Over the years there has been a rise in the subscription economy as more and more businesses see the charm of the subscription-led revenue model.
According to a research by Zuora, India’s subscription economy has seen a growth of more than 400% in the last 8.5 years.
One primary reason to adopt the subscription model is to always have an eye on the expected quarterly and yearly revenue. In fact, several industries in the past have leveraged the subscription model to chart their growth.
Let’s see which industries have aced the subscription-led revenue model and how.
Industries that capitalised on the subscription model
As our lives slowly shift more and more towards consuming digital products as well as buying products digitally, businesses across the sectors have started offering subscription models.
Here we list the top four industries that used the subscription model as a ladder to increase their customer base.
- OTT
OTT or over-the-top platforms that let users stream video and audio content came about as a result of fast internet adoption. It was also a way for production companies to minimise piracy of their films. From the days of dealing with platforms that allowed users to download music and films for free, production companies have come a long way as they launch their own OTT platforms.
Many of them, including Netflix, one of the biggest OTT platforms, started out by allowing users to buy one-time viewing rights of a film or TV series. Now, in its current avatar, they offer a subscription model to viewers, who for a monthly or yearly fee can stream as many videos as they can, as many times they want.
Letting users subscribe for the streaming services has proven to be a game changer for OTT platforms. A report published by MICA said that digital subscriptions reported a 49% growth in 2021 over the previous year.
- BFSI
The companies operating in the BFSI (banking, financial services, and insurance) industry heavily rely on the subscription model as it makes payment collection easier. Right from customers who buy products on EMI or those who have to pay insurance premiums on a regular interval use subscription payment mode such as auto-debit.
By automating payment collection via e-NACH mandate or UPI AutoPay, now BFSI businesses need not worry about collecting payments on time or deal with defaulters. Subscription model has also been the backbone for wealth management companies that let users invest their money in mutual funds via monthly SIPs.
Paytm Subscriptions has been the torch bearer of auto-debit for the BFSI industry. It has partnered with all the major companies in the BFSI space.
- Furniture rental
Buying furniture for home and offices is slowly getting replaced by the whooping $4 billion rental industry in India.
Driving this trend are over half a dozen startups that enable customers to rent furniture and other home products instead of buying them. The demand of renting home furnishings including electronic products gained steam in the country between 2020-21 when the whole country was under lockdown for weeks.
With almost everyone working from home, the demand to rent furniture saw new heights. According to Grant Thornton, rental startups generated 28% more revenue in the Q2 of 2021 as compared to the corresponding period previous year.
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What made it easy for customers to rent furniture is the subscription model that furniture rental startups offered. All they had to do was to rent a piece of furniture and pay automatically using the subscription payment option. The fact that there was no need to remember to pay every month for the furniture made the offering attractive for customers.
A host of these rental startups rely on the prowess of Paytm Subscriptions to manage subscribers’ monthly payments, send invoices, and offer them easy one-click payment options.
- Edtech
Online education sector had been struggling for decades to get users who would pay for online tutorials. Most of the users went for free courses instead of buying the premium live tutorials.
It was only when schools and colleges were shut between late 2020 and 2021 that edtech companies started getting paid users.
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Edtech companies took their business up a notch by offering subscription plans to users. Parents loved the idea of subscribing to courses, as it meant instead of paying a one time hefty fee for the whole course they could pay a small amount every month. For edtech startups, it opened up a recurring stream of revenue.
Paytm Subscriptions has been instrumental from the beginning in supporting edtech startups to rollout different subscription-led revenue models. With Paytm Subscriptions edtech companies not only are able to increase their customer base, they also have better visibility into every subscriber’s life-cycle.
3 reasons to use Paytm Subscriptions
The subscription model is complicated to operate as there are too many things to take care of when it comes to dealing with a large number of digital payments. Here are three reasons why you should use Paytm Subscriptions:
- High success rate: While choosing a payment gateway to process customers’ payment to subscribe to your product or services it’s important to check the success rate.
Paytm Subscriptions has one of the highest payment success rates in the industry. Our robust APIs and customisable SDKs make sure almost all the transactions are successful. It can inform subscribers if the server of a particular bank is not working at its full potential.
With hundreds of millions of cards saved on our network, including over 100 million bank accounts, and 10 million-plus UPI IDs, the success rate of payments is higher than the industry standards.
- Subscription Links: Paytm Subscription Links is a simple way for you to remind users to pay for their recurring bill or monthly subscription. Paytm Subscription Links makes it easier for subscribers to pay using the link.
- Simple UPI Autopay mandate: Automating payments is the essence of the subscription model. With Paytm Subscriptions users can create the UPI AutoPay mandate easily on your platform.
These mandates are created instantly, after which there is no need for users to enter their UPI IDs to make their recurring payments. Your users have the freedom to modify, pause or even revoke the mandate when they want to cancel the subscription.
Conclusion
With the rise in the consumption of digital services, offering users to subscribe to your products has become important.
Paytm Subscriptions offers you one of the highest payment success rates, convenience of deploying multiple subscription models, and letting users pay from all the payment modes.
