The subscription billing market holds huge potential and with the rising adoption of subscription based business models, the competition is getting even tougher. If your business is subscription based or you have plans to adopt such a business model, knowing the common mistakes beforehand can save you a lot of time, money and effort.
In this blog, we will talk about the 5 most common subscription billing mistakes that companies often make and how to avoid them.
5 Subscription Billing Mistakes to Avoid
1. Issuing Generic Invoices & Receipts
For subscription based businesses you need to be more careful with generating invoices as those are not just to convey your customers’ billing details but need to incorporate crucial details like their subscription plans, any offer or discount applied, payment method, terms etc. The invoices should be error free, include important information and transparent. Furthermore, consider your invoices as branding opportunities where you can let them know about the subscription upgrade, add-on services, bundle plans or other benefits. So, no more generic invoices for your customers!
2. Not Having Value Based Pricing
For subscription businesses, especially SaaS, value based pricing is highly significant yet most of the businesses often fail to recognize and establish such pricing. You need to research, understand and measure the true value of your product or service offerings. And the value metric should be one of the crucial aspects to consider while setting up subscription billing for your business.
There are basically two types of value-based pricing and you can pick up the one that is more suitable for your business-
- Good Value Pricing: Offering the proper combination of service or product and quality at a reasonable price.
- Value Added Pricing: Incorporating features/ functions/ products/ services to differentiate an offer with higher prices.
3. Lack of Customization
Customization is one of the most important yet often underrated things in subscription businesses and it must reflect in the billing activities especially, the invoices, receipts or customer self-service portal related to subscription plans. Customization not only improves the relationship with your customers but helps your business stand out of the crowd by drawing their attention with innovative billing solutions.
Also Read: How to Overcome Common Recurring Billing Challenges?
4. Not Having Dunning Management Solution
Your subscription billing system can be highly sophisticated. It may offer multiple payment options and flexible solutions, but what about failed or pending payments? This is one of the aspects that often remains overlooked by the subscription businesses. To ensure it doesn’t happen, always adopt a billing system that provides a dunning management solution. Dunning management is handling the payment failures by communicating with the customers at the right time through conveying the payment status and actions needed. And without such a solution, payment failures can be a serious issue for your business.
5. Lack of Analysis
The most effective and easiest way to bypass, spot or rectify subscription billing mistakes is analyzing the key metrics. A subscription billing tool equipped with such a feature will let you have a bird’s eye view of how your subscription billing is doing by giving the insights on key metrics on a timely basis. No doubt that such reports will help you improve your billing by manyfold.
Muvi Billing, the enterprise-grade subscription billing system for apps and websites, offer automated & flexible billing, 40+ payment gateways, smart record keeping, analytics & insights, multi-currency, multi-language and many more!
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