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 April 29th, featuring the five best trends, tips, quotes or stats from my reading this week.  

1. FTC Native-Ad Guidelines: What You Need to Know

 It’s worth a read to review this cmo.com post on what’s new in Federal Trade Commission regulations surrounding native advertising (advertising that follows the form and style of your regular content).  No time?  Here’s a brief summary:

• Consumers should not be misled about the purpose of the initial contact with the content–a practice that the FTC refers to as a “deceptive door opener.”
• The FTC has advised that disclosures must be clearly visible when native content is shared (e.g., retweeted) across platforms.
• CMO.com expects the FTC to continue to enforce the its native guidelines going forward, consistent with its allegations in the Lord & Taylor action.

Learn more about FTC guidelines in this 12-page report, exclusively for Subscription Insider subscribers.

2.  Understand What Growth Stage Your Subscription Business is Experiencing Now

While Amy Konary’s “The 5 Maturity Stages of a Subscription Business” could be more insightful, the stages outlined are an excellent way to name where you are in the growth process to better understand why you’re facing the challenges you have. The phases are: Ad Hoc, Opportunistic, Repeatable, Managed and Optimized.  Where are you today?

3. Getting Subscriptions Right

Following is a great piece of advice from the social media site Buffer, found in a recent kissmetrics.com blog post:

“The one, single most important thing we’ve learned at Buffer about subscriptions is pricing. We learned that pricing is not something that stays fixed, but something that you can change over time. So far, we head these different pricing models:

• From: Free/$5/$20
• To: Free / $10 / $30
• To: Free / $10 / $99
• To: Free / $10 (now)

A lot of people get very anxious when they first think about pricing because they feel they need to get it “right.” I think you can change your pricing all the time to see what works best. The only thing is always be good to existing customers:

If you go from higher to lower, give existing customers the lower price.

If you go from lower to higher, keep your existing customers on the lower price.”

-Leo Widrich, Co-Founder of Buffer

4. Commandment #1 from Pragmatic Marketing

Pragmatic Marketing is a great site for product managers of any experience level, and I recommend signing up for their online magazine.  What are the basics?  Let’s start with the first of PM’s ten “commandments:”

“#1: Have an up-to-date positioning document and buyer persona for your product. How often do you start developing product or marketing materials without fully knowing who [the target buyers] are? It happens more than it should when we are going too fast, but without this fundamental understanding you run the risk of losing control of your message.” Pragmatic Marketing

5. Last Chance for our May 4 “Subscription Payment Accelerator” Workshop in NYC!

Click here to get one of the few remaining seats at this timely topic. Learn from Education Week, payments expert Paul Larsen, payment services provider Vindicia and more.  This is a hands-on session with ample opportunity for expert Q&A, group discussion and networking.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Diane