Special offers to new customers
Appreciating and looking after existing customers is a better business approach in the long term.
Businesses need to appreciate and look after their existing customers. Yes, the customers they already have, not just potential customers who may or may not stay with them after the special offer expires.
I have a subscription with a music streaming service. It’s not the cheapest or the most convenient one for me to use, but they pay a higher rate to those who contribute the source material, and this is important to me. I’m not a heavy user of the service, but having it available for when I want to use it, is fantastic.
They recently advertised an offer to new customers of a rather nominal monthly rate for the first three months. Not recognising those who support you and only providing deals to new customers has never sat well with me. I looked on their website to see if there was any kind of offer for existing customers. As there didn’t appear to be any, I decided I might cancel my subscription and think about moving to one of the other service providers whose data does not count against my monthly data limit. When I selected the button to cancel I was provided with a choice to either cancel my service or view a special offer. I selected to view the offer and found I could reduce my current monthly rate by 20% for the next 3 months.
I understand the approach taken by the organisation, but I’m not sure they are being open and fair. They are operating in a highly competitive industry and, as I mentioned earlier, they do pay a higher rate to those providing the source material than other similar service providers, but to bury this special deal in this way seems to undermine my confidence in them. If I ignored the offer and selected cancel, would I have been provided with an even better offer? I will never know, as I accepted the offer.
I prefer to be more open and fair with people. If you offer some of your customers a special deal, you should offer it to all of them, not just those who are prepared to cancel their subscription. If you are open and fair you are likely to find a portion of your customers will not take advantage of the offer anyway.