Nope, you’re not Netflix (yet): looking at engagement the right way.

When launching a subscription model, the holy grail is creating a habit or habitual use of your product.

Habitual use means your customers use you for longer, right?

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When we launched our subscription model, I was excited.

“We’re going to be like Netflix for careers! We’re going to get people signing up, they’ll watch all the content; people are going to hit their career milestones much sooner”.

You’ll be surprised to know that’s not what happened (!) - but that’s not a bad thing, and here’s why.

We learned an important lesson about context.

By comparing ourselves to Netflix was a bit naive of me (albeit aspirational).

Apart from the obvious, when I claimed the above, I didn’t take into account the 1) industry we were operating and 2) the end user’s situation: what problem were they looking to solve.

I was trying to compare a video learning platform - something you typically use to achieve an (infrequent) career milestone - with a consumer service, one that’s engrained into daily life.

Look at Netflix.

In many households, particularly where there are millennials/Gen Z, it has replaced terrestrial TV. These viewers, typically, use a streaming service and YouTube instead to watch a series.

Some days, something like Netflix acts as an entertainment source, other times, it’s a boredom-filler. Either way, it’s going on every day.

Then, think about how other subscription services, both B2B and B2C, and how you use them and how often you use them.

E.g. Amazon Prime, LinkedIn Premium, and awesome ideas, such as craft beer subscription service BrewGooder.

With Amazon, I will visit it typically once a week and buy something, maybe every fortnight. (Unless I’ve had a few too many whiskeys, and I’ll buy a bulk load of books or presents for the dog). My usage has increased with the COVID situation, especially as I can’t get a slot for home delivery from Tesco.

Then look at LinkedIn Premium. I’m on this every day. For work it’s really useful, but I’m a casual user at the moment. I’ll go in, see how work marketing campaigns are performing. If I was job hunting, I believe my usage would go from around 30 mins a day to several hours.

The point I’m making is that context is a key player in determining what drives engagement.

It’s the context that sets the scene and is the way to start understanding engagement for your subscription business. Understand this, and you can begin to understand what metrics you need to pay attention to.

How do you create habits to encourage the use of your SaaS product?

Ah, the big question.

You’re not alone if you see a natural link between the subscription or SaaS model as a way to ‘seamlessly’ generate recurring revenue.

Nir Eyal, author of Hooked, talks about habit forming and linking it to a business model:

• Habit-forming products alleviate users’ pain by relieving a pronounced itch.

• Companies find that their economic value is a function of the strength of the habits they create.

Eyal says this is achieved via a series of ‘hooks’ that connect the user’s problem with a company’s solution frequently enough to form a habit.

Okay, so let’s look back at it from Careercake’s perspective.

[Can I just point out that whilst we positioned ourselves within the same field as Netflix, we weren’t expecting the same engagement in terms of views, revenue, rather the WAY people would use our platform].

How we learned to look at subscription engagement and its context.

First off, we needed to break down our audiences.

You’ve got multiple audiences who use Careercake, all of which use the platform and content to achieve different milestones.

Here’s a general breakdown.

B2B: Organisations
These are the organisations that purchase access for their end users, each which has a different relationship, levels of commitment and different career pain points.

B2B2C: End users of the organisation

These are example end users in which the above group have bought Careercake for.

i) Employees who have just joined a company or are about to embark on training.

ii) Students studying at university, in their second or third year - which means they are either applying for work placements or gearing up for graduation.

iii) Customer - someone who’s just landed a new job.

B2C: Direct consumers who’ve come to us.

These are those users who fall into categories such as:

i) They’ve lost their job

ii) Employed, going for a promotion

iii) Employed, transitioning to a new role (e.g. new manager)

The next question we had to ask ourselves was:

HOW do you decide what good engagement is, when you’ve got up to 10 different personas?

Here’s what we learned:

1. You don’t need to focus on everyone. Lack focus and you’ll create a bland and crappy experience for a lot of people.

2. Focus on the groups that are most likely to exhibit the right behaviours and stay with you longer. E.g. If you know there’s a group that is likely to make up a lot of your churn rate, ask yourself are you driving interest from the RIGHT group?

3. Some groups need a little more attention, such as the b2b2c audience as they weren’t the ones who entered the relationship initially. (Think about the effort needed when your Aunty buys you a magazine subscription, but you’re the one who has to phone up and activate it, even though you don’t even read Gardeners’ World).

Next up, look at the context of how end users engage with your product.

Following a heap of interviews with our high priority users, we learned what is valuable to them when using a service like ours, with the aim of optimising the journey and aligning it against what was going on in their life.

The findings revealed many key insights which showed us where to anticipate bursts of increased use aligned against a calendar.

Some of the learnings:

> Seasonality:

Students studying different subjects, in different years of study, needed access to the content around deadlines for work experience. These deadlines differed by subject, however.

> Which version of a product have they subscribed?

Much of Eyal’s book talks about solving a customer’s pain by associating your brand as the source of relief. We looked at HOW people use our content to achieve certain milestones.

We have one library of content, made up of two product sets, which then are made up of six subsets of content. Broadly speaking, the two high level product sets are: content for job hunting and content for when you’re in a job.

The user who comes to us to help them sort out their CV will typically enter using the job hunting route. Their usage is short term, but they’ll watch a lot of content over a short amount of time.

A user who subscribes to the content for when you’re in a job will typically subscribe on a longer term basis. They’re more than likely facing a milestone such as getting ready for a promotion or to settle in as a new manager. This relationship typically will last longer than the first as it’s seen more as an investment.

Takeaways.

Subscription models and marketing, require you to market to new, existing and lapsed customers. All at the same time.

To gauge what ‘good’ engagement may look like, you need to have a good understanding of what context your users engage with you.

Qs to ask yourself to create something that people keep coming back to:

> what problem are your users coming to your product to solve?
> do they subscribe to it for themselves or do they do so on behalf of someone else?
> what’s going on externally that would affect usage of your product over X months?
> what do you think ‘good’ looks like? And what’s your basis for this?
> what user behaviour do you want to make become a habit
> break down your ideal users, which are the most important and why?