Five on Friday: About Us Pages, Pricing & Prime Day

Featuring Marketing Profs, Vindicia, Adweek and Spotify

Five on Friday: About Us Pages

Source: Subscription Insider and Bigstock

In this week’s Five on Friday, Business2Community shares four different pricing models for SaaS, we offer advice on how to write an effective About Us page, Lifehack gives us 10 time-management tips to try, we learn more about Spotify’s new self-serve audio ad model from Adweek, and Vindicia tells us what Amazon Prime Day has taught us about subscriptions.

 

 

 

The 4 Most Common Pricing Models for SaaS 

 Pricing & Prime Day

Source: Bigstock

Pricing any subscription product is a delicate balance between providing a product or service a subscriber will value and covering the actual costs, including profit margin. In a recent article, Business2Community addresses this challenge. Part of the puzzle is evaluating different pricing models. Here are the four most common pricing models:

  1. Flat rate: A fixed rate paid monthly or annually, a simple, but not often-used pricing model.
  2. Pay as you go: A pricing tier based on usage that allows a subscriber to scale up or down, based on their usage. Examples: Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
  3. Flat rate + pay as you go: A combination of the first two pricing methods which provides for a ‘safety net.’
  4. Tiered: Business2Community defines this method as a combination of all of the above. This model appeals to a broader audience, but it is also more complex, involving a lot of different components including strategy, psychology and a knowledge of game theory.

Read more about these pricing methods and how and when a subscription company might choose each type of pricing in ‘SaaS Pricing – How to Stay Ahead of the Curve‘ on Business2Community. 

Write an Effective ‘About Us’ Page with These Tips

Five on Friday: About Us Pages

Source: Bigstock

A subscription company’s About Us page is more than an opportunity to include keyword rich text on your website. It is a chance to tell your company’s story to subscribers, potential subscribers and the media. Marketing Profs offers some useful tips to help you write an effective About Us page in this September 15 infographic, ‘What Makes a Great ‘About Us’ Page:

  • Content positioned ‘above the fold’ is more likely to be read, so put the most important information in this section.
  • Customers prefer to read positive benefits 72 percent of the time, says Marketing Profs.
  • Customers are more likely to use emotions rather than information to evaluate a brand, so use that to your advantage.
  • According to a Forbes survey, 7 out of 10 millennials are likely to watch a company video when shopping online, and 59 percent of senior execs prefer video to text when both are offered.
  • Include an image of the company founder to increase page conversion.
  • Use real photos rather than stock photos, and include customer testimonials.
  • Include a call-to-action toward the bottom of the page, as well as contact information.

For more tips on creating an effective About Us page, read the original article on Marketing Profs here

10 Time Management Tips from Lifehack 

 Pricing & Prime Day

Source: Bigstock

It sounds cliché, but it is true that it seems there are never enough hours in the day to get everything done. While we can’t add time to the clock, we can improve our productivity and efficiency by becoming good time managers. Lifehack can help with its ’20 Quick Tips for Better Time Management.’ We’ve chosen 10 of our favorites for today’s Five on Friday, but you can read all 20 here.

  1. Plan your day ahead of time. Whether you do this the afternoon or night before or first thing in the morning, plan your day.
  2. Set a limit for each task. To help yourself stay on task, set time limits for each item on your ‘to do’ list. Need to have a convo with your boss? 15 minutes. Schedule a meeting with your team? 30 minutes.
  3. Manage your appointments and daily schedule with an electronic calendar (e.g., Google, Calendly, Outlook, etc.)
  4. Know your deadlines. We all have deadlines to meet, and the first step to meeting them is knowing when they are – not just the drop dead date, but the date you should start each task. At Subscription Insider, we use Asana to set and track our deadlines, so the whole team knows what’s ahead and what’s due and when.
  5. Track your time. You can do this by putting a clock in front of you, so you don’t lose track of time or use a time tracking tool like Toggl.
  6. Set reminders. Make sure you are on time – or early – for meetings by setting a reminder 15 minutes before you need to leave for the meeting. You can also set alarms to remind you to make important calls or to limit the amount of time you spend on a task.
  7. Focus. Easier said than done, right? We help ourselves focus by eliminating distractions. For example, when writing, we shut down our social media accounts, close our email and put our phones on silent, so we can power through and concentrate on each assignment.
  8. Batch similar tasks together. Maximize your time by doing similar tasks in batches, like making phone calls or responding to emails.
  9. Delegate. This is difficult skill to learn, but if you have a valued team, learning to delegate can free you up to work on other tasks that require your unique set of knowledge and skills.
  10. Prioritize. You can’t do everything, so you have to focus on the most important tasks first. 

Spotify Launches Self-Serve Ad Platform, Spotify Ad Studio

Five on Friday: About Us Pages

Source: Bigstock

Spotify uses a freemium model, meaning it has free users who listen to an ad-supported version of their streaming music service, as well as subscribers who pay a monthly subscription fee to access the service ad-free. To help grow its ad business, Spotify is launching a self-serve ad platform to automate audio ads, reports Adweek. It is now testing the service for U.S. advertisers who want to get in front of Spotify’s roughly 90 million free users.

With the new self-serve ad platform, advertisers upload a script, choose background music and record a voiceover for the ad. Advertisers can also upload audio spots directly to Spotify Ad Studio and set target and budget parameters. The ads can be targeted by music, location, gender, age, activity and whether the ad will run on desktop or mobile. Adweek says the new model will generate more ad revenue for Spotify from small- and medium-sized advertisers.

Read more about Spotify’s new self-serve ad platform on Adweek here

Vindicia: 2 Takeaways from the Success of Amazon Prime Day

 Pricing & Prime Day

Source: Bigstock

In July, Amazon held its third annual Prime Day, attracting tens of millions of Prime shoppers, turning it into the biggest shopping day in Amazon history. If you haven’t shopped on Prime Day yet, it is an online shopping day exclusive to Amazon Prime members as a perk of membership. While Amazon didn’t realize membership numbers, it is likely that Prime Day attracted new subscribers just so they could take advantage of deals that rivaled Cyber Monday sales.

In a recent blog post, subscription revenue platform Vindicia highlighted two key takeaways from Prime Day:

  1. Exclusive subscription events can mean big bucks. In this case, members were motivated by limited-time offers. In this case, Prime Day lasted for 30 hours. The excitement generated by these offers translated into huge sales for Amazon and Amazon merchants.
  2. Exclusive subscription events attract new subscribers. Shoppers who don’t want to miss out on such exclusive events have to become subscribers or members to take advantage of special offers.

While most of us can’t even hope to achieve Amazon’s incredible success with Prime Day, we can create our own exclusive events and promotions to attract and retain subscribers and grow revenue. Read more about Amazon Prime Day on Vindicia’s blog here


Thank you for reading this week’s edition of Five on Friday. Be sure to let us know what other types of articles, stories and tips you’d like to see in future editions. You can reach me at [email protected]. Have a terrific weekend!

 

 

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