How the reverse sales funnel can help your subscription business

You probably know about the sales funnel, a common business strategy to attract customers. But did you know there is a reverse sales funnel to apply on your subscription business?

Find out more about it, and how it can be helpful to your business.

The sales funnel is a model that describes the customer journey from lead to buying customer. A traditional sales funnel typically consists of these four steps:

• Awareness – create awareness of an item you sell
• Interest – create an interest in the item
• Desire – creating a need of the item
• Action – converting to a sale of the item

When using the sales funnel for traditional business, where customers day-by-day purchases of single products, the funnel ends with the action and then starts over again and again with creating new leads, new interest, new desires and new action.

But when you run a subscription business, you want to apply a different approach – the reverse sales funnel.

In a subscription business, you don’t want the journey to end. You want your customers to stay making regular payments to your product or service, and you want to keep their interest and desire staying strong. Ultimately you want them to be so happy with your service that they want to encourage others to also try your subscription.

The funnel steps for subscription business are:

• Onboarding the member
• Creating ongoing value
• Establish a deep and meaningful customer relationship
• Get the member to become your brand ambassador

In short; when your loyalty program, membership subscription, box subscription or what else your subscription service offers get a new subscription customer the reverse sales funnel starts with you onboarding them. To keep your recurring customers being interested, you must keep providing them ongoing value. Building strong customer relationships are vital when it comes to subscription services, as you want your customers to feel brand loyalty and satisfaction in being your returning customers.

Once you have convinced your subscribers that they are very satisfied with your services they will spread the word about your subscriptions, attracting new members – they become organic brand ambassadors, recruiting new customers for you by word of mouth. And then the reverse sales funnel starts over again, systematically working in a loop.

Adapting the reverse sales funnel strategy will be quite helpful to your recurring payments subscription business, but it also requires time and money to keep it strong. However, the return you will get from a well-oiled reverse funnel strategy in place will make your hard work worth it, as your customer relationships will keep going stronger, resulting in more recurring customers entering your subscription service offering.

Want to know more about the reverse sales funnel? Get in touch with our partners SignUp Academy!