Merchants often like to think that their products and services are so good that every customer is a guaranteed customer for life. Unfortunately, this rarely plays out in the real world, where increasingly finicky porn consumers are more reluctant to purchase and more quick to cancel website memberships.
Direct communication and a discount offer or other incentives are the way to mitigate this user loss.
A Cancel Discount is a retention tool that gives consumers who cancel the ability to keep their subscription at a reduced rate, with their subscription terms automatically modified to the new cancel rate.
According to online billing giant CCBill.com, a Cancel Discount is a retention tool that gives consumers who cancel the ability to keep their subscription at a reduced rate, with their subscription terms automatically modified to the new cancel rate. A Loyalty Discount, on the other hand, exists as a retention tool to give consumers a reduced price the longer they rebill. By providing an incentive to remain customers via this reduced rate, site owners have the opportunity to keep members rebilling.
Sometimes a discount offer is unnecessary; for example, when a site offers frequently updated unique content that former customers only need a preview of to re-join. Whatever the incentive, the common denominator is an event-based (in this case, an actual or pending membership cancellation) email campaign, designed to retain existing customers, or to re-seduce past prospects.
For example, XBIZ.net member Damian offered an interesting and potentially profitable email marketing technique for paysite owners who can cash in by mailing their ex-members using a two step approach to maximize productivity and pull power.
Using this approach, the first email to send is a graphically embellished HTML-based mailer that is, as Damian puts it, “lovely and wizzy.” This message will ask former members to check out the site’s latest offerings posted since they cancelled their membership, and will link to a landing page showing a well-produced trailer of the site’s newest content.
For those recipients that do not respond to this initial offer, send a second HTML-based mailer (HTML so that it is traceable), but make it appear to be an old-school plain text email, which reads:
Hi ____________
I sent you a mail last week asking for your comments on our new stuff. Hope everything is OK with you, but I really would value your input into the new material.
Here?s my personal email email@domain.com
Here?s a link to the new video.
Let me know what you think.
While Damian notes the personalized part of the email is the least important part of this approach, he also cites a study that reveals that personalization increases commercial email opening rates by more than 137 percent — providing a significant boost in audience reach and effectiveness.
“The main point [is to use] singing dancing HTML followed by pseudo plain text,” Damian told XBIZ. “This one-two punch works wonders [because] the pseudo plain text is what makes it work.”
