Use preferred pricing to achieve advance payment

The Goal

The objective of the Austin American-Statesman, located in Austin, Texas (180,000; 229,000) was to keep subscribers who will only renew if they are on a discount and to save money in their re-selling efforts.

The Story

“In certain segments, we offer current subscribers on deep discount offers the ability to keep their current offer for the next two years by paying at least four weeks in advance for their subscription each month. The program works similarly to EZ Pay, except the subscriber is on a continuous discount and for branding issues, we do not call the program EZ Pay. We call it our Loyalty Auto Credit Program,” said Amy Poe, special projects retention coordinator, Austin American-Statesman.

“Although we have had several subscribers take advantage of the continuous discounts, we have had problems benchmarking the program to see what would happen if we did not contact them about the offer. Since then, we have selected a group and contacted half of them, while not contacting the other half. From this method, we should be able to see whether our efforts were fruitful. Also, we will be able to know which subscribers would have stopped due to price if we had not contacted them about the Loyalty Auto Credit Program,” said Poe.

The success of this promotion is measured by the number of payments and conversions to the program per hour.

As a result of this promotion, Austin American-Statesman increased to 1.94 conversions and payments per hour.

The Moral of the Story

A way to keep current subscribers is to continually offer them a preferred rate in exchange for advance payment, making them feel like a valued customer and demonstrating loyalty to them in the form of a lower price.