How to effectively migrate customers up to your Premium plan (with a 91% price increase).

Here’s an excellent example from WeTransfer of how to implement a migration of users from a Standard plan up to a Premium / Ultimate plan at a much higher prices.

Explain what’s happening:

· Clear explanation that the subscription plans have changed, and that the current plan is discontinued.

· Give plenty of notice of when the change is happening (at least 30 day’s notice).

Implications of this change:

· From the next monthly renewal date (4 February), customers will automatically be upgraded to the Ultimate plan at £21.00/month.

Benefits of the change:

· Massive increases in capability on the new plan including unlimited transfer file sizes, account storage & number of portals, instead of the restrictions on the current plan.

· “Coming soon” – signposting future benefits to show their product roadmap.

Give the customer full control:

· Clear signposting so customers can see the new pricing page offering full transparency.

· Confirm that no action is required if the customer is happy with the upgrade (frictionless next step).

· Easily allow customers to switch plans or downgrade by offering a link to their Account Settings.

· Additional help & support available via an article and the Help Centre if they have any concerns or problems.

Why this approach is so effective:

· It offers a massive increase in the capabilities of the platform with the upgraded Ultimate plan. If these capabilities are important to a customer, they will appreciate the upgrade offer.

· Even better is that all Pro customers get immediate access to the upgraded plan AT NO EXTRA COST for full month before the renewal at the higher price, allowing them to sample the upgraded service.

· There is another option for a Starter plan at £8.00/month shown on the pricing page, but the Account page does not allow users to downgrade to the Starter plan “at this time”. I’m assuming that’s a deliberate tactic to force customers to make a choice between Free or Ultimate at this stage.

What could be improved:

· The current price of the Pro plan is not shown in the communication (£11.00/month). Arguably there is a lack of price transparency here, but it is not difficult to click through to the Account page and find out what you are actually paying.

· And… they got my first name & surname mixed up in the salutation, but I’ll let them off as everything else is so well done.

Benefits of this approach

I hope WeTransfer have done the maths on this and are betting that they will be better off assuming:

· X% of users do nothing, resulting in a 91% increase in price (from £11.00/m to £21.00/m)

· Y% will downgrade to the Free plan

· Z% will downgrade in the future once they start paying the higher prices.

WeTransfer would need at least 53% of all Pro users to stick with the upgrade to Ultimate to be no worse off in terms of their monthly revenue.

What do you think? Is that a bet you would be willing to make if you were running this project?

You can see a huge amount of thought and effort has gone into planning and executing this change of plans and prices, unlike another company I recently posted about.

It’s a great example of how to plan and execute a change of plan prices and encourage users to upgrade, without causing too much pain or annoyance.

If you need any help with changing your pricing or implementing price changes, do let me know.

Kind regards

Mark Peacock