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Seven new resources covering subscription metrics, acquisition, revenue performance and payments.
This week’s additions are about understanding the numbers in a subscription business, and what is happening underneath them. They move from the basic metrics through acquisition, subscriber behavior, revenue performance and payments. Here’s what’s new.
START WITH THE SUBSCRIPTION METRICS THAT MATTER
CAC. LTV. Retention. Churn. They are some of the most commonly used metrics in a subscription business, and some of the easiest to oversimplify.
We added three resources to our Subscription Metrics Basics collection:
This guide explains how CAC is calculated, what should be included and why the number needs context before you use it to judge acquisition performance.
This guide explains the assumptions behind LTV and how retention, revenue and margin can materially change what the number appears to tell you.
Retention and churn describe two sides of the subscriber relationship, but a single rate rarely tells the whole story. This resource also separates voluntary and involuntary churn because “a subscriber left” can describe very different problems that call for different responses.
These guides are useful for people learning subscription economics, onboarding into a subscription role or aligning teams on what the numbers mean. They also work as quick refreshers when a familiar metric starts moving.
FOLLOW HOW SUBSCRIBERS ENTER THE BUSINESS
Not every subscriber comes in through the same door. They may buy directly from you, through an app store, a partner, a marketplace, a sales team or another channel. That path can affect economics, customer data, billing relationships, control of the subscriber experience and what happens later in the lifecycle.
We added two resources to help teams look more closely at acquisition.
This guide explains the different ways a subscriber can enter the business and what changes depending on the route. It helps teams look beyond the point of sale at who owns the relationship, who controls the data and billing, what the economics look like and what that purchase path may mean later.
The planner moves to the decision before launch. It helps teams work through the audience, offer, channel, economics, measurement and operating requirements of an acquisition campaign before money starts going out the door.
Together, the two resources connect how subscribers buy with how you decide where and how to acquire them.
LOOK UPSTREAM BEFORE REVENUE MOVES
Revenue is one of the numbers leadership watches most closely. The challenge is that by the time the headline revenue number changes, something else in the business may already have been moving for a while.
This resource looks at changes that can happen earlier across acquisition, conversion, retention, payments, subscriber behavior, pricing and other parts of the business.
Instead of stopping at What happened to revenue?, it helps teams work backward and ask a more useful question: What changed earlier that caused revenue to move?
That can be particularly helpful when a forecast begins shifting, revenue comes in differently than expected or leadership wants to understand whether an operating change deserves attention before its full financial effect appears.
FOLLOW THE MONEY INTO THE PAYMENT STACK
Understanding subscription revenue also means understanding what happens when it is time to collect it. This week we added another resource to the Payment Operator Brief collection:
The brief looks at Worldpay from the perspective of a subscription business, including recurring payments, payment performance, credentials, recovery, international payments, fraud, reporting and settlement.
It joins the Payment Operator Briefs already available for PayPal, Stripe, Mastercard, Visa and American Express.
These briefs are maintained over time, so the Worldpay brief you open today may include developments that occurred after this August 21 update.
There is a connection across all of this week’s additions.
The numbers are more useful when you can see what is happening underneath them: how subscribers came in, what they cost to acquire, whether they stay, whether payments succeed and what may be changing before revenue moves.
That is the kind of connection we are building into the Member Center.
My goal is to give you somewhere useful to turn when a number changes, a question comes up or you need to understand what may be driving the result.
As always, if there is something you need and cannot find it, tell me.
Kathy
Kathy Greenler Sexton
CEO & Publisher
Subscription Insider®
