Easy Magazine Subscription Renewals for Faster Payments

For magazine publishers, subscription renewal isn’t just a revenue source…it’s how they keep the stories going month after month. To keep readership active and thriving, publication companies need to work on their renewals to make them as frictionless as possible.

If subscription renewals aren’t maintained as well as they should be, multiple hiccups find their way into the process, making you lose subscribers. Forgotten payments, payment failures, duplicate invoices, rigid cycles, etc. are some of the obstacles that ruin the reader experience.

Effective renewal management is the number one solution for keeping subscribers happy, and coming back for more. Companies can set this solution in motion by abandoning manual practices and legacy systems, and embracing innovation with modern subscription management software.

When Renewal Gets Hard, Churn Gets Easy

It is important for magazine subscription renewals to feel smooth. Because they are what ultimately lead to either customer retention or churn. Since legacy systems aren’t built to handle flexible workflows, or automation, relying on them is a mistake. Companies employing outdated practices that need manual fixes cannot really grow, as their operational setup isn’t designed to scale.

That’s why successful magazine businesses opt for modern, market-ready platforms like SubscriptionFlow that eliminate their renewal hiccups. When renewal flows are seamless, they contribute to growth in these three ways:

1. Strengthen retention

Gone are the days when subscriber acquisition was thought to be the best way forward for growth. Business perspective has long shifted, and put the spotlight on retention as the primary growth driver instead. That’s because it is better to keep your existing customers as your central focus, and strive to make subscription more seamless for them.

It’s better than allocating a major chunk of your resources to acquire new subscribers, when the existing ones can still easily leave, causing you to double your acquisition efforts. If magazine readers don’t stay retained, then companies can get stuck in an endless loop getting in more customers, and losing them shortly after.

Therefore, companies need efficient renewal processes to actually keep their readers satisfied, and combat this early churn.

2. Make revenue stable and foreseeable

Recurring revenue growth is the ultimate reward companies get from smooth-working renewal cycles. If renewals are inconsistent, revenue can also be wildly unpredictable. When the majority of their subscribers start renewing without hassle, that’s when the company can start predicting its monthly revenue, and enjoying sustainable operations.

3. Unlock better audience insights

Once a customer gets into a paying relationship with you, it gives you an excellent opportunity to understand them better. The longer your subscribers stay with you, the more actionable data they provide you with. For instance, you get to know about their preferences, the kind of magazine genres they lean more toward, which plans they buy the most, etc.

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These insights become the foundation of a strong renewal strategy that caters to more preferences, and facilitates deeper engagement

Spot Inefficiencies in Your Magazine Renewals

Below is a list of inefficiencies that can weigh your renewal processes down. If you spot any of these in your magazine subscription cycles, you need to get rid of them fast.

Missed and failed payments

Failed payments contribute a whopping 48% to churn. And this churn is largely involuntary. When payments fail, customers often drop out of a service without even knowing about it. That’s why magazine companies need to address this silent retention killer.

And most commonly, their outdated systems are to blame. When manual practices come in the place of automation, they scatter workflows, causing employees to overlook some billing cycles. That causes missed payments, and they carry the same impact as failed payments if they obstruct renewal.

Conversely, if customers with missing payments are allowed into the newer cycles, then the company loses revenue.

Lack of personalization

When all customers are given the same offers, sent the same email messages and offered the same rigid payment options, they just generalize their experience. Not personalize it. Generalized communication reduces its impact, and doesn’t make the customer feel valuable or heard.

If customers choose to churn, that’s due to dozens of different reasons. If you try to persuade each customer with the same retention offer you use for all, you might not succeed in your attempt. Different churn reasons demand tailored retention offers that actually address the customer’s concern, and don’t just pop up for the sake of it.

Complex billing cycles that are time-consuming

Magazine publications can establish billing cycles around their magazine release schedules. For instance, if they release issues monthly, then they may offer monthly subscription. The same publication company can have various billing cycles to deal with simultaneously.

For instance, it may have monthly, every-two months, and quarterly cycles running at the same time. The management of these cycles becomes unnecessarily time-consuming when it is not automated. From manual billing date tracking, to collecting payments, to fulfilling magazine orders, to keeping all processes harmonious…it costs you a lot more time than it should.

Multi-Channel Complexity

Magazine companies often deal with virtual and physical copies both. And even with bundles that contain both virtual and physical magazine access. These magazine types have different fulfillment requirements, creating confusion in management. Ensuring fast renewals across the virtual and physical magazine channels can hence be tricky without automation.

Fixing Renewal Friction with SubscriptionFlow

SubscriptionFlow is your trusted partner when it comes to streamlining magazine subscription renewals. It equips your recurring billing cycles with automation, accelerating payments, and enhancing customer experience. After all, customers love instant payment confirmation and access. And while access isn’t instant for physical subscriptions, at least it can be given timely.

Plus, regardless of their subscription plan, your customers can access their self-service portals as soon as they subscribe. So their engagement is established early on, even if they haven’t received their packages yet.

These are some ways how SubscriptionFlow’s magazine subscription management capabilities make your renewals frictionless:

Automatic billing

Automating billing solves half your problems. When billing is automatic, it means that your billing system has your customers’ payment info saved, and it uses that to charge them on a scheduled basis. SubscriptionFlow doesn’t only bill, but also creates professional invoices sent to customers as payment receipts.

When the software confirms a customer’s payment, it triggers their plan renewal instantly. So all your customers are renewed in real-time, and enjoy interrupted magazine deliveries.

Failed payment retries

SubscriptionFlow helps you prevent major churn that is caused by failed payments. It combats failures by retrying these payments according to a smart schedule powered by machine-learning. Alternatively, magazine companies can customize their retry schedule too, according to what works the best for them.

Easy upgrades/downgrades

Customers don’t have to keep on renewing the original plan they subscribed to. With SubscriptionFlow they can easily move between plans. In any case (upgrade or downgrade), the software calculates their new charges, and assigns them a new invoice as soon as the change is made.

This real-time proration facilitates immediate plan switches, fulfilling subscriber needs instantly.

Smart self-service portal

Self-service portal act like personal control centers for customers. Your readers can fully leverage their portals to modify their plans, update payment methods, track deliveries, view invoices, and so on. The more the customer feels connected to their subscription, the more likely they are to opt for its renewal.

Pause button & automatic offers

When readers are about to cancel subscription, you can trigger automatic offers that give them reasons to stay. SubscriptionFlow helps you present personalized offers that cater to the customer’s pain-point, so that they change their mind and continue subscription.

Retention offers can include time-limited discounts, extra value for current price, easier access to premium bundles, zero shipping charges for some months, etc.

The subscription pause button can also be a game changer in this regard. If customers feel uncomfortable paying for their magazine plan right now, no matter what reason, they can simply pause it for a few months, and resume it later. This tactic prevents churn, and allows customers to take a temporary resting period instead.

Renewals taking lots of time? Remove all friction with SubscriptionFlow. Process bills automatically, extend personalized retention offers, and unlock powerful tools to maintain a healthy retention rate.