Earn.com Blog

Are you looking for a way to expand your existing customer base? Gaining subscribers on an ongoing basis is a smart move that can help you attract new customers and increase sales—all without having to add to your lineup of product or service offerings.

For product-oriented businesses, subscription sales work like the old “Wine of the Month Club” idea. Subscribers can pay by week or by month to receive regular shipments of your products. Timing can vary depending on what you sell.  For instance, a bakery might want to send shipments every week; a cosmetics company might send something every month.

Subscription programs work best when your product is something that purchasers use up, wear out, eat or drink, or otherwise needs replacement regularly. However, they can also work for more discretionary products; for instance, ShoeDazzle.com is a website that sends subscribers six pairs of shoes each month and subscribers decide which one they want to keep.

For service-oriented businesses, consider offering a subscription option to enhance your regular offerings. For instance, if you own a consulting business, after completing a major consulting project for a client, you could offer an annual subscription that entitles them to a one-hour phone consultation each month to ensure they stay on the right track with the recommendations you made.

Before adding subscription options to your business, assess how much you’ll need to invest and whether you want to start small, such as having your existing staff make local deliveries, or go big, such as shipping products nationwide via an e-commerce site.

Subscriptions are a great way to expand your reach to customers who aren’t near your physical location. Promote subscriptions as gifts, and you’ll profit from customers who don’t use your product or service but just want to buy it for someone else.

You can also set up subscriptions so that buyers pay the entire year’s subscription cost in advance, or so that a monthly fee is regularly charged to their credit card. You can even build in an automatic renewal so that the customer has to opt out of the subscription to stop paying. Determine which option best serves your cash-flow needs and which price structure is more likely to make the sale.

If you do it right, subscription sales can be your ticket to new income, new customers, and a bigger, better business.

David Gass
Founder, Business Credit Services, Inc.
Earn.com Expert Advisor

Tags: increase sales, marketing, marketing strategy, product business, sales, service business, subscription sales