How to Accelerate Your Subscription Growth – Insight and Advice from Zuora

How would you like to know the secrets of the fastest growing subscription companies? Subscriptions are exploding for everything from information, software, to monthly boxes. This growth has attracted new resources for analytics, software, and marketing to learn what works and how to grow the largest subscription companies today. These tools can give you more visibility, control and monthly recurring revenue for your subscription program. This interview reveals what the largest players in the subscription economy do to attract new customers, understand their subscribers to reduce churn, and grow their monthly recurring revenue.

In This Program You'll Discover:• Why subscription businesses are growing nine times faster than t the S&P; 500 companies.

• Why subscription programs are growing and what you can do to cash in.

• Where 50 percent of the revenue growth comes from within a subscription business.

• The various ways to charge for a subscription program.

• What the advanced analytics reveal about the future of the subscription economy.

This program features our special guest: Matt Darrow

Matt Darrow is the VP and GM of Product of Zuora. He’s a University of Berkley graduate who has been with Zuora for more than five years. Zuora is one of the top subscription billing platforms, serving clients like Zendesk, Docusign, HBO, Ford, Time, Inc., Zoom, Box, Dell and hundreds of others.

1. What is ZuoraFor starters, Zuora offers products, resources, and cloud technologies to help subscription businesses attract and retain members. Zuora has sophisticated monthly billing systems that increase revenue with better pricing models and international acceptance rates. In Matt’s reply to this question, he states that “companies are using Zuora instead of traditional ERP systems, like an SAP or an Oracle, to drive their business model innovation, to launch new pricing and packaging models, to automate their complex billing and payments, and ultimately get the subscriber analytics they need to improve their business and win in this market. And, it's a really big market. Analysts have estimated the size to be about $100 billion by 2020.”

2. What is Fueling the Growth in the Subscription Economy?“The traditional media companies and print providers have been doing subscriptions for 100+ years. A lot of the new interest in the market that we see is all the ‘software as a service’ or technology vendors, or even traditional hardware manufacturing companies that are connecting their devices to the Cloud and actually providing over the top services and access to any of their physical devices,” replied Matt. “So, I think that the key reason for the growth and why subscription companies are growing nine times faster than the S&P500; is that they're not only focused on delivering outcomes, but they're delivering services that continuously enhance their value over time.” Simply put, customers today “want to own an outcome instead of paying for a physical product and service.” The growth not only comes from the subscription element, but also from the focus on each member’s experience. It’s about transformation rather than transactions.

Zuora publishes a Subscription Economy Index report providing a wealth of information about this growing industry. In this report, it is stated that at least half of the subscription growth comes from existing subscribers. This led to my next question.

3. What Advice Can You Offer About Member Retention?Subscriber retention is necessary for a subscription business to remain successful. “When you're running a subscription-based business model, churn really can cause the biggest challenge to that model. If you're not managing churn, and you're not managing your customer retention growth, you'll hit a wall very, very quickly.