagement into revenue. So today, we're gonna dive in, to how to drive conversion and retention all across your subscriber life cycle. And at the end, we're gonna finish with a really great demo on Recurly's latest life cycle engagement tools, and be sure to stick around for that. A lot of fun stuff at the end.
Just a reminder, if if you have any questions, any comments throughout the webinar today, please drop them in the chat and we'll try to get back to you. Right? Alright, let's go ahead and get started.
So first some introductions before we get into it. Hi, my name is Dylan Heffler. I'm the VP of product marketing here at Recurly Later on, you're gonna hear from my colleague, Chad Kane, who is our director of sales engineering. He'll be leading the demo later on. For those of you unfamiliar with Recurly, for almost fifteen years now, we've been helping b to c brands like which Paramount plus FabFitFun grow their subscription business globally. And in that time, we we've had the benefit of observing a lot of different trends, consumer behaviors, and also tactics that brands are taking to grow and retain their their base of customers.
And then the last few years, actually, brands who are using Recurly have seen a hundred and five percent increase in active subscribers.
So, you know, with that, we get a lot of questions about, hey, how would these other brands do this? How can my how can my brand do this? And so before we dive in to the how, it's it's really important for us to take a step back and remind ourselves of of the why.
So a lot of businesses can get caught and lost in chasing competing priorities. There's there's various KPIs. There's always something new to measure, some new objective that we're focused on month to month, quarter to quarter. But what's really at the heart of a healthy and mature subscription business is the measurement of engagement of your subscribers. They're putting the emphasis on the subscriber and then their experience. And from what we've observed, those brands that have the most mature subscription businesses are ones that are speaking about that subscriber engagement and subscriber life cycle all the time.
Because they know that engaged subscribers are going to be more loyal.
They're gonna get the most value out of your products, and they're going to be the biggest advocate for your brand and referrals for new customers. So if it's a double hit, right, if you're able to engage your subscriber, not only do they stick around and you retain them, but they become a fuel for growth and help refer more customers to you. Right. So that's great. But then how do you actually drive engagement? How do you take control of that subscriber engagement life cycle and and not just wait for it to happen?
So your subscribers are more likely to engage with your products or your service if if their experience encompasses these three key aspects here on the screen with complex tech stacks, datasets, devices. Achieving this is not it's not easy. Right? This is this is complicated for a lot of brands. It is a multi multi quarter journey.
So subscribers and customers, they expect their experience to be frictionless, Meaning everything from discovery to checkout to account changes to navigating your product, it all needs to be seamless.
And additionally, you know, those days of just one size fits all approach to subscription, those those are done because subscribers and consumers now have come to expect a personalized product experience.
This could be custom product bundles for them based off of what kind of experience they want or what kind of usage they expect to get out of the product or personalized communications from the brand. A recent survey from Forbes, found that seventy one percent of subscribers expect personalization and even more seventy six percent they get frustrated when it doesn't happen.
So not only are they expecting their experience to be personalized, those people that are expecting it also actually get a little bit frustrated. They get upset if it is not personalized and you can then imagine how that then impacts behavior, conversion, brand loyalty.
And so finally, your communication and the the journey that you're mapping out for subscribers with that communication, it all has to be in the right context and in the context of their actions in the moment.
Right? So what does that mean really is you need to deliver a frictionless and personalized and also contextualize experience across your subscriber life cycle. You have to actively drive engagement rather than waiting for subscribers to move and take the next step whether it's during their onboarding or upgrading their plan. It's the difference between being a passive observer into the subscriber experience and being an active participant.
So we talked about those mature brands that have mature subscription businesses. Right? The mature brands are the ones that are actively putting themselves into the subscriber life cycle, trying to build more connections with the subscriber throughout their journey. Right?
The ones that are have not quite reached that stage yet or more passive. They're sitting back, they're observing and they're measuring but they're not putting themselves directly into that life cycle.
So with the new, life cycle engagement tool that are currently launched a few months ago, consumer businesses can now guide subscribers to take those actions that they might not have taken on their own. And the power of this tool really lies in its ability to deliver those personalized prompts and personalized messages that are based on user engagement data and then based on that user's current activity. So with with just one click, a subscriber can take an action that then drives conversion such as creating product stickiness or making account changes or or maybe it's a maybe it's applying promotions. Right? So you're able to be there in the life cycle with a personalized experience, which we we know subscribers expect and maybe even get frustrated if they don't have. Right? And also become that active participant in the life cycle and moving them to that next stage of conversion rather than maybe sitting back and be more passive and waiting for it to happen.
So there are a lot of really cool use cases where this could be applied throughout the subscriber life cycle. So let's just spend a minute exploring how your teams can begin to leverage these opportunities at the acquisition stage. We'll talk about some few other stages later on.
There's a lot of merchants that we see who struggle with conversion at the checkout stage.
So for for this use case, you you can imagine you could begin to create a customized prompt that maybe recognizes a users who abandoned their cart and then offers them an additional incentive to sign up. Right? So you're doing some recapturing here. And then with a single click, you can bring them back to their previous position in the checkout flow without having them start from scratch. Right? And again, you're removing friction all the way through the process.
And another use case at the acquisition stage, it could be personalizing the prompt that someone sees on-site based on maybe the channel that came from. So if you're running a campaign in social and maybe there's, specific TikTok that they they came through and that's how they converted. Maybe the message and the content that you deliver could be relevant to that campaign or relevant to the content and social and that TikTok or or Instagram Instagram post that they saw and how they ended up making their way to the site.
So once a subscriber is converted, right? They're on board. They're no longer just shopper anymore, they're they're a subscriber.
Could be a trial or paid plan.
That consistent engagement will indicate the value that they derive from your product or service and also actually help predict their likelihood of turning. So here are some use cases during the onboarding phase, for example, that could drive more product engagement.
So if you have a subscriber that is engaging with sports content, you can recommend additional football or basketball or, or racing content as their as our next step in the journey. Right? So again, you're you're finding these different ways to create the right contextual and personalized message and experience for the subscriber so they then feel that the whole experience is personalized and tailored for them. Right? Like, not only are you making it easy for them and also again frictionless.
Right? You're beginning to build brand affinity.
So a lot of brands are also focused on cross selling and upselling to their subscribers. So maybe you've got some new products or services you're offering or or you're launching new plans. There's use cases here where this could be applied in in those situations as well. So if you wanted to create a personalized prompt offering your subscriber a discount for adding or upgrading services.
So this would be a good example. Maybe you're a hotel chain and you use a prompt based on customers upcoming hotel stay and information to offer add ons. Like, maybe it's a bottle of champagne and strawberry chocolate covered strawberries on on arrival or early check-in if they're there for for a special event or a special occasion, like a an anniversary, right, or a party. Or maybe you're offering, like, something something else to the room.
Like, maybe it's like a family trip and you're able to offer something special for for kids, small kids, if you know that there's gonna be kids in their party. So with one click, subscribers could then add on these extras to their account that are, to use the word again, personalized and then give them the feeling that they're creating with the brand a personalized experience for for their trip in in the hotel example. Right? And, you know, last, it did definitely not least, a use case that we we talk to brands a lot about is strategies that they could use to begin to combat the subscriber churn.
So cancellation flows are highly effective use for Recurly's lifecycle engagement tool. With a cancel safe journey, you can begin to intercept subscribers who are about to cancel.
Start to gather some valuable feedback on on their reasons for wanting to leave and then offer alternative options.
Maybe it's downgrading their plan to to a lower tier. Maybe it's receiving some kind of one time or continued discount to stay.
Maybe it's outreach to support. Maybe give them, like, an off ramp to maybe talk to someone on a technical side to resolve a technical issue. Or or maybe they just need to pause their subscription, and And they didn't know that was an option and they were going to cancel, so you give them the option to pause. So there's a lot of different pathways that you can begin to introduce for the subscriber at the point where they'd they think that they're going to cancel that could save the account and create that personalized experience for them.
Right? So they're they're really beginning to tailor the subscription to their preferences. Right? So they feel like they've got a plan that actually works for them and and works for like wherever it is that they are in their life.
Twenty to forty percent of churn that we found is involuntary meaning your subscribers payment has failed. So in addition to leveraging recurly's revenue recovery capabilities, you can now push an in app notification when someone is actively using your product prompting them to update their credit card information.
So you don't lose access to your service. So those types of proactive in app notifications are helpful as a quick especially when you know that they're using the product because you could begin to prevent that involuntary churn before it even happens.
So we we touched on a lot of different use cases today. It was really just a handful. There are dozens of others that can be customized based on the goals you have and the actions that you want your subscribers to take across their life cycle. And then that's that's really the beauty of this is you could begin to piece together this patchwork of customized of personalized experiences so that, like, not only are you an active part, an active participant in that subscriber's journey with your product and with your brand, but you're you're beginning to create that feeling of personalization because they've tailored the onboarding with them.
They tailor the package for themselves. Maybe they've tailored the the pause of the subscription or what for what they need, right? Like it's all these different moments of personalization that give the consumer choice and then make them loyal. Right?
And then and that's what we found. So, really excited to cover these use cases with you. Like I mentioned, there there are many more. And if you're interested, please reach out or put something in the chat.
We'd love to talk more about the different use cases, but I'm going to hand it over now to my colleague, Chad, who's going to dive into a product demo of Recurly's latest life cycle engagement tool. Chad?
Thank you.
My name is Chad King, and I'm the director of sales engineering here at Recurly.
I have been in the commerce and revenue industry for over ten years, and am excited to present our life cycle engagement solution to you today.
Utilizing the power of Recurly's subscription management platform and lifecycle engagement solution, our merchants are creating personalized real time calls to action or prompts at any step in the subscriber's journey.
This enables them to focus their efforts on things like driving engagement. Catch your customers at any phase of their journey by messaging them during acquisition prior to renewal, offering them an upgrade, or preventing cancellation through a survey, all done with our no to low code solution built to empower business teams with the ability to predict and prevent churn.
Our merchants have the insights to help them determine who is likely to cancel and can create a personalized flow to save that cancellation to change a subscription with one click.
Subscribers will be able to automatically change their subscription in Recurly seamlessly and go about their day.
Easy to implement through minimal development efforts.
We empower your teams to drive engagement as subscriber journey prompts without waiting for engineering resources through simple configuration.
Interactive real time calls to action.
Don't wait for that scheduled email to go out. Catch your subscribers in the act by delivering in app interactive prompts based on actions and segments across desktop and mobile web, iOS, Android, Apple TV, Roku, Fire TV, and Samsung TV. No other platform offers the TV device support that we do. And finally, deliver the right experience through AB testing.
With our solution, you can easily stand up AB testing with unlimited variations that drive conversion and optimize revenue.
So with that, let's jump into a quick demo that showcases how you can redirect a subscriber that wants to cancel their subscription and provide them alternatives to drive a more desirable outcome.
So as you can see, we are on the account management page for the subscriber.
This provides them the ability to see their subscription, change plans, or cancel. And that, in our case, is exactly what they're going to do.
So when they come into this page and they click on the cancel button, instead of going direct to a cancellation, they are given a prompt with a survey that allows us to determine additionally why they're looking to cancel by providing some options here for them to select, such as too expensive, prefer annual billing, technical issues, or taking a break. This allows us to redirect the customer to an alternative action that is more appeasing to them, such as providing a discount, switching to a different plan, helping to guide them to technical support and customer support to fix and alleviate their issues, or putting a pause on their subscription for a period of time.
In our case, we're going to select too expensive.
This allows us to redirect the customer to an incentive that will give them the opportunity to reduce their cost, but to stay a subscriber.
This allows the merchant, the ability to then keep that subscriber and continue forward. And that's exactly what we're going to do here.
And what you'll notice when we accept that is that the prompt goes away and we come back to the account management. So this allows the customer to continue on knowing that they have completed their, their adjustment and that their next billing cycle, the cost will be reduced.
If we look at the back end solution for our offering of life cycle engagement, This will can give you insight into the tooling that the merchant has the ability to to leverage. First, we're put to a performance dash board that allows us to see the active users, clicks, average, percentage of click throughs on that.
The top prompts, any active experiments that are currently ongoing, and guides in in the processes that are associated to users, clicks, and a conversion rate that we're seeing success with.
But today, I'm gonna focus on guides, and this is where we went into that cancellation survey and options.
And what I wanna do is take you through the way that this cancellation survey is set up and show you how you can empower your business team to really drive, changes in a very simple and quick fashion. So inside of the guide, which is really where we set up multiple prompts or steps for the customer to go through. Think of it as a workflow.
This can all be done with, a simple adding an item or, in this case, a prompt, which will jump into this first one that we went into the demo with.
And so in this cancellation survey, you have the ability to come in and set up or configure this in our simple content management UI.
And so without developer resources, we have the ability to put in messaging that you see here, set up font and font colors, an additional sub message, in this case, what you see here.
And then we can ask for user interactions, so the buttons that you see here. So I can define the text, the color, the amount of time that I wanna wait for a button click. If I need additional buttons, those can be done from here. And then what call to action are we going to have upon completion when they click that?
If we wanna input a survey, you'll see those options are listed here. I can put a label that shows up on the prompt and then an action that's going to happen that we want to capture. So in this case, price, if it's too expensive, Prefer annual billing, we're gonna switch to an annual plan.
Technical issues, we're going to consider that technical. And then taking a break, we want to pause.
If I decide that I want imaging or other other things behind the prompt itself, I have the ability to put that image in here, or I can if I have technical, capabilities, I can get, custom CSS and drop that directly into control everything that you see in the layout as you see here.
The other important note is that we have different modes to see how will this look if I am interacting on the desktop or mobile web.
Once I'm happy with the presentation of the prompt itself, I click on save and exit, and that will return me back to the details of this step in the, the guide and so what I want to do is I want to drive that to an action so it is sim as simple as clicking on add action.
And in this case, I have a web action that I want to drive.
And so upon submit, I want to specify which one I want to go to. So in an example here, if I'm going to click on submit, if it the option is, price, then I can add an action associated to that, and it will redirect me to that next step in the survey.
So if I back out here, we can drive to guides. And let's take a look at that coupon discount.
And so when I get to the offer that we wanna have from that, What we wanna do is we wanna drive the customer to a coupon. And so I'm gonna simulate this here. And what you'll see is inside of Recurly, this data is synchronized over to allow us various different actions, add a coupon, change a plan. And all of this is done automatically for you so that as a business user, I just take a look at what coupon I need to use, and this would show me any of those that are available here. I would select that, click on add action, and that will drive me to here so that I can then synchronize that coupon back to the Recurly instance and the subscriber's account.
And with that, this completes our demonstration for today. Thank you very much for your time.
