After months of development time and thousands of lines of code we are ready to launch subscription payments. Yes, you can now start taking recurring payments on your OptimizePress sites.

You've requested it, and now it's here - Subscription payments in WordPress and OptimizePress.

This has been one of our most requested features and is asked for frequently in our helpdesk and often mentioned in our Facebook Group.

After months of development time and thousands of lines of code we are ready to launch subscription payments. Yes, you can now start taking recurring payments on your OptimizePress sites. 🙌 🙌 🙌

So what's the big fuss about subscriptions? Well, subscription payments add recurring revenue to your business. This might not sound like much, but from a business point of view, recurring revenue that compounds over time gives you predictable income and cash flow.

Making daily sales in a business is a constant stress for product-based business owners. They have to focus time on marketing, cash flow, staffing, advertising new product ranges, and a lot more to keep a business profitable and in many cases just floating.

The moment a business introduces subscription-based products, they have instant predictable revenue. Look at Amazon Prime. The small yearly fee for one-day delivery adds instant predictable revenue. Amazon can see exactly how much money they will make each year from just the Prime memberships without even worrying about selling products.

As of December 2019 Amazon had 126,000,000 Prime Members: 👀

Source: https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/amazon-prime-membership

You could use this same technique if you sell hundreds of different products that people return to buy from you. However there’s an easier way for entrepreneurs like you!

You don’t need to have an ecommerce site selling hundreds of products. You simply need to sell a service or provide training that people pay monthly to access.

We haven't even looked at the compound effect of getting new subscriptions each day, but it can quickly grow.

Just 100 members paying you $27 a month = $2,700

If you have a membership site where you publish monthly content, you instantly have a predictable $2,700 revenue without product launches or trying to sell more products. Now, I’m not saying it’s easy to get 100 members but it’s probably easier than you think considering how many people buy subscription based products online.

We will cover more about subscriptions and recurring revenue in future blog posts. It's an exciting topic, but right now, we want to tell you about how to get started with selling subscriptions using OptimizePress.

Let's dive in!

First, we highly recommend watching this walkthrough of the new Subscriptions features:

One of our biggest goals with subscription payments was to make it easy to use. We wanted it to be so simple that you could teach a friend to do it in under 5 minutes. When you see what we've done, it's fair to say we hit the nail on the head.

To set up a subscription product, it only takes a few clicks, literally. The clean product interface that we built for OptimizeCheckout continues on with subscription payments as it’s built into the same product page.

Under the payment type, you'll now see Subscriptions which expands these new options:

These new subscription options work directly inside OptimizeCheckouts so there's no need to worry about activating any other plugins from OptimizePress or downloading third-party plugins to make this work.

The beauty of this means those of you who are already using OptimizeCheckouts can simply choose "subscription" as the payment type to start selling subscriptions.

And, for those of you who are wondering if you need this feature and lots more, it's just a simple upgrade to our OptimizeSuite plan where you benefit from our complete funnel builder, OptimizeFunnels LINK, as well as a host of additional features and benefits.

Before you ask... Yes, you can sell subscription products right inside your funnels as your primary product, as well as upsell and downsells.

As mentioned earlier, our subscription payment options are built into OptimizeCheckouts, making it super easy to create new subscription products or switch existing one-time payment products to be subscriptions product types.

You can offer these subscription products as:

This covers all billing periods for successful selling of recurring products.

Along with those billing periods above, you can offer:

Free trial periods - This is the number of days before the billing begins.

Setup prices - This could be used to charge an initial price for a product/service, then after that period, the monthly payments begin.

An example of setup prices might be an initial website set up fee of $500 (set up price) - then monthly marketing consultation (subscription product) that starts after the set up price period.

This covers all billing periods for successful selling of recurring products.

Along with those billing periods above, you can offer:

Free trial periods - This is the number of days before the billing begins.

Setup prices - This could be used to charge an initial price for a product/service, then after that period, the monthly payments begin.

An example of setup prices might be an initial website set up fee of $500 (set up price) - then monthly marketing consultation (subscription product) that starts after the set up price period.

NOTE: At the time of launch, you cannot offer payment plans like; $997 divided into 4 payments (sometimes called installment payment plans); however that will come very soon.

One of the brilliant features is seeing the calculation when you create a billing period, including trials or setup prices.

If you charge $97 for a monthly coaching service with a 7 day trial, OptimizeCheckouts calculates and shows you how the customer is going to be charged.

E.g. - Your customer will be charged $0.00 immediately for their 7 day trial, and then $97.00 every month until they cancel.

If you change the billing period or enter a setup price you will see a new calculation.

We couldn't create a subscription payment type without including the integrations. The ability to send vital subscription data about customers to your email marketing provider opens up more opportunities for segmenting and targeting leads with future products.

We have included various triggers than will send data based on different billing behaviours like:

These payment actions provide you with insights into customers payments or billing, meaning you can trigger further automated marketing emails based on what's been triggered on your site and sent to your email service.

Here's an example.

You run a monthly coaching club teaching people about creating landing pages called "Master Your Landing Pages". A customer joins your monthly club on a 7 day trial.

Inside your EMS (Email Marketing Service) you set up the following tags.

1. Tag: MYLP - New Trial
2. Tag: MYLP - New Member
3. Tag: MYLP - Payment Failed
4. Tag: MYLP - Subscription Cancelled
5. 
   
6. Here’s the tags created inside of Drip.

You also write a series of emails that are sent when a lead is tagged as above. This part deserves a full blog post because you'd have to set up a few emails, but here's some examples of ideas I'm thinking of.

Most email services that have automation allow you to start the automation when a lead is tagged. Usually, this is called a trigger.

Here are some example email automations you could have setup in your EMS.

Here’s an automation setup inside of Drip to send an email to new trial members.

Inside our EMS we've created:

Now, for example, let's say someone goes to your checkout forms and buys your subscription product called "Master Your Landing Pages".

Here's are the rules that will fire inside OptimizeCheckouts and send customer data to you EMS:

These integration rules give you full control over the actions your customers take on your site and during or after a purchase.

So, if someone cancels a subscription, you can run actions to reach out to customers to run win-back campaigns. Win-back campaigns can help you to recover lost customers and bring them back into your subscription.

Sometimes people don't know if a payment fails. They don't want to miss out on access to your membership site, so you send a polite email reminding them to login and update their payment info.

Once you write these emails or automated email sequences inside your EMS, OptimizePress will send new data or update existing leads by sending the new tags, and your emails will run automatically. The beauty of these types of automation setups is that they only have to be created once and can run on autopilot.

With OptimizeCheckouts we have a coupon feature where you create a fixed price or discounted coupon for any product.

Apps like Honey have driven consumer interest for coupons even higher than they already were. People now search for coupons before they spend.

As a marketer, you can take advantage of these buying habits by offering coupons. You can even use coupons as a lead magnet to grow your email list.

A simple coupon can mean one extra conversion, and remember what we said about selling a subscription service, and it's compounding growth. Just one new member a day can increase your revenue rapidly, and it might just take a little coupon to encourage someone to make a purchase.

This is an example of membership/subscription revenue growth based on a business selling 10 x $49/month subscriptions over 6 months with 10% churn ( calculations for example purposes only)

This coupon feature has also been added to work with Subscription payments, where you can discount the whole cycle of the recurring payment or apply it to the setup fee.

Creating a coupon is the same as you would for one-time products. You set the code, expiry date and discount type.

Further down you have the option to set if you want the discount to run over the entire billing period or apply it to just the initial setup fee.

Apply to recurring/future payments:

Yes = Apply the discount to the full billing period including each renewal rebill

No = Apply the discount only to the initial checkout total - E.g if subscription was $30/month and the coupon was $10 then it would be $20 first payment then $30/month for recurring payments after that

As we said earlier, your subscription products will work inside OptimizeFunnels and you can use the complete range of checkout templates to sell your subscription products.

The same way you've been adding products to checkouts forms, is exactly the same way you do it with subscriptions.

Either in the page editor: through the form wizard.

Or directly in the funnel visualiser meaning it’s much quicker to quickly switch out products.

Here's how a subscription product looks on the checkout page.

Notice the new Future Payments section to clearly show the customer the billing period allowing you to be transparent with the customer about future payments. You never want to be in a position where the customer didn’t know they joined a recurring payment program. Clearly explained pricing will reduce refund requests.

As you know, statistics are vital for seeing how your offers are performing and when selling subscriptions you can start to see how those recurring payments are building up over time or which offers are converting more customers.

We've included a new "Recurring Payments" stats page to view only those subscription sales you make as well as showing subscription orders on the order summary page.

You can find Recurring Payments under Checkouts.

The type of statistics you can view and monitor will grow in future releases of OptimizeCheckouts. Future updates will give you the ability to drill down into various areas of product sales and product types.

You can also view all sales types on the Orders page. Notice how each product will show if it is a one-time or subscription order.

The types of subscription you can offer is an in-depth topic that deserves a more detailed post all of its own but we couldn't leave you wondering what to sell.

Here's some ideas of products you might want to offer as subscription type products:

These are a never-ending amount of subscription product ideas. Look at everything you buy, and then think, can it be switched to a subscription product?

First you need to be on the OptimizeSuite Plan and have OptimizeCheckouts and OptimizeFunnels installed and activated.

Once you have those plugins enabled you can sell products and create funnels inside OptimizePress.

To add a new subscription product do the following:

That's it! Your subscription product is created and ready to use.

Next, complete the other optional product options:

Once your product is done you can now begin selling by using any checkout page you’ve already designed or any of the checkout templates inside of OptimizePress. You can also create a brand new sales funnel in OptimizeFunnels from one of our done for you funnels.

So there you have it! Subscription payments are ready to use and we can’t wait to see you selling recurring payment products. This new feature has been in development for months and makes OptimizePress even more powerful for selling digital products.

The subscription business model is a big topic, one that we’ll be writing about in future articles to give you ideas and share inspirational stories from our community.

Even if you are not yet ready to sell a subscription product there’s a high chance you will introduce them at some point as another revenue stream. Once you have any recurring revenue in your business you can quickly see how stable your income can be from just a small number of customers.

If you are just learning about OptimizePress now, you can go and take a look at our on-demand demo to see what we offer. You can also read about the done for you checkouts and funnels that are part of the OptimizePress platform. If you’re on the fence and looking for a platform to handle your list building and sales funnels then try our OptimizeSuite plan.

We'd love to hear from you! Let us know how you're planning to use the new Subscriptions feature in OptimizeCheckouts