Renaldi Adrian

Let’s assume you have a good digital product, for instance, let’s say you create a high-quality digital content. Your product has it’s value, you know people are willing to buy it, and people can sign up and pay a subscription fee for your newsletter. While this is a good start, have you considered the possibility of one account being used by multiple people?

I experienced this myself, so I decided to study ways to prevent subscribers from sharing their accounts with other people (without relying on technical-restriction where an account can’t log-in in multiple devices). There must be a better way than that.

In my research, I’ve noticed sense of attachment happen mostly to social media. It’s obvious people aren’t going to share their account because the account is about their personal identity, but with their own “for you”-feature on the timeline, making it nearly impossible to share accounts. Each account has different content recommendations, followings, and more, making them unique.

Deeper into the sense of attachment, I found that even non-digital product is able to do this, it’s IKEA.They intentionally design their products to be craftable, so people feel attached to their own “creations.” Here’s the detailed article on that.

The sense of attachment is not about forcing a “for you” feature on a digital product but about exploring what makes an account’s subscription feel personal. The use case may vary, but try to find something in your product that makes people feel that this is their account and they won’t want to share it. Think of personalized experiences for the users.

One of the use case example is tracking their behaviour. Let’s assume you have a digital web shop with various product categories. Try to give each user different experience based on their behaviour, if a user frequently buy jeans, send that user more newsletter about jeans and display jeans on their homepage, this personalized function give different experience for each user. If a user frequently buy shirt, show them shirt instead of jeans on the homepage.

Of course adding sense of attachment is not limited to tracking behaviour. You can also add features that users can interact with, making them feel more attached to their account. Some of the examples are: save post, bookmark, comment, likes and many more. Try to compare these features with those of the big players.

Creating value for your product should always be the number one priority, because that’s why people subscribed to you in the first place. Adding a sense of attachment creates more value for their account or subscription.