In this week’s Five on Friday, Business2Community shares best practices for customer retention during the SaaS renewal process, App Annie reveals how dating apps are a billion dollar business, HubSpot offers ideas for reducing customer support friction, Folio explores how magazines are exploring paywalls as an ongoing revenue source, and Conde Nast Traveler discusses whether WiFi subscriptions are worth it – all in this week’s edition of Five on Friday.

Three Best Practices for Retaining SaaS Customers

We say this all the time – it is far cheaper to keep a customer than it is to acquire a new one, so our retention marketing and renewal processes need to be on point. In a recent article for Business2Community, Mia Jacobs offers five favorite best practices for SaaS renewals. Here are three.

• Know your customer – Use customer data to understand each customer and to find out their pain points. What features are they using, what features are they skipping and how often do they reach out to customer service?
• Personalize the message – This goes hand-in-hand with knowing your customer. When you reach out to your customer, help them solve problems or address needs. For example, if you see they haven’t even tried a specific feature of their SaaS product, offer to show them how it can solve problem X.
• Automate renewals and upsells – Don’t miss an opportunity to retain a customer or to get them to upgrade to a premium SaaS product. Create automated campaigns that will do the bulk of the work for you.

To read the other two best practices and more details on the first three, read “5 SaaS Renewal Process Best Practices for Customer Retention” by Mia Jacobs on Business2Community.com.

Dating Apps Are a Billion-Dollar Business

This Valentine’s Day, many couples celebrating their special day met on dating apps, reports Lexi Sydow for App Annie. In fact, last year, dating apps were partially responsible for more than one-third of all marriages. That seems crazy, but it’s true. And mobile is the way to go if you want to be on a dating app.

Here’s an idea of the impact dating apps have on romance. According to App Annie, since 2016, consumer spending has grown by 190 percent to $1.3 billion. Yes, that’s right – we said billion. The top five dating apps last year were:

1. Tinder
2. Bumble
3. Badoo
4. Match.com
5. Grindr

As Sydow points out, each dating app is different and has different features. Many utilize a freemium model where you can create a free profile and see what’s “on the market” before committing to making an in-app purchase or upgrading to a subscription account for access to additional features like messaging options.

What’s next for dating apps? App Annie says the next big thing will be branching beyond dating into pairing people for friendships, like Bumble BFF, and business relationships. Learn more about the future of dating apps on App Annie.

3 Ways to Reduce Customer Support Friction

Reducing friction with customers is important in keeping customers happy and, of course, retaining them to recover your customer acquisition costs and increase their lifetime value. In a recent post for HubSpot, Swetha Amaresan offered seven tips for reducing customer support friction. Here are three ideas to try now:

1. Provide various ways for customers to reach you. You’d think this would be a given in today’s digital age, but not all brands get it. Your subscription or membership company needs to have multiple channels for communicating with customers. Meet them where they are – if you have younger customers, Instagram and Snapchat are good options. For middle aged and older adults, Facebook and email are good options. Find out where your customers want to communicate with you and work those channels to resolve customer concerns.
2. Make it cancellations and purchases online easy. Have you ever tried to cancel a subscription and had to call to speak to a customer service rep? Wouldn’t have you rather click a box or send an email? Customers want you to make it easy for them to cancel their orders. While you may not want to lose the business, creating a seamless customer experience could mean the difference between getting a referral and having a customer bash you on social media.
3. Add value with free content. Help your subscribers or members get the most out of their subscriptions or memberships through onboarding. Do a drip email campaign, share relevant blog posts, or film short video snippets to show them how to use your products or services. This helps make their purchase “sticky,” and the stickier it is, the harder it will be for them to live without it.

Read Amaresan’s other tips on Hubspot.

Why Magazines Want Metered Paywalls

Conde Nast currently has three of its most popular magazines – The New Yorker, Wired and Vanity Fair – behind paywalls, and in January, the publisher announced they would put the rest of their magazines behind paywalls by the end of 2019.

In an interview with Folio magazine, Scott Rosenfield of Wired told Beth Braverman, “The subscription business is one of Wired’s most rapidly growing and important revenue streams. It has become a core part of our brand DNA over the last year.”

The key is finding the right balance which, for many publishers, involves a metered paywall. Magazines find a way to provide some digital content for free, but after a certain article count, readers must subscribe. Bloomberg, for example, has a 10-article limit. To read more than 10 articles in a month, readers are offered a promotional price to try to get them to the next level of commitment.

For their digital products, publishers can personalize bundles for readers based on their interests. This can attract and retain a different group of subscribers. Coupled with print subscriptions, print and digital advertising revenue and income from exclusive events and other perks, publishers can use metered paywalls to create recurring revenue streams to help them become more sustainable.

This seems to be a popular trend, so we expect to see more of this in 2019. Read more on the topic in Braverman’s article for Folio Magazine online.

Do You Really Need a Wi-Fi Subscription for Air Travel?

As technology and travel advance, it has become easier to access Wi-Fi when traveling by plane. You can check your work email, respond to messages, check your social media accounts and message with friends and family. By creating a need we didn’t know we had five years ago, various technology providers want your business and they are offering various packages to get you to subscribe to their service.

In “Are In-Flight Wi-Fi Subscriptions Worth It?” for Conde Nast Traveler, Paul Rubio explores some of the options available to travelers. Jet Blue, for example, offers free high-speed Wi-Fi to every customer. Southwest, however, charges $8 per device per day, but you can’t stream your favorite binge-watching service.

Delta has gotten more creative with its options. According to Conde Nast Traveler, Delta offers free messaging on Wi-Fi enabled flights, but for more extensive Wi-Fi usage, you have to buy a pass in various increments. Delta also offers a North America Monthly Pass for $49.95 and a North America Annual Pass for $599.99. Other carriers have other plans, available as stand-alone services and as subscriptions.

The bottom line is how much you travel and how plugged in you really need to be while traveling. Identify the costs of needing to be online while traveling and weigh it against the “cost” to you or your business if an email has to wait three hours for a response. If you are traveling a lot in a particular month, paying $50 for Wi-Fi is reasonable, but you’d have to travel A LOT for $600 to make sense. Read more of Rubio’s analysis on Conde Nast Traveler.