Subscription Acquisition

An acquisition campaign is a marketing effort to acquire first-time subscribers, usually with a discount, incentive or a bundle. It’s typically run over public channels, ie, a website, social media channel such as Facebook or You Tube, or emails to registered users who have not yet converted. The pricing is usually fairly public and harmonised.

Acquisition campaigns can vary according to the products being sold. However, broadly, there are three types of subscription businesses:

• One product, many campaigns - see Spotify example
• Multiple products, few campaigns - see Drover example
• Multiple products, many campaigns - see Sky example

Savvy marketers will run several subscription campaigns per week to win in the everlasting war for attention. These may:

• Be specific to particular regions
• Include a special discount pricing, bundle, newly owned or third-party product
• Only be available to certain people, ie students or a captive audience such as registered users or users of third-party products who have agreed to receive third-party offers
• Be specific to a dedicated channel, ie the iPhone app store.
• Contain personalised communications, such as custom design and content

At peak times of the year such as during the Christmas period, subscription marketers can run up to five different subscription marketing campaigns a week for the same ‘product.’

Let's take some practical examples.

Spotify

Spotify is a good example of a subscription business with one core product and many acquisition campaigns. Let's explore how they acquire their subscribers.

Temporary promotions 

This is a Spotify acquisition campaign for first-time subscribers which ran from Christmas through to New Year’s Eve 🎄

In this example, the campaign would be ’Spotify Christmas’ and include three offers for Spotify Premium, Premium for Students and Premium for Family for the USA segment. Note that Premium for Family is not discounted, so it’s reusing a default offer for this Christmas campaign. The product is always the same - access to Spotify.

Evergreen campaigns 

However, not everyone celebrates Christmas. For the Saudi Arabian segment, there would not be a special Christmas promotion and the default evergreen campaign with its standard trial offer would be shown. Additionally, there would not be any other offers for Students and Family in this geographical segment 👇

Partner campaigns 

Spotify may also run campaigns with partners at any time of year. For example, this is a campaign promoting Spotify on the Sky website

Or another partner promotion bundling Spotify Premium with Headspace advertised over emails 🧘‍♀️

Drover

Let’s take another example: car subscriptions. Drover is a start-up business which enables you to subscribe to a car at an all-inclusive price, selecting whichever model you like. This is a good example of a subscription business with multiple products and few campaigns.

It looks very much like an eCommerce website, doesn’t it? This would be reflected in their subscription product catalogue where each car would be a distinct product. It’s common for car subscription services to run campaigns around new vehicle launches. However, the subscription price is determined by the dealer and would typically be fairly constant, so it’s likely that marketers would have an evergreen campaign with different offers for each subscription term. Each offer could have a list of associated cross-sells, for example a certain mileage package and delivery options 🚘.

Sky

Our previous examples highlighted Spotify with its one product and many campaigns, with complexity arising from its digital worldwide reach, and Drover with many products, few campaigns. Drover’s complexity results from its physical world inventory.

A third example would be Sky, the multimedia conglomerate which sells a combination of TV, broadband, mobile subscription products and services in the United Kingdom: Sky.

You can only imagine the complexity of their subscription ecommerce experience, with its various products and campaigns, multiple subscriber segments and multiple channels.

A multi-product company such as Sky also has unlimited possibilities with regard to upselling and cross selling. For example, why not include TV with your broadband? There’s a special offer for that! Oh, you want the iPhone 6S. Did you know you could save more by buying the XS? Check it out!

This operational complexity comes at a price. For many telecom companies, the Christmas campaign must be fully approved by August, a full four months before it actually goes live on the website, in shops, in partner channels, in email promotional marketing, in advertisements, in contact centres. Having such a wide range of products sold across many campaigns is a challenging task.

More campaigns, more problems 

With millions of subscribers, marketers at Spotify, Drover and Sky must continuously create innovative and aggressive acquisition campaigns. With their vast engineering teams, they do have the luxury of a backbone of technology to support the complexity of running tens of acquisition campaigns per month across multiple geographies, channels and segments as well as track the return of investment of each of them - call it true enterprise subscription commerce.

Not Spotify, Drover or Sky? Don’t worry. Limio helps companies of any size to manage their subscription acquisition campaigns, tailor their pricing, messaging and offers per channel, and deploy powerful, secure, personalised shops that maximise conversions. We're trusted by the Economist to power their global campaigns across 29 price zones, Which? to promote their products, and GEDI to sell across 9 domains. Our team can share tips on what works and what doesn't work in subscription marketing campaign.