Building and maintaining a sizeable subscriber base is critical to the long-term success of any subscription business. While it may sound simple, this is a key challenge for any SVOD service to overcome.

What's the secret? It's all about staying focused on your Audience and having the flexibility to adapt as their needs evolve.

Here are a few ways that content owners who have grown their Svod Services into successful businesses were able to build and retain the Subscribers they have today.

Building Subscribers: Focus on Your Audience

If you have a specific niche or hyper-localized viewership, it’s especially important you have the ability to market and promote your content well. You have to be extremely focused on your audience—know who they are, where they are, and what they care about. This is why it’s so important to spend time cultivating your social following. Social media is a powerful tool because you can communicate directly with audiences who care about your specific content. It's important not only to be a part of these online communities but also to actively participate in conversations.

The most important marketing tool. It does much more than just help attract new subscribers; It also provides information on many aspects of the service, from the content being delivered to supported devices, to conversion, helping to align the service closely with potential subscribers and customers.

Participate in Social Communities

Become a central part of your target audience's community. Start and engage in conversations related directly or indirectly to your content service.

Listen and Respond

Listening to social conversation is just as important as participating. If you know what your audience wants and understand their underlying needs, you can react quickly and make your content more attractive to new and existing subscribers. Don't just listen, act. Did a particular video get a lot of fan engagement? Start incorporating fan-favorite content into your regular programming.

Take advantage of free content

While growing subscriber numbers will always be a primary concern for SVOD services, paid content (albeit low) will continue to be a deterrent to many online video viewers. Especially if they are new to your content or brand. One of the reasons SVOD services choose to include a tier of ad-supported content is the positive impact it has on subscriber growth. By using a hybrid model and including free ad-supported videos,

viewers can become paid subscribers with little to no customer acquisition costs.

Even if viewers don't convert to subscribers, you still earn ad revenue.

Retaining Subscribers: Be Flexible and Adapt

To retain your subscribers over the long term, you need to understand what is currently working and what isn't, and then have the flexibility to adapt. Do you know which videos were viewed, how many times, and whether the viewer finished them?

Performance Tracking

Which videos did you watch the most?

Videos with the most engagement help you gauge what topics and video talent resonate best with your viewers. Have a video that works well on one device but not another? This indicates something important about your audience in each device.

Do you have a video that is getting few or no views?

Give audiences time to find it, but ultimately remove poorly performing videos from your library and replace them with new content.

Are your viewers completing your videos? Low video completion rates may indicate a pacing or story length issue. On the other hand, the high completion rates indicate that the topic is important to the audience and the video was of reasonable length and speed.

Tracking your video performance helps you understand your content, audience, and revenue, giving you insights to make important business decisions.

Refreshing content

One of the easiest and most effective tactics to retain subscribers is to simply provide them with a constant stream of new or updated content. When subscribers constantly have new and compelling content to watch, they feel much more committed to maintaining their subscriptions. It's also important to report new content based on your video performance data, as well as feedback and requests from your audience.

Create your app here: Register Now