How to use Zephr with Arc Subscriptions

Arc XP Subscriptions includes capabilities for managing the entire on-site subscriber journey, from the first interaction with the paywall, to user registration, to purchasing a subscription.

Some customers have pre existing vendor relationships or find the need for a point solution to meet specific business requirements. Zephr offers users a journey management builder that can augment the Subscriptions offering. Before diving into how Arc Subscriptions and Zephr can work together to deliver an unparalleled user experience, it is useful to quickly look at the full customer journey when using Subscriptions on its own.

Typical Flow

Subscriptions includes a paywall builder that enables your marketing team to establish the content access rules that govern your customer experience.

For example, you can configure a paywall with two rules. The first rule requires users to register immediately before accessing any premium content, and the second rule requires purchasing a subscription after sampling two articles within a week.

Subscriptions’ paywall engine returns a campaign code, which references an offer. This offer includes one or more products. Each product has one or more price codes. The offer also includes supporting marketing text and images.

When the customer selects their preferred offering —for example, a basic subscription with an annual plan— they then proceed through checkout. To enable this experience, the product and price are added to the cart, and the customer is taken through a customizable checkout experience. Arc Subscriptions charges the customer the appropriate amount on the agreed-upon schedule, for example, $99 annually.

Zephr Flow

As mentioned previously, some customers opt to leverage Zephr alongside Arc Subscriptions. You can use Zephr to determine when the customer should be paywalled and leverage Arc Subscriptions’ flexible checkout and billing offering. To make this possible, you must register the products (by SKU) and price codes that you configured with Arc Subscriptions to the Zephr UI. Your developer then can build a custom component that receives the paywall verdict from Zephr, along with the associated product SKU and price code, and take the customer through a standard Arc Subscriptions checkout flow.

Implementation Considerations

Arc XP customers must use one of Zephr’s client-side implementation options. Arc XP does not permit CDN stacking.

Arc Subscriptions offers a developer-facing event stream, which you can use to integrate with Zephr or any transactional email provider. You can listen to these events with websockets, or use IFX to host your event listener code.