Role of Subscription management for Subscription-based businesses

Gone are the days when pay-per-product strategies were incessantly used for products and services. Merchants, vendors, and business owners are rapidly marching towards subscription and membership-based businesses. Furthermore, the progression in fintech technologies advances the online billing & payment processes easier and faster.

Businesses with a membership business model also tend to implement more and more technology to ensure maximum streaming of revenue. Memberships management businesses can take advantage of subscription management software. It provides them with a complete suite of applications to manage their members, memberships, members billing, and payment processing in one place.

This article helps you understand why and how subscription management software can help membership businesses to grow and manage their customer base. Also, it will help businesses understand the other benefits of using a subscription management system.

Before starting an in-depth discussion, it is important to understand the dynamic details of subscription management platforms dealing with membership billing and payment processing.

How does Membership businesses differ from Subscription Business?

Oftentimes, the terms membership and subscription are overlapped. These are two different terms but interrelated to each other. Subscription is a financial concept and works on the principles of recurring billing that are charged at set time intervals. Membership is also a type of recurring billing business that deals with managing the members with recurring services, but it is more focused on customer relationships with a business. Subscription offers access to products or services regularly whereas, with membership plans, customers are facilitated with several additional features and solutions that are not given outside membership.

What does Membership entail?

Membership is a concept of fostering merchant and customer relationships with shared interests. Memberships form an integral part of businesses as they get into a two-way relationship.

Businesses with Membership Business Models

As the dynamics of businesses are changing, merchants and customers are adopting more inclusive features for their customers. Almost, every business provides memberships, however, exceptions are still there. To list down a few, here is the list of businesses that provide memberships to their customers:

Fitness and Health—Gyms, Yoga Centers, fitness management services, diet management services, etc.
Beauty and Self-care—beauty salons, hair salons, self-care services, etc.
Non-Profit Organizations (NGOs)
Clubs & Associations—Restaurants, Hotels, Motels, Resorts, Health clubs, kids clubs, professional Club, etc.
Membership Websites—Gated-content websites

How does subscription management software helps manage memberships?

It might come to your mind that subscription management software might be only delimited to ‘subscription businesses’. But, to change the way of looking at it, the software does not limit itself to subscriptions as it deals with membership businesses, services businesses, and SaaS.

As it has already been deemed as a one-stop solution for membership businesses, one must look into the reasons that make it optimal. To get more understanding of the software with special reference to membership business, let’s explore the ways through which you can manage your business and memberships seamlessly.

Membership Billing & Payment Processing

Subscription management software is the best tool to manage recurring billing, process payments, manage customer lifecycle, etc. Considering the membership management business model, subscription management software helps these businesses to automate the membership billing cycle, collect payments from across the regions using multiple payment methods and in multi-currencies, keep the track of their members’ lifecycle, and more.

Memberships Management

Different membership businesses have different membership requirements. Gyms memberships are different from associations memberships, diverse membership clubs require diverse memberships features in a tool, and NGOs may have different requirements.

Not a single tool can help you with all. The best solution is to integrate it with one system and turn it into one platform where everything can be managed. Subscription management platforms like SubscriptionFlow helps membership businesses to integrate membership management software with their billing and payments suite and gain insights into the membership management software in one place.

Customized Membership Plans

Customization drives customers and merchants towards using products and services of business more than any other product. The reason that it acts as a ‘force of attraction’ is it enables them to keep their preferences above all. With subscription management software, you can create customized membership packages.

When you give your members customized packages, the relation of the business’s values is built that fosters a smooth and friendly seller and buyer relationship. There are different kinds of membership plans that you can customize for them.

Go Cashless

It was a past practice when people used to carry bucks in their pockets. With the advent of technology and fast payment solutions, subscription handling software facilitates merchants and business owners with integrated payment gateways and payment methods. Through the management platform, your customers will be able to experience the non-stop perks of membership with seamless automated payment processes.

By entering relevant payment details, all the payments will be charged on a recurring basis i.e., as soon as their membership renewal will be due. Thus, enabling merchants and customers to go cashless and get their payments all managed with subscription handling software.

Automated Invoicing

Without any worries, subscription management software with its futuristic features and solutions generates automated invoices. This is to lessen the manual work, backlog of work, and manual filing of sheets. To level up your business, it is highly significant that you use automated systems.

When a member is charged with their specific pricing plan, an automated invoice is sent to them. You can select various invoice templates, add customization to invoices, and localization to invoices without any other options. Inclusive of all the features, a subscription management platform will level up your invoicing and billing processes effortlessly.

Gain Membership Insights with Analytics and Reporting

The most important feature that everyone looks toward is understanding customer behavior, drawing future plans and strategies along with managing the credit charges and their usage. With our dashboard that gives a global view of sales, refunds, reversals, and chargebacks you will be always informed of credit charges and their usage for all the members that have signed up for membership. You can also look at the MMR and ARR along with the given analytics for a better insight

Powered by Automation

It would not be wrong to say that automation is leading all the technological processes – an utterly true statement. Software for subscription management that is powered by automation increases workflow. Automation takes the burden off of the shoulders of the team as automated billing, filling, and relevant processes are carried out without the need for manual input.

It is always preferred to manage databases, customers’ information, and other relevant processes through automation rather than going for m annual handling. Why? To save yourself from any error that gives impetus to damaging the brand image, brand reputation, and customer-seller relationship.

In addition to the above-mentioned factors, software that operates on automation, and an intelligent revenue system is beneficial for companies, organizations, businesses, and their respective owners to take their business to the heights of scalability in a short period due to their robust services fully based on modern systems configured systematically.

Customer Data in One Place

No one wants to see themselves in hot waters especially when it comes to customers, revenue, and rapport of business. To keep you at par with difficulties and problems, subscription management software accumulated your data, manage your data, and places your data in one place. But, how does it benefit you? It benefits you in a number of ways looking through the lends of business.

Firstly, for good customer service, you must have a robust and agile system to facilitate the queries of your customers at any given time. Not getting able to access the data when needed can damage the image of your brand and not only this but it can also damage the brand voice and brand values – never welcomed.

The subscription management platform helps you access data on cloud-based storage where you can access your customer data at any point in time. it also makes you access data remotely and saves you from a lot of unprecedented risks such as data loss, data mishandling, data unavailability, and other pertaining issues.

Third-Party Integrations

Subscription management software provides seamless integrations of tools, software, and applications. With this feature and solution, you do not need to move from one tab to another, and you will find all your member’s data under one umbrella. Businesses can integrate other third-party applications like Quickbooks, Xero, MailChimp, etc.