How to Build a Product Subscription with Webflow

Want to learn more about building a subscription product with Webflow? You’re in the right place! We’re about to dive into the benefits of subscriptions, designing the perfect subscription product, and what you need to build a great product.

‍ Introduction: Why a Product Subscription?

Subscription models have proven successful for both businesses and their customers. They allow businesses to continuously capture revenue for the value they provide and provide customers with reliable, ongoing access to their products and services. 

Subscription Model Benefits

In a time where people increasingly expect convenience and personalized experiences, the subscription model has proven to have many advantages over one-time sales. Four main advantages we tend to see include:

1. More Consistent and Predictable Revenue

Regularly paying customers create a revenue stream baseline for your business. As long as your churn is manageable, you can use this baseline for forecasting and predictions. 

2. Increased Opportunities to Upsell and Cross-sell

Your subscriber base presents a prequalified lead list – you already know they’re interested in your niche and willing to pay for it. You can also use their behaviour and shared interests to continue to sell to them more effectively.

3. Lower Marketing Costs to Maintain Revenue

Retaining a customer is generally cheaper than finding a new one. This means that as long as your churn isn’t 100% (the default for one-time sales), you’ll have lower marketing costs to maintain revenue with a subscription model.

4. Easier Community Building

Your subscribers will interact with your product often, which helps develop customer loyalty and trust. Their regular interactions with your product give them opportunities to talk about it and form connections with other customers.

Before the Build: Conceptualizing Your Subscription Service

The subscription revenue model has popped up everywhere, from gourmet food and beauty products to streaming services and software. Whatever you’re selling can likely succeed using a subscription model, too, and we want to help! Let’s review some important things to consider while planning your next successful subscription product.

Carving Out Your Niche

The key to capturing the interest of potential subscribers is identifying a niche that is both underserved and ripe for innovation. Your niche may flow naturally out of your own hobbies and interests or be discovered through research. Most importantly, once you've chosen your niche, you’ll want to define your value offering within it clearly. The clarity of your value proposition will be the beacon that attracts subscribers.

Envisioning the Subscriber Experience

Beyond the mechanics of billing and delivery, the subscriber experience includes every touchpoint your customer has with your service—from the initial discovery and sign-up process to the unboxing experience or digital content delivery. 

We love that Webflow allows us to translate brand visions into consistent digital experiences for customers easily. You can build a product’s site with no code in Webflow, then use Memberstack to add all the functionality required to create and manage your customer experience.

Seek Inspiration From Existing Subscription Product Examples

Exploring successful subscription models can provide valuable insights into what resonates with consumers. We’ve handpicked a few successful examples that you’ve probably seen before.

Netflix

One of the largest entertainment providers around, Netflix has become a household staple and a great example of converting a consumer’s desire for entertainment into recurring revenue. Their product is purely digital, personalized, and regularly updated.

Adobe Creative Cloud

Creative professionals worldwide depend on Adobe for the software used to complete creative projects. Adobe is a great example of a business that upholds its value proposition. It develops and delivers features that can help creative professionals run their businesses, even if they exclude a segment of the hobbyist market to do so.

Dollar Shave Club

Dollar Shave Club meets the regular needs of its customers by delivering razors and shaving supplies. They’re a great example of a subscription business built on top of a physical product that succeeds in a well-served market. Dollar Shave Club thrives against big competitors by offering lower prices through its direct-to-consumer model.

Choosing a Platform

There are many choices when it comes to selecting which platform to use to promote and sell your subscription product. Every platform has its own advantages and disadvantages. Some are cheaper to run but take much longer to set up, or they are much faster to set up but have a more limited feature set. We’re big fans of Webflow, having found it to score well in terms of affordability, time to build, and feature set.

We’d recommend checking out Webflow for your product subscription build. Keep reading to learn more about how to build a subscription product with Webflow.

How to Create a Subscription Product Using a Webflow Template

Getting Started With a Webflow Template

You can significantly speed up your Webflow build times by using templates. Templates can give you a great starting point to use instead of starting from scratch. For example, we publish our own Product Subscription template that follows best practices in web design and comes with features commonly needed in product subscription businesses.

There are two ways to import Webflow templates: through third-party transfer or the Webflow template store. Memberstack transfers your template to you directly after you purchase it. Afterwards, you can use the template as a foundation for your new product site.

Customizing Your Template Design

Once you have a new site based on the Product Subscription template, it’s time to make it your own! Use Webflow’s no-node designer to customize the template with your own information, copywriting, and colors. You can also make other stylistic edits to the template, such as adjusting spacing or adding sections and pages.

Remember that your site might be the first place people come into contact with your product and that they’ll likely see your brand in multiple places online. Spending the time to ensure your brand is consistently represented can increase your memorability and recognition across channels.

Must-have Features for Your Product Subscription

A successful subscription service must do more than just deliver products or content – it must create an ongoing value proposition that encourages retention and fosters a sense of community among its users. You want to manage the customer experience starting the first time they learn of your product and continuing throughout their entire customer journey. To do this effectively requires several features (that our Product Subscription template includes!). Follow along and configure each of the following features to ensure your subscription product has all the features it needs to succeed.

Marketing

Reaching potential customers is a necessary first step in any business – no customers, no business. How and when you reach your customers can significantly impact their likelihood of purchasing.

If your potential customers find you through your site, you’ll want them to be able to learn enough about your product there for them to feel comfortable purchasing. Our template includes a blog that you can use to publish this content with auto-generated tables of contents. Key information often includes answers to frequently asked questions, features, benefits, and links between your product and other things your customers find valuable. 

Once you’ve connected with a potential customer, you can nurture them through our template’s built-in newsletter funnel, encourage them to consider purchasing using Memberstack coupons and remind them that they were considering purchasing through Memberstack’s automated abandoned cart emails.

Multiple Pricing Tiers

You’ll want to experiment with your pricing and capture more revenue from customers who want more value than you’d be able to provide at a lower price. A standard way to do this is through the good-better-best pricing model, which offers potential customers three choices. Each choice covers a different level of pricing and value. Our template includes this out of the box – you just need to edit the tier descriptions and pricing!

Self-service Account Management

Without tools to manage customer accounts, your operational overhead for each new account will scale linearly with your number of customers. You’ll have to manually deal with every request to change a password, change a customer’s subscription tier, cancel, and more. This can grow to be a real drag on your business's productivity. That’s why Memberstack includes self-serve account dashboards for all of your customers’ accounts – they can handle all of those things themselves. 

Community Building

Community building is vital for fostering subscribers' sense of belonging and loyalty. By enabling live commenting on articles, you can encourage active engagement and discussion, turning your subscription service into a dynamic community hub. Our template also encourages your community to take the conversation cross-platform by including social links in the footer by default. These features not only cultivate a vibrant community but also drive organic growth through increased subscriber interaction and social sharing.

Automated Reporting & Analytics

Access to information helps you make better business decisions. You’ll likely be interested in up-to-date information on purchase events and your current subscribers. Our template can deliver automated Slack notifications on purchases so you know the moment a sale is made. You can also check up on your total subscriber base anytime using Memberstack’s Member Metrics.

Security

People are increasingly concerned about security, and rightfully so! We’re sending more sensitive information than ever before online. Your customers will need secure ways to access their accounts and feel confident giving you their payment information. That’s why Memberstack comes with built-in security. Your customers can choose their preferred authentication method – our template includes email/ password and social auth by default. You can add additional login methods with our free Webflow login components and customize the login experience with Memberscripts. Memberstack supports email and password, social auth, and magic links. We are also SOC 2 compliant and integrate directly with your Stripe account to eliminate the need to store card information.

Optimizing and Launching Your New Product Subscription Site

You’re almost ready to launch! Before taking your site live, you’ll want to check a few things related to SEO. Google publishes a helpful guide on SEO, and there’s a lot to it! Fortunately, most of the technical SEO is taken care of by Webflow, and they’ve done a good job of warning you when there’s a serious SEO error on your site. There’s really no upper limit on how much effort you can spend on optimization and SEO, but we believe that the basics taken care of by Webflow put you in a great position to get started.

Give your copy one last read-over, make sure your styling is consistent, check your pricing, and get ready to launch! In Webflow, launching a built site is as easy as configuring your custom domain and hitting the publish button.

Conclusion: Designing and Launching a Product Subscription

Building a product subscription is a rewarding journey that promises the predictability of consistent revenue and many other benefits over one-time sales. From identifying a viable niche to crafting an attractive subscriber experience, Webflow’s no-code tooling and Memberstack’s easy-to-use customer management features make the process much easier. Success stories like Netflix, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Dollar Shave Club are great sources of inspiration for your own products. Bring this inspiration to life with core features like effective marketing tools, varied pricing tiers, and robust security measures, ensuring a subscription service that attracts and retains a loyal subscriber base. We can’t wait to see what you build!