Anna Hosie Team : User Experience and Information Architecture Tags : Usability Web Strategy Tips & Tricks User Experience
15Oct2013

UX design for the subscription funnel

Anna Hosie Team : User Experience and Information Architecture Tags : Usability Web Strategy Tips & Tricks User Experience

How do you design a subscription funnel that grows your online business? First, you need to determine whether the growth that is important to you is revenue growth or user growth. Know the answer? Great as this will help you make the necessary UX decisions outlined in this blog.

What makes up the subscription funnel?

The funnel assumes the user undertakes the following four sequential steps:

  • Visits site
  • Signs up
  • Using product
  • Upgrades

Visits site

As a UX designer getting the user to visit the site is mainly out of your control. Getting traffic to the site relies on good SEO/SEM implementation. However UX design that provides supporting content with relevant links and contextual labels will help boost SEO.

Signs up

It is important on a sign up page to provide all information required for a user to make a decision whether they will in fact signup. You don’t want them navigating away from the sign up page and therefore away from the funnel.

The information provided should be concise and easy to read. Help, FAQs and Customer Support contact details should also be visible.

Decide on the ‘hook’ you want to use to entice people to sign up. Examples of these are:

  • Free trials - All functionality for a limited time
  • Free subscription - Limited functionality but never expires
  • Money back guarantees

Another decision you need to make is whether to take credit card details upfront or at upgrade. The former will reduce the number of people signing up but of these you are likely to get more to upgrade. Use this option if you’re focused on revenue growth. The latter will result in a larger number of people signing up but makes it harder to get them to upgrade. Use this option if you’re focused on user growth. Likewise yearly subscriptions will increase revenue and monthly subscriptions increase the number of users.

Using the product

Next you need to get the user to start using the product. Ways in which you can do this is by navigating them to product functionality after signup and providing contextual help or tips & tricks to guide them through your product. Another great tool to encourage interaction is through email notifications. Let them know when things have changed or improved on the site and if there is an action that requires a response from them.

Upgrade

Statistically very few people go from product use to upgrade. Again email notifications can be helpful in doing this. Upcoming expiry of a free trial meaning loss of functionality or a reminder to show what they could be getting if the upgraded to the next version can help. Test out different scenarios through split testing, talk to your customers and see what would make them upgrade. There is no set of rules to be applied but only ideas to be tried with your users.

Good luck!