Key Affino Subscription and Membership Tools

The subscription and membership model is more important now than ever before. Our clients who have embraced this shift have very successfully established highly engaged communities and realised sustained customer growth, retention and loyalty.

This does not happen overnight - it takes a concerted effort to convert, onboard and continuously engage with those customers through tracking and monitoring user behaviour, and then providing a customised service that matches the audience’s needs.

Affino has a strong set of management tools which are key to evolving services from free through to multi-tiered membership offerings.

Here are some of the essential Affino elements which you can utilise to drive forward your subscription and membership service:

Contacts

Affino delivers full customer views through the CRM contacts management.

Start with Affino as the central database of your valued audience. Ensure this contact data is as current as possible. Much of the data refresh can be done by your community, either by being rewarded or forced to update their profiles to gain or retain access to your content.

Affino supports site registrations, eCommerce registrations, attendee and delegate capture, and the ability to convert form entries into CRM contacts, ensuring you gather the most up-to-date, clean data sets.

Affino has great contact and mailing list import tools too, or you can populate the contacts manually or via the CRM API.

From this point, you can enrich the audience data by capturing the contact’s interests, behaviours, permissions and preferences and newsletter sign-ups.

Accounts

Affino automatically gathers all the account related communications, sales, marketing and insight into one place.

When selling to accounts, it is crucial that you have in your database all your target accounts, and that you associate contacts with the relevant accounts. This can be done multiple ways as with contacts.

In addition, contacts can be automatically assigned to accounts when registering by setting up email domains on each account. Once they double confirm, they are automatically assigned to the appropriate account.

For larger organisations or where employees are geographically dispersed, this provides an easy way to manage and assign access for their employees.

Topics

Topics can fuel and inform the type and level of content needed to engage your audience. The best way to maximise your insight and ability to deliver value is to ensure your topic taxonomy is well formed and encompasses your content, marketing and sales topics into a single unified approach.

Conversion Events

Conversion Events form the basis for many automations within Affino. They identify, log and funnel activity and setting up the customer ladder and right conversion events are essential for improved user journeys, profiling and promotions.

Badges

Coupled with conversion events is the ability to assign badges, either for your sales, marketing or customer service teams to quickly see how active a contact is, or to display publicly against the user’s profile page.

This award system plays an important role in showcasing loyal customers and can also identify potential speakers and experts within your engaged community.

Contact Lists

Affino’s Contact Lists are essential for segmenting your audience. The organisations which use Affino most effectively to engage with and grow their audience tend to have hundreds, or thousands of lists. These lists can be as automated or manual as needed and feed into all manner of targeting, messaging and automation.

Promotions

There are a great many opportunities for developing your subscription and membership services, and Affino delivers on them in a seamless manner providing you with the opportunity to maximise your value add to your customers and community.

Set up any number of promotions for your subscriptions, create the classic 3 / 4 / 5 columns of products with one highlighted. The accompanying Promotions Report allows you to analyse the success of each campaign.

Subscription Automation

When you have lower price and higher volume subscriptions then Affino’s subscription automation is crucial. It can support you with fully automating the subscription marketing, sales, onboarding, fulfilment and renewal workflows.

Affino’s deep integration with Stripe and GoCardless means that subscriptions can be fully self service from taking the initial eCommerce purchase through to renewal or cancellation. Currently the full automation supports debit and credit cards, and direct debits. Soon Affino will also allow for Apple and Google Pay.

Pro Formas

For selling corporate subscriptions, Affino’s Pro Forma sales process, which delivers on account based sales, is seamlessly integrated with all the subscription automation.

Affino’s Pro Forma sales support a variety of sales types including subscription and membership sales, ad sales, event sales, digital goods, physical goods, and indeed ad hoc sales.

Event Credits

Accounts can be allocated credits to be used against specific events in specific quantities. Designated employees can then simply use these credits to sign up and allocated attendees to events. This essentially bypasses the buying process for individuals within an organisation who have a corporate membership.

Forums & Collaboration

Affino’s forum services let you create secure membership collaboration and communications spaces. These can add huge value for events, webinars and round tables by creating a dedicated place for continuing conversations.

Our clients also use forums for focussed, expert-lead discussions and collaborations providing invaluable and actionable industry insight.

A crucial element of these spaces is that they frequently foster new opportunities to add value to your community.

Directory

Affino has a host of directory service including self service directories, company and professional directories and product and edition based directories. A major value add for members is participation in, and potential lead generation from directories.

As Affino is a unified business platform, directory entries are automatically linked across all content types.

Accounts Report

The Accounts Report is a crucial tool to understanding the relative level of engagement of your customers, i.e. is an account over or under engaged compared to their current membership level?

The Account Report provides you with the ability to sort and assess the comparative engagement between accounts, and helps you to identify the patterns of engaged and growing accounts. Understanding what activities lead to deeper engagement is crucial for building ‘sticky’ membership services.

Analysis and Reporting

Subscriptions and memberships could not be successfully managed and grown without comprehensive reporting to gain real understanding of the member audience and organisations.

Affino’s single unified approach tracks users across all aspects of their engagement from message campaigns to reading and downloading content to interacting with other members of the community, allowing millions of data points to be crunched and analysed. Utilise the eCommerce, subscriptions, customer ladder and messaging reports and site analysis to gain a full perspective of your audience.

We have found that clients who utilise Affino’s vast conversion, onboarding and engagement tool set continue to thrive and are 5 times more effective at growing engagement with their audience than those who use alternative approaches.