Explore 14 best subscription management tools and software for recurring payments

In a digital-first economy, organisations and customers are adopting recurring payment systems to bypass cumbersome renewals of scheduled payments. Gyms and wellness centres, product delivery services, and food and drink entities are harnessing this technology to ease out membership renewal processes, streamline periodic delivery services, and offer tiered benefits to loyal customers. With business expansions, professional subscription management companies are becoming a pivotal part of this ecosystem.

By the end of this post, you will gain an understanding of best practices and tools available for managing subscriptions effectively, minimising churn, and unlocking your business’s full potential.

What is subscription management?

At its essence, managing subscriptions entails supervising every facet of a customer's subscription journey, starting from initial sign-up through renewals, upgrades, cancellations, and beyond. This includes tasks such as managing billing processes, implementing pricing changes, monitoring subscriber activities, and responding to customer enquiries. For organisations experiencing a significant influx of clients, handling subscriptions manually becomes unsustainable.

Consider a gym providing different membership levels or a meal delivery service with multiple subscription plans — without effective automation and management, these enterprises would face significant challenges in adapting to shifts in customer preferences, payment schedules, and service adjustments.

Efficient subscription management is crucial, particularly in sectors where customer experience and satisfaction take precedence. An inadequate subscription experience — stemming from billing mistakes, lack of communication, or inflexible service frameworks — can swiftly lead to customer attrition.

Subscription management tools address these challenges by streamlining workflows, enhancing billing precision, and giving customers a periodic overview of their subscriptions.

What is the best way to manage subscriptions?

The key to managing subscriptions effectively lies in harnessing the automation capabilities and in-depth analytics of subscription management software. Let’s take a closer look at this process:

1. Automation

Automating tasks like billing, notifications, and customer support can greatly enhance operational efficiency. In industries such as product delivery services, where subscription volumes can increase significantly, it would be impractical to manage each customer individually. Subscription management platforms like Wonderful, Recurly, and Zuora streamline essential processes, including invoicing, payment processing, and renewals.

Wonderful is a UK-based open banking payments company with user-friendly, subscription / recurring payment functionality and attractive pricing for businesses of all sizes. Its effortless API integration adds to its growing popularity among local businesses looking to streamline their subscription management system.

Recurly is particularly favoured by small to medium-sized enterprises seeking to streamline subscription processes and offer adaptable billing solutions. This solution enables businesses to manage subscription payments in multiple currencies, monitor unsuccessful transactions, and provide customers with the convenience of upgrading or pausing their subscriptions effortlessly.

Conversely, Zuora is tailored for enterprise-level organisations, allowing them to oversee intricate subscription plans, various pricing tiers, and international customer bases. The comprehensive reporting features offer valuable insights into customer behaviour, facilitating the customisation of services to align with their requirements.

2. Customer centricity

Focusing on customer delight is the best way to build loyalty. Customers expect smooth and flexible subscription management from any business, whether it's a gym or a meal kit delivery service. Businesses can offer customisable plans with tools like Chargebee, which makes it easy for customers to change their payment level. This is very important for businesses like wellness centres, which often experience seasonal member preferences.

Chargebee also stands out for its excellent customer service. It automatically reminds customers to renew their subscriptions, follows up on failed payments, and even offers different subscription plans based on how customers have been using the service. This keeps customers interested without overburdening staff.

3. Data-driven business insights

Subscription management technologies provide detailed customer analytics. Businesses may estimate churn, understand their subscriber base, and adapt subscription offerings with these insights. Paddle is a SaaS platform that helps businesses make price and service decisions by tracking KPIs including Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), churn rates, and customer lifetime value (CLV).

Data on member cancellation rates might help gyms and health centres offer discounts or other advantages before losing them. Also, product delivery services can use client data to tailor their products to preferences and purchase habits.

How to reduce churn for my subscription services?

A 4% monthly churn rate is regarded as a satisfactory benchmark for a subscription company, with an average annual churn rate of 5-7%.

While customer churn is inevitable for subscriber-centric businesses, organisations are constantly striving to come up with innovative plans to reduce the number. If you are in this business, try implementing the following strategies to control your customer attrition rate:

Build memorable customer experiences

Optimising the customer journey at every level is a tried and true method for reducing turnover. Organisations may map the client lifecycle with the help of tools like Salesforce Revenue Cloud, which pinpoints key touchpoints where interaction can be enhanced. For instance, health clubs might utilise this information to create unique exercise programs for each client, and meal delivery services can reward repeat clients with exclusive deals.

From onboarding to renewal, help consumers through a seamless journey that fosters loyalty. Customer attrition can be reduced by self-service, flexible programs, and easy cancellation procedures (albeit with rejoining incentives).

Offer flexible plans

Reducing churn requires flexibility. Different customers need different service levels throughout their subscription. Gyms and fitness studios can provide tiered membership options so customers can upgrade or downgrade as their fitness goals change.

Bold Commerce allows businesses to provide flexible subscription options. It offers tiered pricing, "build your own" subscriptions, and dynamic billing. Bold Commerce is great for product delivery services and food and drink enterprises, where customers can change the delivery frequency or product mix for each cycle. A coffee subscription business may let clients simply adjust their delivery schedule or coffee blend preferences, while a wellness centre could provide different service packages to meet customer demands.

Proactive communication strategy

Communicating with subscribers before they cancel is crucial. Businesses may automate personalised messages like subscription renewal reminders and long-term client offers with HubSpot CRM. Proactive involvement makes clients feel appreciated, whether gyms remind members of due dates or meal kit businesses provide limited-time promotions.

Tracking customer sentiment using CRM solutions like HubSpot lets organisations identify potential churns early and take action, such as offering incentives to stay or addressing complaints before they escalate.

What is the best subscription management tool?

The ideal subscription management tool depends significantly on your industry's best practices. Hence, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution that serves every sector. Keeping this in mind, we have focused on three industries, which are heavily subscription-dependent.

Gyms and wellness centres

Mindbody is an effective solution tailored for the fitness and wellness sector. This system efficiently handles memberships, recurring payments, and class bookings, making it well-suited for gyms, yoga studios, and wellness centres that depend on a subscription-based revenue model. The Mindbody mobile application enables users to efficiently manage their memberships, schedule appointments, and process payments, ensuring a smooth customer experience.

Food and drink businesses

Shopify provides a variety of subscription management tools, like Recharge, that cater to enterprises in the food and drink industry. Recharge is an app that effortlessly integrates with Shopify. It helps companies handle repeat orders, notify consumers automatically, and provide them with alternative methods to pay. Whether you run a food delivery service or a coffee subscription service, Recharge simplifies subscription billing and gives you valuable insights into consumer behaviour patterns.

Product delivery services

Subscription boxes are on the rise in the United Kingdom and are expected to cross £1.8 billion by 2025. Subbly is ideal for subscription boxes or delivery services as it oversees the full subscription lifetime, including client acquisition, billing, and delivery logistics. Subbly's simple interface enables businesses to easily set up and manage subscription products, while its automatic billing system guarantees that consumers are charged correctly and on time. This makes it an ideal choice for meal kit services and other delivery-oriented enterprises.

What is a good CRM for subscription-based startups?

Customer relationship management (CRM) tools play a pivotal role in streamlining operations and building customer loyalty for subscription-based startups. Some of the best CRM tools for new entrants in the subscription industry are:

Zoho CRM provides comprehensive subscription management features for startups aiming for growth. This solution enables organisations to oversee customer interactions, streamline processes, and monitor subscription phases. The platform integrates with Zoho Subscriptions, allowing companies to manage billing, renewals, and subscription upgrades seamlessly in one location. This integration enables startups to optimise their customer interactions and effectively monitor each customer’s progression through different subscription phases. The combination of affordability and scalability positions it as an excellent option for startups.

Freshsales, a CRM solution from Freshworks, is another great option for subscription-based enterprises. In addition to an intuitive dashboard, it offers robust customer administration capabilities, AI-powered insights, and built-in email tracking. For subscription businesses, Freshsales integrates with popular subscription billing software such as Chargebee, enabling companies to manage renewals, analyse churn, and monitor customer lifecycles. Freshsales also provides a user-friendly interface that enables startups to manage customer relationships and concentrate on development.

Salesforce Essentials is tailored for small and expanding enterprises, especially subscription-based startups. This streamlined iteration of Salesforce delivers essential CRM functionalities—contact management, lead tracking, and sales automation—while facilitating interaction with subscription billing platforms such as Recurly and Zuora. This enables subscription-based startups to oversee client data and subscription cycles within a single system, assisting firms in optimising sales efforts and minimising churn. The vast application ecosystem renders it a highly customisable solution as firms expand.

What is the best subscription management software for SaaS?

Before we dive straight into some of the top subscription management software, specifically customised for the SaaS industry, let’s understand the significance of this tool in facilitating operational convenience for these companies.

●        Automated billing and invoicing: SaaS providers handle complex recurring payments. Billing is automated using subscription management software, eliminating errors.

●        Customer lifecycle management: tracking customer behaviour, upgrades, downgrades, renewals, and cancellations improves client retention methods.

●        Flexible pricing: SaaS firms offer usage-based or tiered pricing. Businesses can easily install and manage these models with subscription management software.

●        Automated dunning management: This helps SaaS organisations cut attrition and recover revenue.

●        Analytics and insights: The platform helps businesses make data-driven pricing, growth, and retention decisions by providing granular subscription insights.

●        Global scalability: subscription management platforms let SaaS companies expand globally and comply with complex regulations by supporting numerous currencies and languages.

Keeping these objectives in mind, we have selected some subscription management software that caters to industry-specific requirements of SaaS companies.

Stripe billing

Stripe Billing, a popular subscription management technology, is easy to use and integrates well with the Stripe ecosystem, including Stripe Payments and Stripe Radar for fraud detection. It provides SaaS firms with versatile and scalable recurring billing solutions like invoicing, metered billing, and tax compliance. Stripe Billing supports many currencies, making it suitable for international enterprises. Automation technologies like smart invoicing and dunning management assist in recovering rejected payments and preventing churn on the platform.

2Checkout (now Verifone)

2Checkout, can be considered as a credible Stripe alternative, it offers global subscription management, recurring billing, and payment processing for SaaS and digital service providers. 2Checkout simplifies global subscription management with numerous payment methods and currencies. Its primary features include automatic invoicing, customer retention tools, and extensive analytics on consumer behaviours and subscription performance. 2Checkout's robust API lets businesses customise their billing and subscription workflows, making it a top choice for multinational enterprises aiming to reduce payment friction.

Billsby

Billsby is an uncomplicated subscription management software for SaaS, product delivery, and membership organisations. Innovative subscription management tools include variable pricing models, prorated billing, and client communication tools to simplify complex billing procedures. Businesses can automate regular payments and customer management with Billsby's easy integration with leading payment gateways and CRMs. Startups and small businesses aiming to scale would benefit from its customisable dunning management solutions to recover rejected payments and prevent attrition.

Apart from these, Wonderful, Fusebill, and Billforward are some mentionable names that serve the SaaS industry efficiently with their easy-to-use, customisable, and affordable subscription management tools.

Conclusion

Effective subscription management tools are critical for optimising operations, reducing churn, and improving customer experience in the dynamic subscription-based industry. Subscription management software can boost productivity and scalability for SaaS platforms, product delivery services, and food and drink businesses. Choosing the right platform for your business strategy can build client loyalty and help create a roadmap for future growth.

FAQs

What is a subscription model?

A subscription model charges customers monthly or annually for a product or service. Fixed, tiered, per-user, and usage-based subscription models serve diverse consumer demands. Businesses may develop dependable, long-term revenue streams while offering clients flexibility and continual value with this model. Subscription models help SaaS, product delivery, and streaming platforms retain customers and grow.

What are the best apps for subscriptions?

Recurly, Chargebee, Zuora, and Stripe Billing are great subscription management tools for automatic billing, customer administration, and variable pricing. Wonderful is another emerging name that is ideally suited for small enterprises and charitable organisations in the UK.

What are the best B2B subscription apps?

Zoho Subscriptions, Recurly, Chargify, and Billforward are some of the best B2B subscription management tools. These subscription management tools help B2B companies handle recurring billing, find the best pricing models, and make data-driven business decisions.

Photo by Microsoft 365 on Unsplash