5 KEY Automated Workflows for YOUR Subscription Business

Hey guys, this is Isaac from sapaholic.com and opzer.co. And in this video, I want to walk you through 5 workflows I set up for clients that have some sort of subscription offer, whether that's a community of sorts, a coaching program, or a service, a traditional service that they're offering to clients. And what are those 5 triggers 5 main events that you want to take into account or create workflows for, create steps for after someone has purchased, uh, one of those subscription products or services. So I'm going to walk you through that. Okay, so number 1, purchase. That's the first and the main event you want to consider. That's an obvious one. Then there's the refund, there's a cancellation, There's the payment failure the first time it happens. There's the nth or the last payment failure. I wanna walk you through what that means in a second. And a bonus one here, there's also renewing members. This is a simple one, but one that can really prevent a lot of upset clients and upset customers. So this first video is gonna be just the conceptual of the workflows and the basic steps you wanna set up. In the coming videos, I'm gonna walk you through in more detail, break down each one of these actually as a, you know, over-the-shoulder tutorials, opening up Zapier and setting those up. If you wanna make sure you're notified for those other breakdown videos and more detailed tutorials, make sure to subscribe and hit that notification bell. So let's get started with workflow number 1, which is the purchase, the main event, the moment the client decides, hey, I like what you have to offer. I'm gonna give it a shot. Okay? The first thing you wanna do is you wanna grant access to whatever it is that they offer if you can. This is optional for depending on the type of business you run. But if it's content, if it's a community of sorts, you may wanna make sure you give access to them to that immediately. If it's a traditional service or if it's some sort of coaching of some kind where you're gonna have maybe a recurring meeting with them, you wanna make sure that you at least give them all the details that they want upfront. So at least they know what to expect. Okay? You also wanna update that contact on your CRM or email marketing tool. You wanna tag them accordingly and make sure you update any custom fields that are relevant. If you're using a project management system or a database, which is very helpful, typically When you are a service business and you are doing something on the backend to deliver that, if whether it was your employees, your coaches in your team, whatever it might be, you wanna make sure you update that database with that new client that came in. And you also wanna make sure you have some sort of retention, you know, series in place where people are gonna receive regular information that's going to allow them to stay longer. Also, this is something that I've also seen a couple of clients do. It's to make sure that within that email series, you also have either separately within your email marketing tool or within Zapier, you can actually have a Gmail email, the Gmail step so that, that Email actually seems a lot more personal. Okay? This is not an email in their CRM with your logo and all of that. It's just a much more personalized or seemingly personalized email that you can delay depending on your business. But typically 14 to 30 days is what you want to wait in order to ask clients for a review or a testimony. Depending on the business, you might want to actually set up a different workflow where the trigger is not the purchase and simply a time delay, but the trigger might be, for example, the delivery of your first project. So that will depend on the business. But typically you wanna make sure you have somewhere set up in place a trigger so that you can get reviews automatically. And think about what are the review platforms that are most relevant to you. I have clients that are using Trustpilot for their service business or their even the course business. Some people might wanna— are using like Google reviews, the kind of like a Google profile, if they're more traditional type of company. So think about what is— what's the best place for you to lead people to leave your review and make sure you're leading them that way. So that's workflow number 1 at a glance. Let's talk about workflow number 2. This isn't something that everyone will necessarily have, but if you have some sort of guarantee in place and you offer refunds, then you want to— you may— you want to make sure you have this workflow in place where you're going to Immediately revoke access to that person to whatever it is that you give them access to. You're gonna update that contact. That might mean you're gonna remove any member tax you had in place, and you're gonna add tax that tells you that the person refund, and you're gonna update your database and project management system accordingly. So the people that are in charge of the delivery know that this person refunded. Something else I also seen some of my clients do is they have some sort of refund Survey, so they ask people why they refunded, and that serves as feedback for you know potentially other changes. Maybe they didn't know it was going to renew or something, or maybe they were not happy with a specific part of your service, and that might be useful information for you to reduce your churn, reduce your. Chargebacks and refunds. Now getting into workflow number 3, what if people cancel? Notice that this is slightly different than the refund. The refund, you want to immediately have a set of actions. If people canceled, although you want to update their information in your CRM or in your email marketing tool, there are other things that you need to wait until the end of the into the end of the billing period. So think, for example, that I paid for a year of a particular service and I cancel month 8. Well, I have still 4 months left. So you wanna make sure that in your SaaS, in your workflows, you have that taken into account because you don't wanna remove access immediately. You wanna make sure that you wait and delay for the remaining days. And then what you do, it's similarly you revoke access, you update whatever delivery system you have on the backend. And something I've also seen a lot of clients do successfully is to add that person to some sort of win-back automation, some sort of win-back email series of some kind where you're going to— since this person didn't refund, she was probably happy. Maybe it wasn't the right time, so they canceled, or just life happened. You may want to encourage them to return as a client later on. Okay, so let's go to workflow number 4, which is very simple and just has one action. And is, what if the moment the client has to renew the subscription, their payment fails? At that point, what I would— what I've seen my clients do is they don't do anything on the backend specifically, like updating the contacts or removing their access, but they simply trigger an email series where they encourage people to update their billing information. Typically, depending on what payment gateway you're using, something like Stripe, they might automatically send emails telling the customer that they intended— that tried to charge and couldn't. But what's important is that depending on what tools you're using, Stripe might not be able to tell the client, to tell the customer exactly how to update their billing information. So you are the one responsible here, uh, telling the client, hey, we tried to charge you, but we couldn't. So here are the steps for you to update your payment information. Make it as easy as possible for them. And depending on the size of your team, maybe if you have people that are able to reach out, either call the client directly, it's something you may wanna do so that you can you put in contact with them and help them go through that process. Depending on the payment gateway you're using, again, most payment gateways have already a number of attempts that they do when a payment fails. So they might try like every 4 to 5 days for 4 to 5 times, and at some point they will just do not try anymore. And you can use that either say the 3rd or the 4th if you want, if you don't want to wait till the end, or you can use the last attempt as the trigger to do everything else. And you're essentially assuming, hey, if we were unable to charge you, we will treat you as someone who canceled. And essentially you repeat some of the steps we've already talked about. You're going to update their contact, remove and add tags accordingly, revoke access. Update your delivery system on the backend if applicable. And you also want to add them to the win-back automation because it's possible out here they're not particularly unhappy, probably. Maybe they just changed, their credit card expired, life happened, and they moved on. But maybe they're still interested, and if you hit them with an offer, you know, a month or 2 months later, they might take you up on it. Last but not least, this is one that I've seen a lot of people not implement, and it can save you a lot of headaches. It can save your support team a lot of headaches. Just simply reminding people that, uh, of the date of the renewal, uh, subscription. This is not relevant if your subscriptions are monthly because I typically do not recommend that you have a a renewal reminder email or communications of any type if, if it's monthly. It becomes very annoying to get an email every month reminding you about a particular subscription. This is mostly applicable if you have, say, like a quarterly subscription, a semi-annual subscription, or an annual subscription. And here what you want to do is that you want to simply make sure that X days before the renewal, you just send them an email letting them know that that payment is coming due soon. The days I've seen clients use range from anywhere between 30 days to as little as 7 days. Sometimes they have 2 to 3 emails in that timeframe. And this is a great way for you to give people a heads up that that payment is coming and not have anyone upset, because no one likes a surprise. On their back statement, right? That's essentially the 6 workflows I've seen most commonly set up for any subscription type of product or service. As I said earlier, I'm going to be breaking down these in detail. So if you want to stay tuned for that, make sure to subscribe. If you run a profitable education or service business, and you want to make sure you put the system in place to scale your business faster and with less overhead, we'd definitely love to talk to you. Check out the first link in the description to talk with me or one of our team members to see if we're a fit. And if you do this for a living, if you love nerding out about automation, there's another link in the description where we might have career opportunities available for you. So feel free to check that out. And thanks for watching. Until next time.