Automation to Elevate your Subscription Model - PPA IPN Think Tank

Marketing is usually at the heart of subscription automation, since it involves engaging with the biggest audience and requires effective pipelining and onboarding. When done at scale this has to be automated for the best overall experience, Key marketing automations for The Stage include.

• Message Campaigns
• SEO
• Paywall & Metering
• Social Sharelines
• Analysis
• Marketing Automation
• Conversion Events
• In-depth Audience Insight

It's important to note that these are all journeys and that all of the automations should be regularly reviewed to ensure that they are doing the best and most optimal job for where your audience and service offering is.

Sales Automation is critical when selling subscriptions at scale, Ensuring that all the processes are handled as effectively and seamlessly as possible means that you minimise the friction on the sales funnel and convert the highest number of prospects.

The automation then ensures that the sales notifications and reports operate in a timely manner and hand off effectively to the fulfilment and onboarding automation processes.

• Sales Automation
• In-depth Audience Insight
• Ecommerce
• Account Sales
• Account Automation
• Pro Formas
• Order Management
• Deep Payment Gateway Integrations
• Subscription management
• Sales Targets Management & Dashboards

Affino handles all the onboarding processes, and most of the fulfilment for The Stage, and where it doesn't it provides fast realtime APIs so that users and their deliverables can be authenticated and identified through Affino's User and CRM APIs.

This ensures that The Stage's fulfilment is all realtime, automated and fully reliable.

• Registration
• Single Source contact record with full automation
• Seamless fulfilment workflow from purchase through to service delivery
• Service Automation
• Subscription Lists
• Online Access
• API Authentication for apps and affiliates
• Service Credits
• GDPR Compliance
• Cookie Policy Management
• Terms and Conditions

Up to 90% of subscription renewal decision making happens in the first thirty days of a new member or subscriber coming onboard. Affino has a host of automated processes to both assist with the onboarding process, and for rewarding loyalty.

Core to this is making every aspect of the subscription, personalisation, permission and insight as self service as possible for the customer, with the ability to send, and present, targeted notices to guide and encourage deeper engagement.

• Automated onboarding tracking
• Chained onboarding message campaigns
• Onboarding list for customer service team
• Customer loyalty scheme (option)
• Self Service
• My Account

For The Stage there are days when approaching 1,000 subscriptions are auto-renewing. This can only be done with highly effective retention and renewal automation which smoothes the renewal processes as far as possible, and handles the credit card recovery, grace periods, dunning and all related renewal tasks as seamlessly as possible.

Affino also providing as powerful insight as possible into the subscription renewal, retention and expiry levels.

• Automated subscription renewals
• Receipting and Invoicing
• Automated payment error handling
• Copes with Grace Periods for Direct Debits
• Dunning, recovery of subscriptions from expired or failed cards
• Renewal Notices (print)
• Subscription Renewal Campaign Automation
• Renewal Pro Forma Automation
• Suscription Expiry Report
• Stop Code Report

One of the areas that the Affino and The Stage teams worked the hardest at was to ensure that the finances and revenues are all perfectly accounted for throughout the system. This is an immensely complex task with all the varying subscription automations in place, and the disparate data sources which we had to contend with at the outset of the project.

• Self Service On Demand
• Extensive financial reporting
• Incoming Cash
• Earned Revenue
• Deferred Income and Liability reporting
• Deep drill-down on all orders and payments
• Order and Order Line Item reports
• Tax Reporting