How to Deploy an Automated Billing Strategy for Your Digital Business

Setting up billing is one of the fundamental steps to selling your products.

And it is not an easy one.

Here’s how to deploy automated billing to start selling your digital business:

What is Automated Billing?

Automated billing is invoicing your customers and then getting paid by them without having to do that manually. 

Another form of automated billing involves charging your customers without invoicing. These can also be recurring (subscription-based) payments.

Automated billing saves time and allows businesses to scale easily, as it can quickly and effectively process a growing number of payments. Automation will also reduce errors and let you process those payments in a more timely manner to avoid losing those customers.

Automated billing always involves a reliable software solution, so your first step would be to choose that solution. 

Pick Your Software Solution

Depending on the nature of your business and your budget, you have quite a few options for setting up an automated billing system for your business.

PayKickstart offers a variety of features and integrations allowing to set up an effective billing strategy that will be both automated and secure.

PayKickstart works in multiple industries including coaching and consulting businesses, selling courses and digital products (as well as physical products), and software and SaaS businesses.

Choose Your Payment Processor

PayKickstart offers a great choice of automated payment processors as well as easy integration with any (or all of these).

These payment processors include:

• Stripe and other credit card processors: This is ideal for digital products and service and software-based business.
• PayPal: Can be used in addition to credit card processing to give your customers an alternative payment option to eliminate payment failures
• Digital wallets (PayPal and Apple Pay): These can be used for selling physical products
• Bank transfers: A good additional payment method for processing larger amounts of payments

All of these payment solutions are integrated with zero coding needed.

PayKickstart automated billing solutions come with several important benefits:

• Low processing fees (2.5% + $0.25 per transaction). These fees will depend on your sales volume and PayKickstart plan
• Support of 135+ countries: Sell worldwide!
• Multiple payment processing options: Give your customers a choice and alternative payment method if one of those fails.

At this point, PayKickstart only accepts merchants from the United States and Canada.

Identify Your Pricing Structure

How much is your product going to cost?

This question is never easy, and involves a long process of market and competitor research, possibly surveying your target audience and estimating your upcoming expenses.

Your pricing model is key to your business success, so take your time to evaluate everything.

The keys to pricing your product intelligently are:

• Estimating the cost to create your product
• Evaluating how willing your customers are going to be
• Understanding your competition.

If your business involves one-time payments, it will be quite easy for you to adjust your pricing as you go. However for subscription-based businesses it can easily turn into a nightmare because you will have to deal with your current subscribers every time you do it.

Set up Your Products

To set up your products inside PayKickstart, you need to create your campaigns first. Once your campaign is created, you will be able to add products within it.

When creating a product:

• Write a description for your customers to know what they are paying for
• Assign your landing page URL (from your public site)
• Provide a URL of a page where your customer can download the product (for digital products)
• Customize your payment settings (one-time or recurring)
• Set up your checkout page or widget
• Enable any or all of your integrated payments

This is where you can also integrate your webinar or course software (if you are selling consulting hours or a course) and set up your shipment processor.

You can also set up and customize your email notifications to keep your customers updated on their purchase and payment status.

Your PayKickstart-powered checkout will fully operate your payments for you and it will also manage all the confirmation and reminder emails, and more.

Create a Customer Relationship Management Strategy

Automation makes it so easy to pay that you are likely to see your customer base grow fast, and that’s when it becomes too easy to lose track of customers struggling to benefit from your product.

Therefore creating a solid customer relationship management strategy should always accompany billing automation. 

PayKickstart will handle a lot of aspects of your customer management strategy, including all kinds of automated email notifications and reminders:

• Customizable “billing reminders” sent to your customers,
• PayKickstart Dunning / Subscription Saver feature that will revive your customers’ failed payments
• Trial expiration emails, and more.

In addition, you have a wide variety of email marketing integrations allowing you to set up more notifications to keep in touch with your customers.

Adopting a well-balanced customer relationship management platform is also a good idea. Zendesk is one of the easiest options out there: It integrates into your site without any coding and keeps your customer support team efficient and productive. 

All the communications with your customers are archived and organized so you can go back and find any previous threads. If your customer support team consists of several people, Zendesk will also distribute tickets among them and provide you with your team efficiency analytics.

Further reading: How First-Class Customer Service Impacts Every Aspect of a Startup

Conclusion

Creating an automated payment strategy will bring your business to the next level: It will save you time and money allowing you to focus on other important aspects of your business, like product development and marketing.

Digitizing your business is also a good way to reach new (international) markets and expand your business to other niches, and automating your payments is a key step to that.

Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty is the Brand Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas, as well as co-founder of Viral Content Bee. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for over a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also the frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of a weekly Twitter chat #vcbuzz

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