Monday, April 16th, 2012 at 9:33 am
We’ve often talked in past posts about the importance of customer retention and the impact on customer lifetime value. A lot of the dialog centered around the retention uplift that CashBox provides. Today’s post highlights a few examples of our subscription billing clients and the *actual* number of subscribers saved from their time of going live with us through the end of last month.
Example 1. A video publishing service with both monthly and annual plans across different product lines. Nearly 8,500 subscribers retained.
Example 2. A kids’ based virtual world. Over 65,000 subscribers retained via CashBox.
Example 3. A sports franchise with a distinct season – February through October – which can be immediately gleaned from the graphic below. In ten months we’ve saved 6,500 subscribers.
Example 4. An online dating company that bills in multiple currencies around the world. Over 44,000 saved subscribers.
That’s a little under 125,000 saved subscribers for just four clients. The value of those subscribers? Millions in annual revenue once you take into account the compound effect of those subscribers over time. The Digital Economy is alive and well, but it takes a clear focus on subscriber retention to fully benefit from it.
Tuesday, April 10th, 2012 at 8:01 am
Our singular focus at Vindicia is to maximize customer acquisition and retention on behalf of our clients. We also know that providing deep support for the most common digital business models is a critical foundational element. We’ve had extensive client engagement around subscriptions, microtransactions, one-time transactions, freemium and hybrids, and our focus in building marketing and selling automation solutions is to help create extremely long-term customer lives, independent of business model.
Today’s announcement that highlights our expanded usage-based billing support fits squarely into this theme. We now provide capabilities that cut across various usage based scenarios.
- License-based pricing: Pricing for many CRM products fit this mold. Businesses charge per seat pricing and the aggregate price changes based on the number of users licensed by the client.
- Variable-usage pricing: Vindicia uses this pricing model, whereby we charge a percentage of successful revenue transacted on our clients’ behalf. You can have different rates by tier.
- Highest-tier pricing: Pricing is simply determined by how much you use and which “band” that usage falls into for that period of time.
- Flat fee pricing: Pretty self-explanatory.
There are many combinations and permutations of these and other models that fit the “usage/rating” sector. Most importantly, all these models benefit from the ancillary CashBox services including our broad payment method support, native sales tax engine, high reliability and scalability, and the aforementioned focus on acquisition and retention.
There are multiple examples of business model success in the Digital Economy. We want to support you across all of them.
Thursday, April 5th, 2012 at 1:20 pm
While preparing a blog post for an upcoming product launch next week, it struck me that our clients truly span a range of business models. I investigated the specifics of our five largest clients:
- Two of them have freemium models, where the premium component is based on subscriptions. While both are global companies and growing rapidly, one of them prices exclusively in USD, while the other prices in six different currencies.
- Two of them are traditional subscription services, with either a 7 or 14-day free trial, and both clients have multiple subscription offerings targeted at different segments of the market.
- One of them relies almost exclusively on one-time transactions, primarily because it has an app-store model.
The common thread is that all five emphasize best practices around making their services accessible, convenient and compelling, which at the end of the day is what distinguishes the winners in the Digital Economy.
Wednesday, April 4th, 2012 at 11:29 am
Today our client Next Issue Media launched its digital newsstand. Their storefront provides an interesting view into hybrid business models as a way to pique interest among potential subscribers. Next Issue offers a couple of different “unlimited” subscription plans which provide access to a bundle of different magazines. In addition, for those still interested in just one particular magazine you can purchase titles a la carte.
What I personally like about their subscription strategy is their focus on making the consumption extremely convenient. I may spend a few days reading the latest issue of Fortune and only then switch my attention to Sports Illustrated. The idea of having all the content I care about at my fingertips and within a single app is far different than what currently exists, and the analogy a number of journalists have made to this being the “Netflix of Magazines” is not a bad one. The bundled strategy also gives them the flexibility to experiment with pricing to better understand the elasticity of demand for their digital service. The publishers that back Next Issue also get data that helps them understand the relevance of specific content in digital format, something that would be much harder to obtain via their print versions.
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012 at 8:57 am
There are many components to a customer acquisition strategy. For digital businesses, especially those that have a worldwide reach, the choice of payment methods they offer to customers significantly influences which demographics they can reach. That’s why we are excited to offer mobile carrier billing on the CashBox platform via an integration through and partnership with BOKU. The growth of mobile phone use, coupled with falling rates, makes mobile carrier billing a compelling offering for customers who either want the convenience of paying through their mobile carrier or don’t have a bank account/credit card to use.
We have an extremely broad array of payment methods that digital businesses can now offer: credit and debit cards, PayPal, stored value cards, regional payment methods like Boleto Bancario in Brazil and European Direct Debit, ACH, and now mobile carrier billing. Independent of what payment methods you offer, CashBox will still support you with industry leading scale and reliability, and continue to offer a broad spectrum of business model support: subscriptions, usage, microtransactions and hybrid models.
There is a lot more in the works on the product front. Stay tuned.
 | Tags: billing, BOKU, carrier, carrier billing, mobile, mobile carrier, payment methods, reliability, scale
Posted by Sanjay Sarathy in Industry News, Marketing, Payments 101.201.301, Vindicia Press Release | No Comments » |
