The document provides a comprehensive guide on subscription metrics, reporting, and the evolving role of finance teams in the subscription economy. It emphasizes the importance of measuring value through standardized business velocity, subscriber usage, and subscriber support metrics, and encourages collaboration across all departments to optimize business performance. Additionally, it discusses the significance of maintaining subscriber identity records and leveraging predictive analytics to enhance insights into subscriber behavior and drive growth.

1. Subscription Metrics & Reporting Tips
Measuring Value, Assigning Roles & Understanding
Which Insights Matter for Your Business

2. What’s Inside?
Introduction
Part 1: Measuring Value With Metrics
Part 2: Subscriber Identities & Roles
Conclusion
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Powerful subscription metrics support
your business strategy.

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Subscription metrics answer
questions like:
>
What attracts and converts new users into subscribers?
Are your subscribers engaged for the long-term?
What’s your recurring revenue – and how can you increase it?
How can you penetrate new markets and reach new customers?

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Financial and revenue metrics are the
responsibility of the Finance team.
(They love that stuff.)

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But the role of the Finance team is changing.
In today’s subscription economy, the Finance team is no longer just
the cost accountant. They’re now the business value architect –
and they have the power to drive growth and profitability.

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Now you need a new
strategy for managing
subscription metrics
and reporting…
>

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… that not only lets your intrepid
team of number crunchers
measure growth and profitability
but help drive it across all
functions within your company.
>

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This deck explains how to use specific subscription
metrics and roles to understand how existing business
potentially impacts future revenue as well as
subscription processes across your organization.

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Let’s get started.>

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> Business Velocity Metrics
> Subscriber Usage Metrics
> Subscriber Support Metrics
Part 1:
Measuring Value With Metrics

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Measuring Value with Metrics
You can define your own metrics based on what matters to your business.
But luckily, there are some standard value metrics that every subscription business
should be monitoring, so you don’t need to start from scratch.
We’ve classified these value metrics into three categories:
> Business Velocity
> Subscriber Usage
> Subscriber Support

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Business Velocity Subscriber Usage Subscriber Support
 Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
 Average Revenue Per Account
(ARPA)
 Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
 Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
 Churn/retention rate
 Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)
 Sales & Marketing expenses
 Research & Development expenses
 Visitors/signups/paid customers
 Monthly/daily active users
(MAU/DAU)
 Monthly/daily unique visitors
 Session duration
 Number of sessions per user
 Number of key user actions per
session
 Most/least used features
 Ticket volume
 Customer Contact Rate (CCR)
 Customer satisfaction rating/Net
Promoter Score (NPS)
 Average resolution time
 Cancelation rate
 Chargeback rate
 Fraud rate

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Business Velocity Metrics
What they tell you:
Is my business profitable and operating efficiently?
How to use them:
To increase the efficiency, quality and consistency of your business operations;
To invest in the right technology, projects and personnel;
To expand into new global markets

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Subscriber Usage Metrics
What they tell you:
How does my subscriber navigate and engage with my offering?
How to use them:
To uncover unique opportunities for optimization;
To discover new and unexpected use cases and user segments;
To define subscriber identities

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Subscriber Support Metrics
What they tell you:
Is my customer’s experience with my product/service a positive one?
How to use them:
To improve your checkout flow;
To optimize your offering’s UI/UX;
To decide which features to add or remove;
To make your purchase process more secure

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Value metrics don’t live in a vacuum
– and they shouldn’t be confined to
the Finance team.
>
Instead, metrics should be owned jointly across all
departments within your organization. Your CEO, CIO, CTO,
CMO, VP of Sales and all other key stakeholders must be
held accountable for transparently providing and
contextualizing analytics on all business activities they own.

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> Building Subscriber Identity Records
> Defining Subscriber Roles
> Assigning Subscriber Roles
Part 2:
Subscriber Identities & Roles

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Building Subscriber Identity Records
In the old transaction-based economy, it was enough to keep a static database of
customer contact information — but that era has come and gone. Now that your focus
has shifted from the order itself to the person doing the ordering, you’ll need to
maintain comprehensive subscriber identity records.
This is accomplished by consolidating behavioral, financial and demographic data
from disparate business systems, including:
Customer relationship management tool (CRM) Web analytics
Enterprise resource planning tool (ERP) Marketing automation tool
Email platform Subscription billing platform

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Building Subscriber Identity Records
Your subscriber identity record should include the following information:
> Contact information
> Product usage metrics
> Purchase history
> Payment history
> Refund history

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Think of a subscriber identity record
as your customer’s fingerprint.
>
It gives you an overview of the impact that their behavior,
demographics and financial contributions have on your
subscription business.

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Once you know who your subscribers are,
(thanks to your real-time subscriber identity records!)
you can group them into roles. By running reports on each of
these roles, you’ll uncover insights that are specific to the different
types of subscribers you’re serving.

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Defining Subscriber Roles
One way to define subscriber roles is based on the features and functionality
that different groups of users are able to access within your offering.
To boost recurring revenue, you need to upsell “standard users” to a premium
version of your offering with more features and functionality – and then
charge these “power users” a premium price.

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In subscription reporting, different
subscriber roles might also be
referred to as “cohorts.”
>
In short, a cohort is a group of users who share a common
characteristic or experience within a certain period. It could
refer to a group of subscribers who all have the same access
level – like, for example, your “power users” – or it could
simply refer to a segment of users who all signed up during
the same month.

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Cohort analysis is useful in subscription billing
because it lets you identify relationships between
the characteristics of a specific population
and that population's behavior.
Source: Cohort Analysis 101

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Assigning Subscriber Roles
Assigning the right subscriber roles can be tricky. After all, how can you
correctly determine which roles will reveal the most valuable insights?
The answer: leveraging powerful predictive analytics
to apply a role, or multiple roles, to each subscriber identity.

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Assigning Subscriber Roles
Machine learning software accurately identifies trends in customer behavior
without the risk of human error. It’s intelligent enough to refine its predictions
as you feed it more and more data.
The result? An unbiased overview — and forecast — of how different
subscriber roles (or cohorts) will impact your bottom line.

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Assigning Subscriber Roles
Why invest in predictive analytics for your business?
> Quickly segment complex analytics by subscriber role
> Understand how customer behavior powers product innovation
> Easily track engagement scores and lifecycle moments

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So, all that being said…>
… how do you ensure that the Finance team has the
resources they need to effectively measure and track
your business performance while driving future growth
and profitability?

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You have a couple of options.

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Regardless of what you choose, you’ll
need the capabilities to:
>
 Combine your financial and behavioral data
 Track your subscribers’ buying journey from start to finish
 Measure how your customers are engaging with your offering
 Monitor the health of individual subscribers
 Group subscribers by common traits and behaviors

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If you’re managing your subscription
program in-house:
You’ll need to closely inspect all of your business tools (whether developed
internally or outsourced) to ensure that you have solutions in place for all of
these capabilities.
Then, you’ll need to link of these systems together. That’s how you get those
subscriber identity records – plus a holistic view of the health of your business.

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If you’re using a payment processor or
subscription billing platform:
You might find that your provider is not offering real-time insight into your
revenues and cash flow. If you can’t seamlessly consolidate your customer and
financial data, you’ll never have an accurate view of your business’s
performance.
Evaluate the time and resources required to manually feed data into different
business tools and systems – and also consider the room for error.

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Here’s another option:
Choose a flexible, comprehensive, end-to-end
subscription billing solution that specializes helping
businesses like yours go global – fast.
(We’re partial to this one.)

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cleverbridge moves fast, integrates
flawlessly and manages expensive,
risky and time-consuming tasks for
your business.
>
Like collecting payments, managing taxation
requirements, complying with global trade
regulations and setting up legal entities.

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 Rapid integration and time-to-market
 Highly available infrastructure
 Rigorous security monitoring
 Flexible solution and robust set of APIs
 Exceptional ongoing support from a
team of experts
 Full suite of success services to optimize
your subscription program (email
marketing, affiliate marketing, custom
design/development and more)
 Active global affiliate network
 Sophisticated fraud screening
technology
We check all of your boxes, including:

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to offer advanced subscription reporting and analytics.
And now we partner with

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Created specifically for the needs for global
subscription businesses, ChartMogul seamlessly
integrates with our subscription platform –
giving our clients access to real-time visual
reports and cohort analysis.

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This enables the Finance team to
quickly track and analyze key metrics,
measure customer satisfaction and
identify opportunities for optimization.
Not just reporting on your business, but driving it.
>

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Ready?
LEARN MORE

41. cleverbridge provides global subscription billing solutions that help companies build long-term customer
relationships and grow recurring revenue streams. With our flexible, cloud-based billing and monetization platform,
cleverbridge simplifies subscription business models and delivers an optimized online customer experience. Our
clients leverage our expertise, technology and services to more effectively monetize their products and services,
rapidly expand their global subscriber base and maximize customer lifetime value. Headquartered in Cologne,
Germany, we have offices in Chicago, San Francisco and Tokyo.
To learn more about cleverbridge, please contact inquiry@cleverbridge.com or visit www.cleverbridge.com.