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Cash flow is the movement of money into or out of a business, and having a steady and substantial amount of it is crucial for growth and development. When you’ve got a significant amount of cash at your disposal, you can invest in hiring, customer acquisition, and other activities that drive business expansion. We recently tried something that got us an extra $14,000 in cash in seven days, and we'll explore how we achieved this influx.
So, what’s great about subscription businesses is the relative stability. You get a steady-ish stream of revenue that slowly increases over time and is much less susceptible to the whims of other business models that are based on one-off payments.
But what can be slightly frustrating is the “slowly” part. Many times, those customers will be paying you every single month for years, yet you have to patiently wait for that money to trickle in. Or do you?
What if you could get the benefits of a pile of cash and the stability of knowing your customer will be around for longer than a month? Well, my friend, you can, thanks to one thing: annual subscriptions. They’re the magical unicorn of the SaaS world.
There’s a catch, though. The way most companies approach annual plans is to just slap it on their pricing page and hope the customer picks it over the monthly option, maybe enticing them with a little discount.
That’s the passive way to make yourself feel good about “doing something” but I guarantee you’re leaving money on the table.
The annual upsell
Instead of thinking of your annual plan as just a different payment option, think of it as a feature to upsell. “Sell” is the operative part of that word. It requires a little bit of work, but if you do it right, it will pay off.
For nearly two years we’ve been prompting users, via email, to switch to annual a few months in to their subscription. Unfortunately the results were always a bit dismal, with the average conversion rate to annual being around 4.75%.
Here is the contents of that email…
Hey Joe! I hope things are going swimmingly so far.
Would you be interested in a couple of free months of Baremetrics? Switch to annual billing, and that’s exactly what you get!
Your account is currently at the $79 monthly rate. If you switch to annual billing, we’ll bill you $790 per year, resulting in two free months (a savings of $158)!
- Get 2 months of Baremetrics for free!
- Save time with easier accounting (just 1 invoice instead of 12)
- Did I mention you get 2 months for free?
If you’d like to switch to annual billing, just click the link below to get started!
https://baremetrics.com/switch
If you have questions about anything, just respond to this email.
Josh Pigford
Founder of Baremetrics
P.S. Of course if you don’t want to take advantage of this offer, just delete this email and nothing will happen.
On the surface that looks like it’d potentially work just fine. It highlights the benefits and makes it a quick, self-serve “click the link and be done!” switch. But it always felt a bit too salesy, so I decided to try something a bit more personal and informal.
Hey Sally! We’ve been testing out some new pricing models for Baremetrics and instead of our usual 2-months free for switching to annual pricing, we’re offering 3-months for free to a subset of customers.
Would you be interested in that?
Reply and let me know and I can add the right coupon to your account and make the switch to annual for you.
Thanks so much for being a part of Baremetrics. It means a lot to have folks like you on board. 🙂
Josh Pigford
Founder of Baremetrics
How’d this puppy perform? The conversion rate on this email is 11%…a whopping 131% increase! It generated over $14,000 in revenue in the first seven days. That’s the stuff you write home about!
There are a number of things different about this email.
- A 3-month discount, instead of 2
- Manual process — No one-click, self-serve switch process
- Personal — Doesn’t include automated “here’s how much you’d save” info
- Urgency — “We’re testing this out and only offering it to a subset of customers” (which is true, we don’t offer this to lower paying plans)
The open rates were basically the same between the two emails, so subject line didn’t seem to matter. Ultimately, the combination of urgency, personal touch, and a bit larger discount pushed this one over the edge.
I do think the additional discount played a role in increased conversion, but from talking with other founders, most tests point to the size of the discount actually not being that big of a deal.
Future testing
The problem with this format is that it’s not really repeatable over the life of the customer. I suppose you could send it to them once a year, but then the “urgency” factor gets lost.
Testing out a series of these emails is certainly worth our time, as is testing out the size of the discount itself (number of months, percentage discounts, etc).
What are some things you’ve tried to increase annual subscriptions? Any formats you’ve found work really well?
