Your subscribers are ultimately what’s going to make or break your subscription video business. Unlike advertising revenue models that require massive amounts of views to make money, the views don’t matter with a subscription-based or SVOD business model, subscribers are what matter.
In order to scale your subscription video revenue, your focus must be entirely about the customer — acquiring them as fans, converting them to be paid subscribers, and last but not least, retaining them as customers for the long run.
The following is a checklist of the essential tools and tactics that SVOD businesses use to improve customer acquisition and retention, which ultimately enables them to successfully scale their subscription revenue.
The foundation of any successful subscription video network is an owned-and-operated website with streaming video. Before even considering launching OTT apps, Video businesses should first focus on building their subscription service on their own website.
It’s a quick, cheap and easy way to get a subscription video service up and running, while still having control over IP and fan relationships. Plus, there are product and tools like Zype’s subscription web player embeds that make it extremely easy for video businesses to start streaming video and building up a subscriber-base on their website.
Although SVOD doesn’t need a massive audience to make money, it does require a moderate to large fan base that is fully engaged. These are the fans that come back, again and again, to watch more content, in addition to following you and your brand on social media or through email. Before a video business starts to scale their subscription revenue, they should already have around 200-300 thousand fans across their social channels and website. Check out the recording of our recent webinar, to find out more about the type of content and size of audiences that works well with a SVOD model.
Social media platforms are ideal for driving your fans to become premium subscribers. Video businesses should leverage YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for both engagement and marketing purposes. Video businesses should continue utilizing advertising revenue from free content on YouTube, in addition to using it as a platform to drive viewers back premium monetized content on their owned-and-operated subscription website.
The biggest challenge for subscription video businesses is churn. Even in the first month, cancellations from monthly subscribers are inevitable, but there proactive ways to mitigate and prevent churn. It’s much more expensive to acquire a new subscriber than to keep an existing one. Although customer acquisition and conversion are important, it’s critical that customer retention remains the top priority to ensure subscription video business’ long-term success.
To learn more about how to scale your video businesses with SVOD, you can check out the following Zype U articles:
SVOD Economics & OTT Video
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