How Advantage Can Help Your Business to Grow

Advantage has been a catalyst for growth for countless clients over the years. The breadth of capabilities, the tools for streamlining business processes and the ease of experimenting with new features have all been purposefully designed and built to help our clients succeed. Here are just 5 of the many ways that Advantage can help your business to grow. 

1. By supporting multiple revenue models designed to help you meet your customer’s preferences for how they consume your content 

• Subscriptions 
• Pay-per-view 
• Pre-paid tokens 
• Series 
• Standing orders 
• Memberships 
• Paid-for trials 
• Step-up pricing 
• 1-time events 
• 1-off products 
• Usage-based services 

These are just some of the revenue models Advantage supports.  

Begin by asking your customers what they’d like. There is nothing quite like soliciting your customers’ opinions to inform you of where you should be heading. We have one client who makes a point to go visit their readers in-person. It’s that personal. Listen to what their preferences are. They might really surprise you.  

Then start testing the specific models your customers are requesting. Advantage’s broad feature set allows you to experiment with different models to see what sticks. You might find that many of your customers felt the same way as your interviewees.  

If what you test does not stick, that’s okay. It’s called “testing” after all. But don’t stop there. Test out variants on the model and you just might find a sweet spot somewhere nearby. 

2. By providing bundling capabilities to your marketers to quickly promote new value-add bundles to increase acquisitions and customer loyalty 

Bundling opens up possibilities for customers to try out new products at a discount. Mix subscribed or 1-off products, digital and physical, services, memberships, event registrations or product series, in any combination.  

The possibilities are endless, like your marketers’ imaginations. I recently attended a seminar in the publishing industry and one of the speakers talked about bundling as a new way forward. Hmm. Advantage has supported bundling for over 20 years. Scholarly publishers were perhaps the first sector within publishing to need it when they moved to digital content and their institutional customers needed to bundle digital and print. Since then, the bundling flexibility required by other types of publishers has grown exponentially.  

As a consumer myself, I love bundles. I’m getting a deal for 2 or more things I want or need. Then I can subscribe to that bundle and save even more, which is pretty irresistible. But the software needs to support a customer’s future wishes to change the bundle, or add another item partway through the subscription term, and handle all the financial implications of those adjustments. Advantage does all of this, of course.  

3. By using AI to optimize acquisitions through our partnership with Sub(x) 

A/B testing is the classic way to test out 2 different marketing efforts. It’s a bit of a painstaking process, as anyone who’s done it knows. What if a marketer could use AI instead to speed up the process? Our partner, Sub(x), does just that. Their learning model and access to data allows the process to speed up and optimize online acquisitions, making offers to the customer that will result in a new sale. Getting the right message, to the right customer, at the right time is the key to maximizing customer acquisition and revenue from every web and app visit. 

This same technique can be applied to renewals and retention. AI + data allows the machine to figure out the best offer to be made to save the cancel, for example.  

Sub(x) is running successfully at many global magazine media and news media brands, such as Hearst, Time and Future. Their clients always experience double digit increases in customer acquisition and revenue after deploying Sub(x) Autopilot.

4. By providing marketers with a landing page design tool to get new promotions live in minutes 

Cider Plus’s landing page design tool allows marketers to move fast. Design a new landing page in minutes with no technical expertise required. Then push out the email with the link and watch the orders flow in. 

We believe that marketers want to be creative and try things quickly. Why require a technical resource to set up a landing page when the marketer knows exactly what parameters they want to use? As a marketer myself, I’ve designed landing pages with no external help, and I’m not a trained engineer. Streamlining this process has allowed marketers to try things more quickly, resulting in quicker sales. 

One of our clients has set up dozens of landing pages for new business units, getting immediate results on their investment. 

5. By providing numerous tools to improve retention 

All the information you need when you interact with a customer needs to be available and visible, which empowers you to offer solutions to potential churn customers. If a customer is calling to cancel, for example, this is an opportunity for a conversation and to offer a limited or permanent price change, package downgrade, a gift, or a customer service credit. Advantage provides these in a scriptable way to give your staff the tools they need during these interactions.  

Advantage gives you room to grow in your retention approaches. We support dozens of features that can be configured at different times, so you can turn on just a few at a time allowing you to adjust your retention strategies as you go. Advantage is configurable and adaptable with an ever-increasing feature set.  

Advantage is chock-full of capabilities that were built to help you succeed. Our most successful customers are the ones that exploit those capabilities and expand their use of Advantage consistently over time. Advantage isn’t just software; it’s a growth catalyst. Embrace its features, adapt to changing market dynamics, and watch your business flourish.