How to Grow to 100K Subscribers: An Interview with Rob Reynolds, CEO of Directade

How can you grow your business to 100K+ subscribers? The elusive six-figure benchmark is a goal for many subscription business owners — so how do you reach it? As part of our initiative to help new subscription business owners, we’re interviewing top subscription model experts we work with about how they’ve helped brands accomplish major goals, and what advice they have for others.

In our third interview of this series, we’re sitting down for a Q&A with Rob Reynolds, CEO and lead analyst at Directade, a team of MP&A marketing analysts that advise brand leaders on how to optimize their marketing strategies for Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) and subscription businesses. We asked Rob questions to learn more about how they help brands grow to 100K+ subscribers and beyond.

Q: If membership growth is the ultimate goal, where should brands start when creating a strategy?

Rob: It’s best as a multi-pronged approach. It starts with customers — listen to them. Subscription brands have a unique opportunity to collect rich data, so it’s important to gather and act upon both qualitative and quantitative insights.

It’s also a good idea to seek out feedback. Talk to your internal team — people like your Social Media Community Managers and Customer Service Managers — and develop a good unsubscribe survey. Some CEOs even call a few customers each month to hear how things are going and what they can do to make things better. By understanding what your customer thinks about your product (good or bad), you can find ways to improve or better position your product.

Lead by example. Encourage your whole team to adopt this mindset.

And last — if you hear there’s a problem with the product experience, fix that before investing more in media. If you skip over this step and just spend more on acquisition, you’ll end up with higher cost per order, lower lifetime value, and higher churn.

Q: Staying on customers for a second: what other advice do you have about unlocking the potential around customer data?

Rob: Convert your best customers into brand ambassadors. Their positive word-of-mouth will get you more earned acquisition, which will help stretch your media dollars. Also think about starting a fan club or test group with your most dedicated customers and give them access to new products first. Find out what motivates these customers and reward them for participating.

Q: The CEOs/CMOs I know are pulled in a lot of different directions. In what one area do you think leaders should focus their attention on for subscription brand growth?

Rob: I think you really have to focus on your numbers. It’s surprising how many senior marketers don’t know their numbers on profitability, cash flow, and CPO Allowables (Cost Per Order Allowable is a measure of how many marketing dollars a company can afford to spend on each customer). Having these numbers top-of-mind will guide your everyday decision-making and will help you better prioritize your growth efforts.

Q: What are the things that can trip brands up and prevent them from hitting growth goals?

Rob: Poor communication with your customers. It leads to churn and will undermine your growth. The two key areas that are important to get right are billing and customer onboarding. Also:

• Make sure you work with your credit card processor to avoid billing failures or to resolve them once they happen.
• Be transparent with customers on how the subscription will be billed.
• Clarity in billing descriptors on the customer’s credit card statements is something that’s easy to do, very important, but too often overlooked. That’s something we really like about connecting clients with ReCharge for subscription billing — we never have to worry about these issues.

Q: Do you have a parting word of advice?

Rob: Yes: never run out of stock! Running out of stock leaves sales on the table and that kills growth. Not being able to fulfill orders you’ve taken will turn an excited customer into a unhappy detractor. If you can’t handle more orders this month, then pull back on media. You can even start a waitlist if needed. Communicate with those customers until you can add them to file. But be sure you prioritize your existing customers. They should always come first.