We’ve rolled out two new much-requested features for system vendors.
New Feature #1: Custom Subscription Management
The first feature is Custom Subscription Management – a fancy term for the ability to offer individual subscribers a discounted price on your system. You’ll see that you have access to this feature on the “Subscriber Management” screen (formerly called the Subscriber List screen).
This feature is useful if, for instance, you have a customer to whom you want to say, “Thank you,” by offering a special discount.
Or, it might be useful if you decide to raise your subscription price for new subscribers, but want to “grandfather” in your old subscribers for some period of time. This is possible because once you give someone a special billing arrangement, his arrangement supersedes all future changes in the system’s list price, until your custom billing arrangement expires or you end it. In other words, you can offer your current subscribers the special price, and then feel comfortable raising your system’s retail price, knowing that current subs who have received the special price won’t be affected.
Note that you can create a custom billing arrangement for one subscriber at a time, or you can create a custom arrangement for whole sets of subscribers at a time. (To work with multiple subscribers, use the checkboxes that appear all the way to the right of their names.)
New Feature #2: Electronic Coupons
This feature has been requested often. On the Subscriber Management screen, you’ll see a link that allows you to create your own Electronic Coupons for your system. This feature is similar to the custom billing above, but – while custom billing lets you reduce prices for current subscribers – electronic coupons let you offer reduced subscription rates for new subscribers.
The feature is self-explanatory: you can specify a discount plan, then ask the system to spit out an electronic coupon code, which you can then distribute to whomever you like.
Ideas where this might be used:
Offer users of a web site a special discount.
Or: if you have two systems at C2, offer users of system 1 a discount to try system 2.
Or: use the coupon as a “call to action” in print or online ads.
Some important limitations
Both features are only available for those systems that charge a flat fee per period. In other words, if your system charges, say, $100 per month, or $5 dollars per quarter, or $1,000 per week, then you can use these features. (It doesn’t matter whether you offer a free trial period or not – in either case you can use these features.) However , if your system uses a “pay-per-profitable trade” model, or a “pay-only-if-the-preceding-period-is-profitable” model, then neither of these features will be available to your system.
Also: you can set expiration dates to your coupons, but no limitation on numbers of use. In other words, you can’t currently set up a coupon which expires after 100 people use it. That feature may be implemented in later releases.
Finally: These features are designed to support special discount pricing – not special price increases. You can’t “offer” individual users a special increase in price.
Summary
I welcome your feedback and questions. As per the usual C2 Way, testing has been thorough and methodical. Just kidding. Testing has been, uh… well, let’s just say: Please direct bug reports to me at matthew@collective2.com.
-Matthew
spot on.
You can’t “offer” individual users a special increase in price.
Reverse psychology, I guess? “Renew now and take advantage of our new higher prices…”
Thanks, been eagerly waiting for this for awhile.
Thanks again.
David
I want a new feature that allows my subscribers to tip me after a good trade. Kind of like saying, “hey, you did a great job this month, here’s an extra $1,000 bucks.”
Now that’s faith!
