How to Manage Your Subscriptions
Lesson 8 from: A Crafter's Guide to Starting a Subscription BusinessMei Pak
How to Manage Your Subscriptions
Lesson 8 from: A Crafter's Guide to Starting a Subscription BusinessMei Pak
Lessons
Introduction
09:53 2Why Sell Subscription Products?
02:53 3Great Subscription Ideas
10:59 4Positioning Your Subscription Product
06:09 5Pricing Your Subscription Product
25:48 6Interview with Stacey Trock of FreshStitches
34:29 7Subscription Models: Which One is Best for You?
23:52 8How to Manage Your Subscriptions
06:14Shipping Tools and Apps
23:06 10Finding Your Ideal Customer
05:54 11Why Marketing is Necessary
06:45 12Copywriting for Your Subscription Product
19:03 13Photography for Your Subscription Product
03:49 14Promoting Your Subscription on Social Media & Blogs
32:47 15Interview with Maureen Vasquez of Pipsticks
23:57 16How to Handle Unsubscribers
09:19 17The Unboxing Experience
06:18 18Frequently Asked Questions
08:09 19Common Challenges for Subscription Businesses
08:52 20Growing Your Subscriptions
10:21 21Interview with Wendi Gratz of Shiny Happy World
24:50Lesson Info
How to Manage Your Subscriptions
All right so let's talk about managing your subscriptions so these s o this is going to be in the bonus pdf download but just so we can walk this through one of the great ways that a lot of us started out stacy start out this way I I kind of am using this way I have moved on to ah different service but a lot of us really a lot of us makers do it manually we do it yourself we have spreadsheets and and it works and what I love about it is said it's easy to set up it is so easy to set up that you don't have to worry about like having to pay a monthly fee for a special service so I know a lot of us makers a lot of us creative types were always worried like I wanted put the best foot forward I want to make sure everything looks perfect I wantto you know there's there's the expectation that we have of ourselves eso in order to make this easy for you I don't want you to procrastinate I don't want you teo really this is the great the best time I want you to start now basically so I want you to...
give I want to give you the easiest option to get your subscription started on dh this is one of the best ways so I'll do a couple of walk throughs on this but it would be great for if you're a nazi shop owner this is a great way to go about it because especially because with etc it's not like you can integrate an app or plug in for you to do recurring payments it's also great for smaller size subscriptions and I know we all start somewhere we all started zero so I think in a lot of ways and mix ends that we do start it manually and it really depends on you and your resource is that you have if you do have a bigger budget sure, I think it's great that you start off with some of the paid options if those are available for your shopping cart but if not this is totally fine to do it with a spreadsheet to do it manually it works out pretty well and even with at seventy subscribers that I have I wouldn't say it's a terribly hard the manager anything like that it works it works out really nicely so depending on your shopping cart there are definitely options to use subscription aps and plug ins I know a lot of us are in shopify I actually recently just moved to shop a fine and loving it is amazing but these are a bunch of thie options you can use there's recharge recurring payments payroll and charge rabbit these air the actual names you can go into the shopify store and and just search in their search bar for these, so they're all a little bit different than the one I use is re charge, and what I like about it is if you're using a papal button, for example, on your own web site, if you have your own web shop outside of etc, the papal button is separate from your general shopping cart, so people are buying your regular products. They can't check out with your subscription at the same time, but some of these really cool abs what it lets you do is you can put the subscription product in the cart and all of the other different products you have in your general shop and put that all in the same car and check out in one smooth goal. The nice thing about these aps, too, is that it gives your customers and nice kind of customer management account place so that they can go in themselves and they can cancel if they want to or they can change their address if they want to. Otherwise with paypal, it is a little bit jang gear, but it's not impossible, it's not terrible for the most part, if people need to change addresses, so just email me now I'm just going into paypal and I'll just change it for them. Here's another interesting one that you should definitely check out it's called create joy on gets a full subscription business builder it's also kind of a marketplace, so once you hit a great joy dot com, you're going to find all of these different subscription products that are out there on dh the only drawback that I see to this is that if you currently have your own web site or if you have your own etc shop if you want to send people through subscription, you have to send them outside to your crate. Linc and I was trying to do research on this and I don't believe I found the answer, but I don't think you can embed this on your web site either and I think that would be a great option, but unfortunately if you want to sell your subscription, you have to direct people to your create joy ah website so let's set up your spreadsheet because we talked about how we're going to do this the d I y manual style, right? I want to make this easy for you so you can get started right away. So a really good point that I want you to remember here is a spread sheet where you're keeping all of your customer's information is the same spreadsheet that is going to double as your bulk shipping spreadsheet file and I'll talk more about shipping in a little bit so what's going to happen when we're doing papal when we're using paypal subscription buttons is when someone signs up for that you're going to get an email that says someone signed up for a new subscription has started for so and so and then all the information you get is a person's first name last name address all I could stuff here's your spread she is really a place for you to just you know, once you get that email, bring up her spreadsheet copy and paste all of that information over and then you can archive that email but that's basically the process that I go through every time I get a subscription I just take the time ah quick one minute to just transfer that information into my spreadsheet a good thing that I want to note here because I learned the hard way is um to have separate columns for the addresses so what I use what I used to do was I had just one column for the entire for three or four lines of an address and that doesn't work very well when you're thinking about bulk shipping when you're uploading the spreadsheet too any one of the page shipping or the free shipping software's I'm going to show you so from the get go I would love for you to start with having separate columns for address find one address line to city state and postal code have that all broken down into separate columns?
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
Great course, especially the interview with Stacey (part 6).
Nuvea
Mei gives lots of practical information and resources in this course.