You’ve selected the right subscription model for your business and your customers. You’ve got the products and a rough idea of the subscription price(s) you’ll be offering. Now you’re ready to put your subscription service to work and start generating the recurring revenue that finally makes your ecommerce endeavor business sustainable and predictably profitable.

And you suddenly realize you’re stuck.

You know how subscription services work, in theory, and you’re sold on the idea, but you still need a touch of technical know-how to get your subscription service set up and keep it running smoothly.
Even if you hire an outside expert to do all of the actual coding and launching, you should make sure you understand the basics so you can tweak, adjust, and evolve your subscription service without paying an arm and a leg each time.

Building Your Subscription Funnel

First things first: you need to set up the actual sales funnel that will drive your audience from initially capturing their attention to finally signing up for that subscription.

(image source: adespresso.com)

Here’s your typical sales funnel. The same basic model works no matter what you’re selling, including subscriptions—you need to create an awareness of what you’re offering, increase your audience’s interest, lead them to a decision, and convince them to take action.

Here’s how to do it, using a bottom-up approach to funnel building that makes sure everything leads straight to that sweet subscription revenue.

Action

The action you want people taking at the bottom of your funnel is signing up for a subscription. That’s typically going to take place on a landing page.

For anyone unfamiliar with the term, a landing page is simply a page on your website devoted to convincing readers to take a specific action. When interested people click ads, links in your marketing emails, links in your blog posts, etc., they land on this sales-oriented page and ideally convert into paying customers.

Or in our case, paying subscribers.

Long-form landing pages used to be in style, especially for information sales businesses. Certain ecommerce verticals, like health and beauty products, also saw strong results from landing pages with lots of copy, user testimonials, multiple calls to action, etc.

This has started to change significantly, though, and for many ecommerce businesses short and sweet has always been the best landing page approach. Today’s audience has grown weary of endlessly scrolling through sales pitches. Long-form content still has its place, but it’s probably best to keep it off your landing page.

This type of short-form landing page is probably your best bet for subscription conversions. By the time your audience lands here, they should already be informed about your product(s). Now you want to make their decision easy.

Tell them exactly what they’ll be getting, offer various options if you have them, and let them click to sign up. Collect their payment and shipping info on the next page, after they’ve already made the decision to buy. Then those longer forms won’t be a barrier to the sale—psychologically speaking, the sale will already be complete.

Decision

Before your customers take action on your short-form landing page, you need to convince them that your subscription is the right decision.

This is where long form content—an advertorial on someone else’s blog, an article on your site that describes the benefits of your product in detail, a detailed explainer video on social media—can come in handy.

Remember to focus your content on what your customers get, not what your product is. You’re selling younger-looking skin, not wrinkle cream; worry-free convenience, not laundry detergent. Talk about how your product solves a problem and you’ll see more sales.

Place a call to action or two at key points in the content, including at the end, and link those CTAs to your landing page.

You can also drive traffic to your subscription landing page through marketing emails to people who have signed up to receive messages from you. Social media posts that speak directly to your followers and other channels that connect you to an already-interested audience.

Pay-per-click ads that retarget people who have visited your site or made previous purchases can also be effective:

Speaking of purchases, try sending customers to your subscription landing page as part of the confirmation for each sale. They’ve already made one decision to purchase from you, so they’re that much more likely to do it again—strike while the iron is hot!

Interest

That long-form content, those carefully targeted emails and retargeted PPC ads—they’re most effective when they’re delivered to people who already have an interest in your products and your brand.

That interest doesn’t have to be much to start. Any action that brings a prospect closer to you makes them subconsciously like and trust you even more. Every click increases the likelihood of a sale, so at this stage you want to make the offers low-pressure, low-key, and to the point.

Things to consider for the “interest” part of your funnel include:

• Catchy headlines for your blog posts
• Ad copy that grabs attention and delivers value
• Images that stand out in social media feeds
• Opt-in offers for your email list

There’s TONS to say about how to make your marketing more effective in terms of generating initial interest, and we’ll be looking into those in future articles. The goal of all the specific tactics is the same: get them interested in you when there are twenty other things vying for their attention.

Awareness

Generating interest is about getting your audience’s attention long enough to start educating them about your products.

Getting awareness is about getting in front of your audience in the first place.

SEO. Keyword research. Organic search. Paid search. Guest blogging. Hashtags.

To put your marketing out where your customers will become aware of it, you need to first become aware of them. What blogs they read, what social media they’re on and who they follow, what keywords they’re looking for, and so on.

Targeting your content towards these avenues is how you or to build the initial awareness that starts everyone down the funnel towards your subscription.

Like generating interest, there is a virtually endless supply of specific tips, tricks, and tactics for generating initial awareness of your products and your brand. For the purposes of setting up your subscription sales funnel, just make sure you’re focusing your energy on channels you know your customers are using.

Once your funnel is up and running, you can fine-tune your awareness approach to your heart’s content.

A Recap of Your Subscription Funnel

So that’s your subscription funnel, built from the bottom. Let’s take a quick look at the audience experience from top to bottom, so you know what actions you should be taking at each step of the journey.

• People first learn about your product/brand when your site or other content surfaces in organic search results, as a paid search ad, on a blog they already read, in their social media feed, etc.
• Their attention is caught by your headlines, your images, your one-sentence irresistible promise, or other tease of your products and/or your content
• As they learn more and more about you and your products through the information you provide, they get closer and closer to making that subscription decision. They might make a one-time purchase as part of this process, which is the perfect time to serve them your subscription offer.
• They arrive on your landing page, all but ready to subscribe, and your simple, easy, clear and concise offer convinces them to click through and purchase.

Follow this funnel guide and you’ll have a solid system in place for generating ongoing subscription revenue. Use that to build out your ecommerce business even bigger, and start reaping the real rewards you’ve always been after!