As the curator of the INSIDER Guide to New Product Development, I’m constantly keeping an eye out for bite-size information that will help you develop and scale better subscription products.  Here’s my “Five on Friday” compilation for August 12th, featuring the five best trends, tips, quotes or stats from my reading this week.  

1.  Tips for Creating an Agile Product Roadmap

Worth a read in its entirety is Roman Pichler’s “10 Tips for Creating an Agile Product Roadmap.” No time?  Here’s the list:

• Focus on Goals and Benefits. Include the market problem you’re trying to solve, who the market is, the desired release date and, of course, what the product is supposed to do.

• Do the Necessary Prep Work. Validate your product strategy before moving ahead.

• Tell a Coherent Story. Bring the market to life for the developers and marketing communications team.

• Keep it Simple. The roadmap should not include your user stories and UI designs.

• Secure Strong Buy-In. Development and sales of course, but don’t overlook finance and customer service.

• Have the Courage to Say No. Yours is the voice of the market – be true to it.

• Know When to Show Dates. Inside the company? Yes. To customers or the media? No.

• Make your Roadmap Measurable. What’s the goal – customer retention, upsell or new sales? How will you measure your success?

• Determine Cost Top-Down. Reduce time spent on highly granular cost and man-hour estimates this way; hone the estimate as you learn more.

• Regularly Review and Adjust the Roadmap.  Change happens – be ready for it.

2.  Succeeding with the Multiple Calls to Action Landing Page

Creating compelling calls to action (CTAs) is a universal challenge.  But attempting to offer multiple options to subscribers on a single page or, even more complicated, trying to offer completely different audiences their own unique CTA on the same landing page can be a recipe for disaster.

In this post that’s worth a scan, Hubspot offers several inspirations for strong CTA landing pages. However, it was the multiple-offer pages, specifically, that caught my eye.  The examples also happen to be from two successful subscription businesses: Uber and Spotify. 

Uber takes on the challenge of multiple offers for multiple audiences and succeeds with terrific use of space and conscious thought to moving the viewer’s eye in the direction of most interest.  Spotify offers both completely free and (more prominently) a trial of their premium content-streaming service with clear options stacked for each of decision-making.

Both ideas are deceptively simple but offer subscription businesses good examples of how to address the knotty challenge of multiple CTA’s.

3. Gap between Social Media Marketing Opportunity and Action Persists

According to the same DMA post referenced above:

70% of companies are still not collecting data from social media channels, yet 47% of marketers say that social channels offer the greatest opportunities right now.

4. Does In-Store Marketing Make Sense for Subscription Businesses?  Maybe.

As difficult as it is to think about 2017 during the dog days of summer, the DMA’s “7 Trends that Should Shape Your 2017 Marketing Budget” is worth a quick scan for those of you already in the throes of planning for next year.  No time?  Here’s an idea you may want to consider:

Insight #1: Market to Customer – especially Millennials – In-Store

While location-based offers and beacon technology may not, initially, seem like a good fit for subscription businesses, some of you may have offerings that would be a good fit.  A well-placed “tired of shopping?” call-to-action for your monthly grocery or fashion delivery service might be very well received!

5. Learn from the Past, Assign Tasks to Have a Great Quarter

While the concepts in this entrepreneur.com post are foundational to planning, they are worth repeating as we start to plan for the last quarter of the year – or the first quarter of 2017!  Remember to:

Learn from the past.  What wins and losses did you have last quarter?  What tasks are slipping that shouldn’t be?  Name your mistakes to avoid them in the future.

Prioritize your goals. There are only so many hours in the day (as “learning from the past” probably illustrated); keep your eyes on the most important tasks.

Establish accountability. Know who’s doing what, and set mini-deliverables throughout the quarter.

Measure. Make sure everyone knows what success looks like.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Diane