GatherContent Garners Subscribers With Recurly
Overview
Clear. Concise. Compelling: That’s what every writer knows great content should be. And consumable. Content needs to be easily consumable in a variety of formats to build readership and the business it supports.
Complicated: This was the problem the team that created GatherContent faced when trying to manage content-heavy digital initiatives for the oil and gas industry. This difficulty is what led them to develop a solution specifically for the content creation and workflow needs of today’s businesses.
The GatherContent platform helps companies create and manage content that’s both structured and portable — and then publish it to any CMS or platform. Launched in September 2012 and headquartered in London, the company now has thousands of customers in over 130 countries, managing millions of pieces of content.
No other option was as elegant or sophisticated, with the breadth of features we needed.
Gaining a Competitive Edge
When they launched, GatherContent had no questions about what company to choose for subscription billing: Recurly. As an early stage startup, the company had limited resources, and they needed to focus on developing their core product, not on the complexities of recurring billing. Finding a solution that was easy to implement and use was a huge plus. According to Adam Hawes, Commercial Director, “no other option was as elegant or sophisticated, with the breadth of features we needed.” They also required a solution that was highly secure, stable, and scalable—and something that would give them a true competitive edge in a crowded marketplace.
As a young company, GatherContent needed to experiment. According to Hawes, "We’ve tried so many different plans since launch. You want to be able to create plans quickly, and launch quickly.” They wanted an easy way to optimize their pricing model and how it would scale, and Recurly gave them a simple, straightforward way to experiment with their plans and pricing.
The dunning feature lifts the burden of our customer support team from having to manually contact our customers.
Rewarding Customers With Coupons
One of the key Recurly features that GatherContent uses is the coupon function. Using coupons helps them track the success of their marketing initiatives and exclusive offers. Hawes says, "We’re very conscientious not to overuse coupons, so the key marketing initiatives are around critical dates, such as year-end and Black Friday. Other than that, coupons help us easily reward customers for going above and beyond with things like user testing. It’s also how we track our non-profit and education discounts. Our 2015 Black Friday coupon campaign was one of our most successful initiatives."
Recurly Works to Recover Revenue
Recurly’s Account Updater function is another important feature that GatherContent relies on to ensure they are recovering as much revenue as possible from credit card transaction declines. Recurly, Hawes says, makes it very easy to update customer credit card details and complete the transaction. And, the company can very quickly identify the reasons for why a card payment has failed, using Recurly's tools.
As well, GatherContent relies heavily on Recurly’s automatic dunning capabilities to ensure that they are effectively addressing any billing issues that may lead to customer churn. "The dunning feature lifts the burden of our customer support team from having to manually contact our customers. It’s great to have complete control on when a new attempt is made on the card and when ‘payment failed’ messages are sent," says Hawes.
Future Plans and Growth
In terms of GatherContent's future plans and challenges, Hawes is optimistic. "We need to become more sophisticated with creating a better suite of plans and bolt-ons for an everexpanding customer base that uses us for very different things. Recurly makes this very easy for us. And we’ve just started exploring creating all our manual invoices through Recurly. Having real-time financial reporting on all our billing will be a huge benefit."
They also plan to offer multi-currency support, which they anticipate will be a big project. This will be a long-term challenge as they continue to grow and enter more countries. Recurly currently supports the currency for 30 different countries and is always adding more. GatherContent may also start offering more sophisticated billing models, to better serve their customers, including a usage-based model which Recurly offers.
Recurly has allowed GatherContent's team to focus on the key problem we want to solve. It has helped us refine and optimize our pricing without that becoming a distraction to our team.
Streamlined and Efficient
GatherContent took a process for planning, organizing and producing web content that was complicated and convoluted and made it streamlined and efficient. With Recurly, their subscription management processes are streamlined and efficient too, enabling GatherContent's growth and success. "Recurly has allowed GatherContent's team to focus on the key problem we want to solve. It has helped us refine and optimize our pricing without that becoming a distraction to our team."
Download the Case Study: GatherContent
