The long-term goal of every business venture is to build a predictable and steady income. Companies may take different approaches to reach this ultimate goal. However, everyone can agree the most effective strategy to create such a stable and predictable income is through a recurring revenue model or subscriptions.
Subscription-based services enable you to establish a steady income from your business by regularly harnessing income. WooCommerce is arguably the best platform for establishing a recurring revenue model business. It provides you with a robust set of tools to build a successful recurring revenue model via subscription services.
But how do you harness this incredible capability of WooCommerce subscription services? Here, we explore the idea behind the recurring revenue model for business and how you can achieve it with the help of WooCommerce development.
Why Does Your Business Need the Recurring Revenue Model?
The first thing you must know about the recurring revenue model is that it can work even with the standard retail business model. You can enable a subscription model for your traditional retail products, and the customer can choose the preferable model. But is it worth going through all the trouble to implement a recurring revenue model for your online store? The following benefits of the recurring revenue model will help you find the answer to that question.
- Predictable income
- Enhanced customer loyalty
- Lower Acquisition costs
- Useful data insights
- Better opportunities for upselling
- Enhanced inventory management
If the above benefits tick all your requirement boxes, the recurring revenue model business is ideal for your business. Moreover, several other benefits become accessible to your business once it implements subscription capability.
WooCommerce Subscription Services and Their Benefits
The WooCommerce platform is the best for implementing subscription services. It allows you to build a feature-rich website with unique subscription plans ideal for your target audience. Moreover, there are numerous native and third-party plugins available for implementing subscription capability on your WooCommerce store.
The fully open-source WooCommerce platform gives you many advantages over other platforms when it comes to subscription services. Following are some of the most compelling benefits of implementing subscription services on your WooCommerce store.
Product Flexibility
With WooCommerce, you can add a subscription option for an extensive range of products, including physical items, digital products, and even services.
Scheduled Billing
WooCommerce lets you schedule the bills for subscription products or services. You can set up the billing monthly, quarterly, or annually. You also have the option to add custom billing schedules.
Custom Trials and Demos
You can offer free or discounted trials to attract new customers while giving them a taste of your product. It is one of the marketing strategies to entice customers and form long-term relationships.
Automatic Subscription Renewals
WooCommerce also offers automatic subscription renewal, which lets you collect the subscription fee from the customer without becoming an administrative burden.
Payment Flexibility
With WooCommerce, the customer can use various payment methods to subscribe to your products and services, significantly enhancing the payment flexibility of your business.
Advanced Subscriber Management
You can effortlessly manage subscribers with WooCommerce. Whether you want to pause, cancel, or modify subscriptions, WooCommerce can easily let you handle it.
Superior Integration Capabilities
With the advanced integration capabilities from WooCommerce and access to extensive plugins, you can implement numerous features and capabilities to your subscription-based business.
Steps for Implementing WooCommerce Subscription Services
Now that you know the numerous benefits of WooCommerce subscription services and the recurring revenue model, let’s discuss how to implement this. Implementing a personalized recurring revenue model for your business may often require the help of a certified professional. However, you can implement a fundamental subscription model business using the following steps.
Choose the Products for Subscription Sales
The first step to implementing a recurring revenue model via WooCommerce subscription is to select the subscription-ready products. The items you choose for subscription-based transactions can be physical goods, digital products, or services.
You can also start with selected products that are often in high demand or even reach out to selected customers based on their purchase history. Create a list of products, their preferred billing intervals, etc., to better define your subscription model.
Choose and Install a WooCommerce Subscription Plugin
Selecting subscription-ready products enables you to understand your subscription needs and helps you find the ideal WooCommerce plugin. You must ensure that your chosen plugins support your specific subscription plans, products, and services.
You can also seek help from an expert WooCommerce development team to identify the apt plugin. Moreover, seeking professional help lets you install and customize the plugins to add unique capabilities. You can also try installing the plugin via the “Plugin” option in the WooCommerce dashboard.
Enable Subscriptions and Create Subscription Products
The next step is to enable subscription product types on WooCommerce. You can follow the steps below to create subscription products.
WooCommerce → Settings → Products → General → Enable subscriptions (check box)
After enabling a subscription on your WooCommerce store, you must create the subscription products. Use the following steps to create subscription products on your WooCommerce website.
WooCommerce → Products → Add Product
It is worth noting that the steps may vary slightly depending on the WooCommerce plugin you use. The interface should also allow you to choose the subscription types, such as Simple Subscriptions, Variable Subscriptions, and Grouped Subscriptions.
It can be a time-consuming task to configure the product details and subscriptions. It is advisable to hire professional help for the configuration process.
Configure Trial Periods and Manage Product Variations
Although optional, it is preferable to configure trial periods for your subscription products. It is an effective way to entice potential subscribers and overcome the initial friction in obtaining new customers.
Besides that, you must also manage subscription product variations. It involves defining product variations and setting the pricing options that are ideal for your business model. However, it is only applicable if you have more than one variation of the same product.
Market and Customer Support
After the initial setup of your subscription products, you must proceed to its marketing side. Selling products once or twice differs entirely from selling them for a subscription fee.
It would help if you highlighted the benefits of subscribing to your products/services while maintaining compelling product descriptions and attractive images.
Besides that, you must also ensure exceptional customer support. But ensure your customer support team is trained to handle subscription-related inquiries.