If you have a business, you’re selling something. And if you’re selling something, you need a way for customers to purchase it.
That’s business 101.
And in the case of a subscription business, you need a way for potential new customers to sign up and pay for your product or service.
You can have them contact your sales or support team to get started the old-school way. But that may not be the most customer-friendly way to go about it, and it certainly isn’t the most efficient use of your employees’ time.
You can build your own registration or payment page—that’s always an option. But like with anything else, there’s a cost and a timeline associated.
You’ll need to:
- develop a clean and effective eCommerce experience that guides your customers on their purchase journeys,
- capture all their relevant account and payment details, and
- synch all that data into your billing operations to close that loop from making the sale to collecting the cash and accurately recognizing your revenue.
Oof.
But of course, time and resources are of the essence for rapidly growing subscription businesses. The sooner you can get things up and running, the more quickly you can grow your customer base and your monthly recurring revenue.
And what about when those customers start using your product and need to make changes to their subscriptions—plan upgrades, add-ons, or new account details?
Having a self-service portal enables customers to self-manage their subscription lifecycles without always relying on your support team.
But that too requires infrastructure and regular development…
Integrating hosted pages right into your subscription billing operations
At Stax Bill we’ve been in the subscription billing game for over a decade, and we’ve seen how having a suite of hosted pages built right into our recurring billing solution helps growing businesses get to market more quickly and with greater success.
So even if you decide to master-craft your own registration and self-service pages in the future, not having to rush the process means fewer obstacles to growth and scale.
Here are three huge ways your business benefits from integrating with a subscription billing solution that offers hosted registration pages and self-service portals.
1. Make it quick and easy for your customers to get started
When a prospective customer is ready to make a purchase, you need to make sure there are as few obstacles as possible standing in their way. You also need to make it easy for them to customize their purchase and get exactly what they want—and expect—from your business.
A cleanly presented registration page enables prospects to:
- clearly review their plan and purchase options to select the right offering for them,
- customize their plan selection to suit their unique needs, and
- add on additional items to build out their purchase—and increase your business’s revenue potential.
This process should also collect all your soon-to-be customer’s relevant contact and billing details so that your billing software can build out the account and prepare for regular automated invoicing and collections. This streamlines the entire subscription creation process, ensuring accurate data capture and eliminating a lot of manual work for your billing or support teams.
2. Support customer growth through the entire process
We briefly touched on the benefits of enabling add-ons and upsells during the registration process. The power of suggestion goes a long way, after all. And recommending popular additional products and features or even providing the opportunity to build onto a plan selection in real-time can quickly and easily add to a customer’s purchase total.
But what about after your customer makes their purchase and starts using your product?
There’s that old truth that selling to a current customer is a lot more cost-effective than acquiring a new one. In fact, the cost of acquiring a new customer has increased about 60% in the past six years. And it’s suggested that up to 30% of your total revenue should be expansion revenue from your current customer base.
So what’s your business’s process of farming its current customer base?
- Perhaps your sales or customer success team has a regular cadence of reaching out and attempting to upsell and cross-sell to customers, or
- maybe your teams just wait until renewal time and attempt to upgrade customers then.
By leveraging customer self-service portals, your business can empower customers to make:
- subscription changes
- additional purchases
- add-ons, and
- upgrades all on their own and at any time.
This means they can have the features and functionality they need precisely when they need them without having to rely on the assistance of your support team. And your support team obviously saves time, too, by not having to make these updates manually.
Additional tip: You can even pre-schedule automated emails or SMS messages to customers recommending new features and upgrades when they become available. Include the link to their self-service portal, and you can start automating some serious expansion revenue for your business.
3. Offer a better end-to-end user experience from day one
A clean and transparent registration experience with clear navigation steps helps customers move seamlessly through the purchase process. That’s a benefit to your business for sure, but it’s also pretty much an expectation from customers at this point.
Not providing this level of user experience makes your business seem outdated—perhaps even untrustworthy.
Leveraging hosted pages through your subscription billing software helps you optimize your end-to-end user experience even further. You can:
- Customize your hosted pages with your business’s branding. This helps ensure a seamless experience where customers feel like they’re on your site the entire time, whether they’re making a purchase or managing their subscriptions.
- Tailor your registration pages to specific geographic regions and currencies. This is meaningful because up to 50% of customers will abandon a purchase if they’re forced to pay in a foreign currency.
- Offer customers an order summary that follows them through their purchase journey and updates in real-time as they add, adjust, or remove products and input coupon codes.
And once they become a customer and they start managing their account through their self-service portal, you can provide them with clear insights into things like their:
- current subscriptions,
- invoice history, and
- account credits.
You can also empower them to take meaningful actions, such as:
- make payments
- edit their contact and billing information, and
- adjust their subscriptions in real-time, whether that’s adding more users, adding additional features, or migrating to a bigger plan.
Again, this gives your customers what they need when they need it without delay, and it makes it simple for them to grow their account with your business all on their own.
Hosted pages enhance the customer experience and optimize your subscription business’s potential
When your subscription billing software comes with a suite of hosted pages, it offers an easy way to transform your business operations and keep your growth moving rapidly in the right direction without any extra effort on your part.
Developing your own customer registration and self-service pages can enable you to dive into the details of how you want to mold your customer’s purchase journey and billing experience with your business. But taking the time to build all of this out can also slow you down.
Stay agile, stay focused, and ensure your billing solution includes everything your business needs to offer a great customer experience and quick go-to-market potential straight out of the gate.
