Things have definitely changed. While I focus on keeping affiliates happy, TheDoc handles our members and makes sure they are happy. We can actually offer upsells to other paysites to our members and they happily buy with almost no complaints and a negligiable cancel rate (because we're so tightly niched on the big boob site, we can easily upsell to sites thing we don't offer in our members areas).
We've done things like adding a voting system and little interactive things as well as some new things we'll be rolling out soon. So what if it only adds 10% to the bottom line, that's 10% we don't feel like pissing off to someone else.
There also aren't as many whales these days as there were then. The signup and forget types? They're becoming fewer and farrer between. I'm sure they'll publicly call bullshit, but there are some bigger companies struggling with keeping those types of members ignorant. The mailer used to be the whales, now it's turning towards the TGP guys. While they will never be like the whales of old, but neither are the whales of old.
Something we've done as well that's been a little more successful is only offering partial access to our members area for trial members. They have to upgrade to a full membership to see everything (they'll still automatically renew/upgrade after their trial period though). Maybe this has cost us a couple "join and forgets" but we also have a low enough chargeback ratio that we'll soon be using our own merchant account.
It's also amazing how many accounts we've saved by simply answering emails where users had simple video player issues and other things that had they not gotten an answer, would have lead them to cancel (they sure as hell won't voluntarily stick around a video site where they can't see the videos). Even if that saves 5% of members, who would turn down 5%, especially with today's margins?
Would we have the kind of successfull numbers we'd have with retention if we had 20 generic sites with the same backends and a couple 100-150 per day join mailers? Hard to say, but look at how many bigger companies are cutting staff, going out of business altogether, leaving to pursue "other ventures", etc. It's getting harder to find that magic surfer who just got his first computer, a new credit card and hasn't been burned by someone in the past. We see surfers that are so paranoid about being fucked, they click the cancel link the first time they log into the trial area (we actually get them emailing us sometimes asking if they can go ahead of upgrade when they see no funny business going on).
Maybe some are even relieved that we have clearly marked cancel and customer service links in our members area.
The times they are a changing....
|