As the curator of the INSIDER Guide to New Product Development (NPD), 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 December 11th, featuring the five best trends, tips, quotes or stats from my reading this week.
1. Five Tips on Writing Great Customer Satisfaction Surveys
In a short-and-sweet roundup that’s part of a more comprehensive white paper on the topic of customer satisfaction surveys from the customer experience company Medallia:
“In order to drive ongoing improvement across your business, your customer satisfaction survey must be:
- Based on concrete business objectives. For your survey to spur meaningful change, your entire organization needs to be invested in the metrics it uses and the topics it investigates. Subscription Insider Notes: In other words, don’t ask customers to rate your speed of bug resolution if you aren’t measuring it internally.
- Actionable. If employees can’t act promptly on the information from your survey, they’re more likely to ignore it. Subscription Insider Notes: A good example here is not to ask customers whether having more content would be of interest, if it’s not cost effective or otherwise practical to offer it in the near future.
An extension of your company’s brand. When your survey feels like part of the regular customer experience, customers will be far more likely to complete it – and believe that you’ll do something with their feedback. Subscription Insider Notes: You can do this by integrating one-question surveys into an existing workflow such as a call/live chat with customer service.
- Relevant to the customer’s experience with your company. When customers encounter irrelevant survey questions, their answers will be less accurate and harder to understand. They might even lose interest and drop off entirely. Subscription Insider Notes: So – don’t ask a U.S. audience what countries you should expand into.
2. Don’t Start Selling Too Quickly
Email lookbooks are always good to glance through for inspiration; take a look at this one from Pardot. My favorite recommendation:
“If you are sending emails to prospects who are in the early stages of the buying cycle, keep your content light and educational. Focus on thought leadership articles and blog posts instead of promoting late-stage sales collateral like buyer’s guides, white papers, and recorded webinars.”
One of the biggest mistakes in the sphere of demand-generation is trying to “generate” demand at all. Instead, focus on showcasing your expertise, sharing small bits of information, and getting to know your prospect before making a 20%-subscription offer.
3. When Offering 50% Off Really Isn’t
I’ve been bumping into this unpleasant trend pointed out in the quote from a recent SurveyMonkey post. Purely as a potential subscriber, I will say that I don’t care for it.
“Ensure you convey to customers exactly what you mean. You don’t want your customer to think he’s getting 50% off when he’s actually getting 50% more product.”
In short? Don’t offer 25% off your subscription price if what you’re really offering is a 16 month subscription.
4. How to Succeed as a Writer from a Millennial’s Point of View
Millennials have a bad reputation for being unwilling to work hard and earn rewards. At first, the narrative of a Millennial author, Han-Gwon Lung, posting on entrepreneur.com was no different. However, he turned his career around and is both working hard and achieving success in the business of writing. His lessons are worth learning if you’re young and hungry, whether an individual contributor or running a subscription company:
- Learn how to sell. Smarts aren’t enough, and Lung recommends reading Daniel Pink to discover the selling mindset.
Spend one hour each day looking for new business. Create a short email template that you can customize with the specific pain point of your audience.
- Set your own hourly rates. My take for Subscription Insiders: Charge what your product is worth. Be objective and clear-eyed about pricing, but if you’re offering something truly unique for an audience that is willing to pay, charge an appropriate price.
- Reject bad clients. This is something we could all learn from Millennials. Older workers may see this as spoiled, but the confidence to dissolve a relationship with an abusive customer will give you time to replace that revenue, not to mention keep your peace of mind.
- Do something you love that also pays the bills. As Lung says:
“Do something you love and something that pays the bills. The two do cross paths. Still, it’s up to you to find the intersection. There’s no Google Maps for that.”
5. Native Ads Perform Even Better on Mobile
We know that native ads perform better than traditional display, but this is particularly true on mobile. Desktop native click-through rates (CTRs) average a respectable 0.15%, while native-mobile ads had CTRs over 1%, according to recent data from Polar Media Group and Celtra, as reported by Business Insider.
Have a great weekend, everyone.
Diane
Diane Pierson has deep experience in product management and marketing, having delivered results to companies including Dun & Bradstreet, LexisNexis, American Lawyer Media and Copyright Clearance Center. She has built products & services that have delivered over $100 million in revenue and knows what works, and what doesn’t, when executing product plans and strategies. She is also a contributor to Subscription Insider. (Read Diane’s full Bio)
