We removed a 20% discount, for those who subscribed to our custom plan early,
as it encourages ‘bad-fit’ customers and that costs everyone more in the long
run.
The initial idea came from a service we were testing out. They offered all new
trial users a 20% discount if they bought a paid account on day 1 of the
trial. We like to experiment so we tested it out and offered it to new users.
The consequences were as follows:
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More people paid and subscribed on day 1 of the trial.
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They were the people more likely to complain that it wasn’t right for them.
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We spent more time explaining the product to them.
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They were more likely to unsubscribe.
As an experiment it was certainly interesting but it does not fit with the
customer success ideals of working with customers who can achieve their
desired outcomes using the service.
“If you knowingly allow bad-fit customers to be acquired, nothing else you
do in Customer Success will have the result you’re hoping for as those
customers — no matter what you do — will never achieve their Desired Outcome.”
Lincoln Murphy, SixteenVentures.
Without the discount, the users go through the full two week trial and we
actively focus on understanding if they really have a problem we can fix.
In fact, we encourage them to extend the trial if they have not used it enough
using one of our 20 automated emails we send to users and you can see all of
these emails in the article below.
/blog/intercom-email-templates-for-your-campaigns/
If you’re interested, we’ve also laid out how we use Intercom as our customer
success software.
/blog/12-ways-to-use-intercom-as-your-core-customer-success-software/
