Plays - Overview

Introduction

A Play is a goal oriented workflow that empowers Growth and Retention teams to launch targeted interventions such as personalised offers, pricing experiments, and cancel page experiences or renewal price actions at critical moments in your subscriber lifecycle. They let you run growth strategies and experiments that drive measurable outcomes such as acquiring customers, expanding revenue, and reducing churn, all without relying on engineering or product teams.

Play Objectives

Based on the business objective, there are three broad categories of plays in Chargebee Growth.

• Acquisition Plays
• Expansion Plays
• Retention Plays

Acquisition Plays

Acquisition plays are designed to convert prospects and trial users into paying customers. These plays typically target users at the top of the funnel and focus on removing friction, reinforcing value, or creating urgency at key conversion moments.

Common use cases include:

• Incentivising trial plan subscribers to convert into paying customers.
• Offering limited-time discounts or incentives to convert leads or re-engage inactive sign-ups who have not completed onboarding.
• Experimenting with your Pricing Tables to optimise the conversion of your trial users or subscribers.

Acquisition plays help you systematically improve acquisition rates by delivering timely, personalised offers that encourage your prospects to take the next step toward becoming customers.

Example: A SaaS company uses an In-app Offer Play to show a 20% discount modal to trial users who signed up for trial 10 days back but haven’t converted, resulting in a 15% lift in trial-to-paid conversion.

Expansion Plays

Expansion plays focus on growing revenue from your existing customer base by encouraging upgrades, add-ons, or higher-value plans. These plays target active subscribers and are triggered based on usage patterns, lifecycle milestones, or account attributes.

Common use cases include:

• Upselling customers to higher-tier plans as they outgrow the limits in their current plan.
• Cross-selling add-ons or premium features to make the offering more valuable.
• Incentivising monthly plan customers to subscribe to an annual frequency to get more predictable cash flows and longer lifetime value(LTV).

By aligning offers with customer needs and behaviour, expansion plays help maximise account value while maintaining a relevant and non-intrusive experience.

Example: A fitness app notices subscribers who log 5+ workouts per week rarely churn. They use an In-app Offer Play to cross-sell a nutrition tracking add-on to this power-user segment—generating $45K in incremental ARR within 60 days.

Retention Plays

Retention plays are aimed at reducing churn and increasing customer lifetime value by proactively engaging customers who may be at risk of leaving. These plays help you intervene at critical moments to address dissatisfaction, improve engagement, or incentivise continued usage.

Common use cases include:

• Presenting a pause or downgrade option instead of full cancellation based on declining usage.
• Offering a discount or incentive to subscribers who initiate cancellation.
• Surveying churning customers to capture reasons and improve your product or service offering.

Retention plays turn your highest-risk moments into recovery opportunities, thereby helping you save subscribers who might otherwise slip away.

Example: A digital news publisher uses a Cancel Page Play to offer churning subscribers a reduced "weekends only" tier instead of full cancellation, retaining 22% of subscribers who would have otherwise left entirely.

Play Types

In Chargebee Growth, Play Types define the format and experience layer through which a play is delivered to your subscribers. While Play Objectives (Acquisition, Expansion, Retention) define why you are running a play, Play Types define how that strategy is executed in the customer journey.

• In-app Offer: To surface contextual upsell or cross-sell offers to subscribers at the right moment, based on usage signals or billing events.
• Pricing Table: To present upgrade options or plan comparisons when subscribers show intent to change their plan, helping them visualise the value of moving up.
• Cancel Page: Personalise the cancellation experience with targeted offers, surveys, or alternatives when a subscriber initiates cancellation, your last and most critical moment to save the customer.

Not all play types are available across all objectives. Below is a table that explains various types of plays available in Growth and the objectives which they help achieve.

How do Plays work?

Chargebee Growth provides users with a Play builder interface - A wizard that let’s you setup your play in a guided step by step manner. Using the play builder, you can go from an idea to a live play just within a few hours (not weeks), and continuously iterate based on real performance data.

Below are the key steps in the play builder:

1. Audience - Who should see this play?

Each play begins with defining the right target audience. When you configure a play, you create an audience segment using customer attributes, lifecycle stage, and behavioural signals to ensure the play is relevant and timely.

You can define audiences using the following criteria:

• Subscriber lifecycle stage, such as trial, active, renewing, or at-risk.
• Subscription and plan attributes, such as plan type, billing frequency, or add-ons.
• Usage, entitlements & behavioural signals indicating engagement, limits, inactivity, or growth readiness.
• Account-level attributes like tenure, region, or customer segment.

Because Chargebee Growth is Billing-native, you can build audiences using customers & subscriber data (including custom fields in billing) in your billing system with no additional integrations required. You could also send additional context or data too along with the subscriber context at run time while making the call to Chargebee Growth. Chargebee Growth continuously evaluates subscribers against these criteria, and allows only qualified subscribers to enter the play.

2. Triggers - When should the play activate?

Triggers define when the play should activate and ensure that the corresponding action is executed at the most impactful moment in the subscriber lifecycle. Once a subscriber qualifies for the audience, the play waits for the configured trigger to occur.

Examples include:

• When a customer visits a specific page
• When a customer clicks a button.
• When a customer approaches renewal
• When a customer initiates cancellation
• When any custom event is performed

Plays are triggered only when both audience conditions and trigger rules are satisfied.

3. Targeting & Experimentation - How do I optimize for the best outcome?

Once you've defined your audience and triggers, you can configure the actions the play needs to take and set up experiments to validate what works best.

Users can define actions within the play’s targeting logic. Actions define what you want to execute for the desired target audience. There are two categories of actions which are available across various play types.

• Single actions - Present Offers(modals, pop-ups, or banners with personalized messaging), Pricing Table(plan comparisons or upgrade paths), or Cancel Page(retention offers, pause options, or exit surveys) to encourage upgrades or plan changes.
• Test actions - Randomly split the play traffic based on percentage values to evaluate Offers, Pricing Tables, or Cancel Pages to and determine which configuration drives better conversion or revenue outcomes.

For more complex targeting logic, users can also use sub-audience splits to further break down the target play audience into sub-audience groups and perform actions for each sub-audience segment as required. This helps ensure that the entire targeting logic can be accomodated within the least number of plays in Chargebee Growth.

Additionally, users can also choose to configure the below settings as part of their targeting & experimentation setup.

• Play level control to direct a fixed percentage of subscribers eligible for the play to be tagged as a control group. Control group is used to evaluate the performance of the play by calculating the lift the play is generating for its eligible audience segment compared to the baseline performance for the control group.
• Global Control to exclude a defined percentage of subscribers from seeing any play of a specific play type within Chargebee Growth. This helps you establish a baseline to measure the true impact of all your plays by comparing outcomes between exposed and non-exposed subscribers.
• Global Fallback to define the default treatment for subscribers who do not qualify for any play. This is a safety net available for certain types of plays e.g. cancel page plays that ensures every subscriber call that is made to Growth is returned back with an appropriate response and ensures minimal impact to end subscriber experience.

4. Monitoring and Performance Tracking - Is it working?

Every play tracks performance metrics tied to business outcomes:

• Engagement: Customers Entered, Customers Engaged, Accepts, Acceptance Rates, Fulfillment Rates.
• Conversions: Trial to paid conversion, activations, upgrades, retained.

You can use this data to:

• Identify which offers, cancel pages or pricing tables drive the best outcomes
• Refine audience & targeting strategy
• Swap out underperforming offers, cancel pages, pricing tables with more performant ones
• Continuously improve based on real subscriber behavior and feedback.