Subscription Products: A Better Business Strategy for your Hotmart Members Area

It’s not how much you charge for your members area, it’s how you charge. Learn how to set up subscription products with Hotmart. 

Having a members area is the ideal way for you to organize and sell your course online. But the nagging question for most creators is: how much should I charge for it? 

Let’s take a look at why this is the wrong question. When creators stop asking, “How much?” and, “How?” instead, the answer comes much easier. 

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Members areas and subscription products – strategies that work

A solid members area provides your students with a unique learning experience. It’s also a product that most consumers feel comfortable purchasing these days. 

And comfort is the name of the game when it comes to online subscriptions, too.  Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon Prime are just a few examples of market leaders who have helped make online subscription plans commonplace.  

This revolution in how to charge consumers has been deemed the Subscription Economy, and it goes much deeper than just recurring payments. It demands a new way of approaching your products and business and what KPIs you pay attention to. 

Keep the ongoing value dripping 

In the case of subscription products, creators have to deliver value to their students continuously. This requires an organized schedule for the release of content to customers and setting fixed dates or a period of days that students must wait in order to have access to specific content.

Customers need to see the value of what they are currently paying for as well as anticipate more to come. This way, they will never question why they make their weekly, monthly, or yearly payments for your product.  

With this in mind creators should never release all of their content at once. When setting up their members area, they need to create a release schedule so that their students know that more is always coming soon.  

This builds expectations and increased engagement among customers. Additionally, automatic content posting, or drip content, allows creators to spend more time doing other things, like building new products or enjoying their free time.   

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Sell additional products within your members area

Paying customers is hard to come by. Any seasoned creator knows how much time and how many strategies are invested in conversion rates and marketing.

If you’ve already won over a customer and they love one of your products, the obvious solution is to focus on selling to them again. They get to enjoy more of your content, and you get an easy sale. It’s a win-win.   

With Club Sales, Hotmart’s free advertising service, you can offer additional products within your members area while your customer is enjoying your product. You can even promote products you’re affiliated with. 

You can set up Club Sales to kick in and make the right offer at the right moment. Let’s suppose that after completing 10 lessons, you think your customers would benefit from another one of your products. Enter Club Sales.    

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Listen. Retain. Repeat. 

More than any other type of product, subscription products need to keep their subscribers happy. Creators need to understand what students think about their course or product so they can keep improving and retain customers.  

Hotmart’s Members Area makes this easy by enabling the comment box. Comment management provides creators with the possibility of connecting with their customers and offering them a more humanized service in addition to finding simple ways to make the subscription experience more enjoyable.  

Know thy customers

With Hotmart Ask, you can conduct a satisfaction survey and listen to your students’ opinions about your members area. By conducting a survey, you can understand whether your students are enjoying the course, for example, and gather the suggestions for improvements they offer you. 

Click here to read more about the Hotmart Ask tool.        

 

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Sell more with Hotmart’s payment suite and subscription service

Hotmart’s subscription service is your key strategy to sell more. With it, you can schedule your billing and process payments using Hotmart’s proprietary payment suite, HotPay.

Below, we’re going to talk about a few advantages of using the subscription service to boost your business. 

Organization and predictable revenue

With the possibility of choosing between weekly, monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, semiannual, or annual plans, creators are able to organize themselves in terms of expenses and investments. 

As long as you keep your subscribers engaged and make it easy to see the value in maintaining their subscription, it’s easier to forecast your financial return. 

Automatic billing and local payment methods

HotPay provides automatic billing according to the creator’s settings. And if a customer’s payment isn’t completed do issues with credit or the registered payment method, the creator can count on smart retries to maintain the subscription as active. 

And to make sure potential customers find the payment method that works best for them, check out what HotPay has to offer to keep the buyer and seller happy:

• Credit card subscriptions. If a transaction has a payment error, Hotmart’s system attempts to reprocess it up to four times and, if this comes up short, the subscription is tagged with an “Overdue” status. If the product is hosted within the Hotmart Members Area, this student’s access is denied after the unsuccessful payment of the bill, and will only be granted access after the system confirms an approved payment (or if the creator permits access). The creator can also manually attempt to collect the payment.
• Local payment methods: creators who sell in a variety of countries can count on local payment methods. It’s a way to offer peace of mind for those buying and optimize potential sales.  Among the local payments, we offer are: SEPA in the EU, Bacs in the UK, Cartes Bancaires in France, and Venmo in the US. 

 Free product trial

Everyone likes to kick the tires before committing to a purchase. With digital products, free trials are a great way to open a potential customers eyes to the valeu your product can offer them.  

 Switching subscription plans

Giving your current subscribers the freedom to change their plans (weekly, monthly, annual, etc.) is a great strategy to retain customers.  You can allow your students to migrate to more affordable, but longer plans, or more expensive plans with an increased value offer. 

Is a subscriber having financial problems and having trouble keeping up with the payments of your product? Offer them a more affordable plan so that you can retain them. 

Or, do your customers like your product and are becoming more engaged? This is an opportunity to offer them a more expensive plan with even more exclusive content. Click here and learn how to set up a product subscription-plan switch.  

Monitoring and automatic reports

With Hotmart, you can set up the periodic reports with the results and information about your subscription service. Below, we have the list of reports you can receive automatically: 

• General Sales Report 
• Subscription Report
• Smart Installment Plan Report
• Subscription Renewal Summary
• Subscription Renewal in Detail
• New Subscriptions in Detail
• Subscriptions with card close to expiration
• Reasons for declined payments

Check here what you can view in each of these reports!

Managing the number of subscription payments

Creators have the chance to limit how many payments they want their subscribers to make. They can also make it unlimited, so that the subscription will only be canceled when the subscriber wishes to do so. 

Advantages of the Hotmart subscription product for customers

If the advantages are numerous for creators, it’s no different for customers. Check out below a few advantages of this type of service for your customers. 

Exclusivity

In subscription products, creators can release a special trial period so users can learn more about the service or product. Moreover, subscribing users can have exclusive access to the product or service, before it’s launched on the market. 

Simplicity in the purchasing process

With subscription products, subscribers only have to pull out their wallets once and then immediately access the product. Billing is then handled automatically.

 A lower entry price for buyers

Typically, the amount charged for a subscription product is lower than the price of a product charged only once. This makes sense because the creator’s intention is to build subscriber loyalty and retention. 

This practice is also seen as being positive for subscribers because they commit to paying a more affordable price than if they were purchasing a product with a single payment. And they keep paying only if they remain interested in the product’s content. 

In the long run, this strategy allows creators to receive a higher amount than they’d receive if they were selling single-payment products, since their revenue would be limited, as long as they keep subscribers interested in maintaining access to their product.

Now that you’ve learned about the advantages of Hotmart’s subscription service, set up your subscription product and sell more and sell right.