Hump Day: do you use subscriptions?

[Jordan Miller]

Happy Hump Day, team. 

I'm curious to know if you're utilizing the subscriptions feature in your community. 🤔  Or, at the very least, have you thought about it? Subscriptions feel exclusive and elevates the brand imo. 

I personally use a subscription component in my community. It offers members additional access, as well as an ad free experience, but it's not something I've leaned into as much as I'd like to. However, I love the potential of it and want to chat with you about it. 

It might be a good time to strategize using subscriptions as businesses figure out how to navigate through the topsy-turvy markets and unpredictability nature of the global economy. 

There are a ton of benefits to having a subscription element in your community. Here's some marketing jargon explaining the benefits:
 

• VIPs: Subscribing members can unlock restricted areas of the community and receive added benefits. 🤩 
   
• Reward: Highlight your subscribing members with exclusive badges, outlined replies and vibrant signatures. 🏆 
   
• Recurring revenue: Subscriptions provide stable and predictable income, an essential ingredient for business growth. 💰 
   
• Builds loyalty: Your fans and customers want to support you. Give them the opportunity to by consistently showing up for them and building that trust. hold 🙌 
   
• Boosts brand image: Offering another facet to your company illustrates you understand the importance of community exclusivity. 😎 
   
• Provides direct access: Paying subscribers cut to the front of the line. 🤵‍♂️🤵‍♀️
   
• Offer incentives: Give paying subscribers additional perks like exclusive access, additional privileges, an exclusive newsletter, merch and more. 🎈 

TL;DR: 

 

As always, here is a list of updates from our devs in the last seven days. Nicely done!

Quote

- Added Sentiment Analysis stats charts
- Added comment details to the content react Data Layer event.
- Added an option for members to disable new device emails.
- Added the ability to see the average time between member ranks in the admin control panel statistics.
- Fixed an issue where attempting to create shipping rates can show the "lower value must be any or zero" incorrectly.
- Added an account settings link to the user profile.
- Fixed the breadcrumb not showing when there is only one category and one forum, and that forum contains sub-forums.
- Fixed an issue where it was possible to bypass the minimum tags requirement.
- Improved the preview message in the admin control panel for adverts containing javascript.
- Fixed an issue where the sitemap URL may be missing from the default generated robots.txt file.
- Fixed an issue where creating an album wouldn't trigger the "New Content Item-Album was created" Achievement rule.

 

Let me know what you think about subscriptions in the comments!

PS - while I've got you, please read and comment on our new blog post about our simple theme editor!

 

[Davyc]

I don't personally use subscriptions, but an associate of mine, who I recommend IPS to and maintain his site for him, does use subscriptions. In fact they are at the heart of his site; I won't say community because a lot of people subscribe, but they don't actually contribute to the site.  That's not a bad thing where his ambitions lie as it's more of a business model than a community model, but the subs work really well in conjunction with Stripe.

So I would wholeheartedly advocate the use of the subscriptions feature for anyone who believes they may have a use for it.  It's not for everyone, but if you can use it I can say that it's a great tool 🙂

 

[Jordan Miller]

15 minutes ago, Davyc said:

The use of the subscriptions feature for anyone who believes they may have a use for it.  It's not for everyone, but if you can use it I can say that it's a great tool 🙂

Appreciate you weighing in! 

[marklcfc]

I would but could never justify the price of $150 (used to be $100 and even then it was too much) + $45 renewal every 6 months, I'd probably make a loss.

[Pescao6]

20 hours ago, Jordan Miller said:

I'm curious to know if you're utilizing the subscriptions feature in your community. 🤔  Or, at the very least, have you thought about it? Subscriptions feel exclusive and elevates the brand imo. 

I personally use a subscription component in my community. It offers members additional access, as well as an ad free experience, but it's not something I've leaned into as much as I'd like to. However, I love the potential of it and want to chat with you about it. 

Configuring ads on my site was a challenge, but one that I enjoyed as a learning experience. I've definitely thought about using subscriptions for ad removal, but haven't had the time to find out how to do that. Are there are any guides you'd recommend for creating an ad removal subscription?

[Jordan Miller]

5 hours ago, Pescao6 said:

Configuring ads on my site was a challenge, but one that I enjoyed as a learning experience. I've definitely thought about using subscriptions for ad removal, but haven't had the time to find out how to do that. Are there are any guides you'd recommend for creating an ad removal subscription?

Nice! I'd recommend putting your ad code in the Advertisements section in your ACP. De-select your subscribers group from those ads and voila! When they become a subscriber, and are automatically moved into the subscriber group, they won't see ads. 💸

[SjorsK]

Yes, our core business runs on subscriptions 😉 We use IPS as a learning/community platform (Community is mostly for SEO reasons. Unique content sells!). And learning is our core business and people subscribe to get access. 

Feel free to check it out:
Lowepost, creative learning platform

Only issue is that we have to manually remove all subscriptions as soon it expires since that bug was introduced. Otherwise people can not re-subscribe. We solved this by running a SQL query with a regular interval.