As experts in churn prevention Chargebee Retention has realized that targeting certain audiences with customized and tailored cancel experiences and offers can lead to a reduction in cancels by making the right offer at the right time. In this article, we'll cover how to use the Audience Manager in your Chargebee Retention dashboard to create a custom audience.
First, we'll assume that you have done a split test by offering a discount or pause randomly across all of your cancelers. In your Chargebee Retention performance readout, you found out that cancellers were much more likely to accept a discount if they were in a trial or in their first subscription month and much more likely to accept a pause if their account was over 6 months old. In addition to those findings, we are concerned that cancellers might want to game the system by seeking out or doubling up on discounts so let's add some eligibility for the discount offer.
Sounds simple enough. Let's target those groups by creating some rules-based Audiences that we can use for targeting.
In summary here are the Audiences we plan on creating.
Audience 1:
Discount eligible Trial users and Paid subscribers in their first month.
Audience 2:
Accounts over 6 months old
Audience 3:
Everyone else: Accounts older than 30 days but newer than 180 days as well as anyone without discount eligibility from our Low LTV group.
Don't forget to map your fields first! Head over to our article on Field Mapping if you need a refresher.
Log into your Chargebee Retention dashboard and click on the Audiences tab.
On our first visit we see that we don't have any rules created since our last test was applied randomly across all cancellers.
That makes sense when you are creating your first rules-based Audience, let's get started by clicking the New Audience button.
Now we've landed on an empty page with the option of creating either a single rule or a group of rules. Start by clicking Add another rule and select a property, operator, and value.
Remember: Properties come from your integration enrichment source or directly from the Chargebee Retention.js and are first mapped to be used in Experiences and or Audiences
The Operator represents the logic you would like to apply to the Value field. At the end, when a canceller's profile is passed through this rule we'll end up with a true or false result allowing them to view certain experiences or move on to another experience.
Let's start by creating our discount-eligible, low LTV audience. In this example, our engineering team has passed a boolean we've called Discount Eligible that we've already mapped via Chargebee Retention.js.
If a canceller comes to a Chargebee Retention experience with the eligibility flag set as false, they won't pass this rule. We also want to capture our low LTV users so we'll create a target audience with cancelers on a trial or if they are in their first 30 days of a paid subscription. For that case, we'll add a group and allow either of those two to pass through.
Let's add a group using the and operator and within that group create two rules using the or operator.
Easy enough! Let's use our mapped properties to assign some rules.
Okay, we've defined our first Audience. Any discount eligible canceller with a Plan name trial or with their first 30 days of a paid plan. Click publish and your Audience is ready for some traffic. At this point no traffic is flowing through our Audience rule yet, we'll tackle that in our follow-up article on Targeting Audiences.
Don't forget to give your new audience a meaningful name!
The rule editor is case insensitive. So you need not type in multiple values with different cases such as trial, TRIAL, Trial etc, just entering any one of this option will work.
Updated in December 2023
If you are using Chargebee Billing, you may see some of your values such as Plan ID, Subscription Status, Coupon ID, Plan Interval etc, getting auto-populated for selection purposes from your Live Chargebee Billing site. Please note that only the first 100 values are loaded by default and additional input may be needed if the value is not available in the default list.
To test the targeting rules with audience segments created using your test site, use the custom value option by manually entering actual values from your test billing site.
Now that we've set up an audience for our early LTV users let's create another rule-based audience for our cancellers who have been members for more than 180 days.
Start by clicking New Audience and you'll see another empty definitions box ready to apply some rules. For these folks, we're sending them all to our "Pause" page regardless of their discount eligibility. We know everyone will have a paid account by the time they are six months in so we can ignore their plan type or name for this example. Choose your previously mapped subscription start date, the is before days operator, and add in 180.
Chargebee Retention automatically uses the day of the cancel session as the reference date so anyone with a subscription 181 days or older will pass this rule and move on to the funnels we choose to target them with.
Chargebee Retention automatically compares the date of the cancel session at the time of cancel. 6 months from now our converted trial accounts will be eligible to enter this Audience.
Let's publish this audience and move on to our final group. Those who did not fall into one of the above categories and have eligibility for a discount.
For the rest of our cancellers we'd like to continue the experiment but keep our test running between the discount and pause offer. We can do that easily by setting up a third audience that includes all of our discount-eligible cancellers.
Again, we'll only need one rule for this group. If they're eligible for a discount we can make them the discount offer. Click done and we're finished making Audiences for this example. In our article on Targeting, we cover how to create the targeting hierarchy for Audiences you have added in the Audience Manager.
if you would like to take a deeper look at all of the Property types and Operators that Chargebee Retention supports, take a look at our follow up article on Properties and their associated Operators here.
As always if you have any questions or get stuck at any point, please send over an email.