MRR is the lifeblood of the modern company. Every company regardless of size should have this Monthly Recurring Revenue. This way you can count on and predict next month’s revenue.
A Few Monthly Recurring Revenue Examples:
Dentist: Teeth whitening plan of every six months you are making sure people are coming back for each whitening.
Non Profit: Monthly giving where you have a credit card on file and you know that they will be auto-billed.
CPA: A subscription that you can provide billing services every month for clients. The bonus is that you can keep increasing services (more on this later).
The two questions we need to answer can we (A) increase our MRR and (B) start opting more people into the monthly plans for service.
Every month measure your Monthly Recurring Revenue and make sure you are trending in the correct direction and have a plan!
The utility is how you will get sustainable growth!
Utils are a concept we rely heavily on for strategy, we have a whole blog post on that.
Here is the gist, Utils are used to measure levels of pleasure. Often times the level of pleasure of the first piece of pizza is not the same as the 10th piece of pizza. If you can pivot before those utils drop off you have successfully optimized. Read the whole blog here.
Basically, you are trying to provide more value then they are paying on a recurring basis to avoid Churn (people unsubscribing/leaving your service). Here are a few tactics to disrupt that until drop off.
Surprise and Delight.
Show the subscriber something new. Maybe automatically increase their service or go above and beyond.
Example 1: If you are a pool maintenance company, bring a rake and rake the leaves around the pool. They are now surprised and delighted.
Example 2: You are a Nonprofit. You can send a monthly personalized video using something like Bonjoro to WOW those monthly donors every month. You want them to miss you if they “unsubscribe”. We have a whole article on different ways to do this. Keep Reading
Profitable Loss Leaders!
It sounds like an oxymoron. A loss leader is something that gets people in the door at a loss. The big differentiator is that you have to have a path for getting a predictable amount of people to pay more.
Example 1: My local car exhaust and repair company offers free inspections. they will take 15-20 minutes to look over your car and tell you what they believe is wrong and what they propose to do. The business owner is paying someone to do that for 20 minutes (At a loss), but the goal is that they will come back to have them Fixit.
Example 2: We Do This! We offer audits at a loss. Our initial audits are a loss for us because it takes so many hours to complete. Feel free to send us a message and we can show you what we do 🙂
Our goal is that about 50% of people we provide an audit to become a client of ours. (They usually never leave)
Value Bump/Gamification
This is not for everyone but many digital products can do this. Issue certificates for completion and keep a count of how many things a user completed. Give badges if they do a certain amount of actions.. or give a ranking of activity. “you are in the top 10% of active users”
Again, its not for everyone, but i just wanted to leave this here for you. If you can pull it off you can really increase your acquisition and stick. Duolingo is the best case study for this.
Just make sure you measure it.
I cannot emphasize this enough. Make sure you measure what you do! Look at your MRR revenue, churn, and stick.
If you do not, you will not know what is/is not working! And then you will lose no matter what.
