Tailor upgrade pricing to subscriber tenure

Use sub-audiences in one play to vary upgrade pricing by tenure.

Overview

You want to move Plus subscribers up to Business, the next plan up. How you nudge them depends on how long they've been on Plus:

• 3 to 12 months on Plus: These subscribers are in the prime upgrade window. Offer them a discount in exchange for an annual commitment.
• More than 12 months on Plus: These subscribers are loyal and rarely churn. Recognize them with added value instead of a discount. Show them Business Loyalty, a plan priced the same as Business but with richer entitlements, such as a premium support level. They pay the standard Business price and get more for staying.

Everyone else sees the standard Business upgrade table, including subscribers in their first 3 months who are still learning the plan.

To do this, you build a single Expansion play. The play uses one parent audience of active Plus subscribers and two tenure-based sub-audiences, each mapped to its own pricing table. The standard table is the fallback.

What you get: a single play that handles tenure-based upgrade pricing cleanly. It's also a clear example of how sub-audiences support multi-level targeting in one play.

Before you start

1. Connect Growth and Billing. Make sure Chargebee Growth is enabled and connected to your Chargebee Billing site.
2. Set up Business Loyalty plan in Billing. Create Business Loyalty as a plan in Chargebee Billing, priced the same as Business but with richer entitlements (for example, a premium support level), in the same product family as Business.
3. Integrate Growth with your application. Have your app development team follow the dynamic pricing table integration guide so Growth can present the right pricing table to subscribers in your app.
4. Set up the pricing tables. Create and launch the standard pricing table for your product.

Implementation steps

Follow these steps to set up tenure-based upgrade pricing in a single play.

1. Create an audience of active Plus subscribers

Define the overall group the play targets. Create an audience:

1. In Growth, navigate to People > Audiences.
2. Create a new audience with the following conditions defined:
   • Condition 1:
     • Property: "Plan ID".
     • Operator: "starts with".
     • Value: "plus".
   • Condition 2:
     • Property: "Subscription status".
     • Operator: "is".
     • Value: "Active".
3. Select the Done button to save the audience.

This selects customers with an active Plus subscription.

2. Create the tenure-based sub-audiences

Create one sub-audience per tenure cohort, based on when the subscription activated, and decide which pricing table each one sees. You can create these audiences up front, or create them inline while you build the play.

Audience 1: 3 to 12 months old

Create an audience with the following conditions defined:

• Condition 1:
  • Property: "Subscription Activation Date".
  • Operator: "happened before".
  • Value: "90" days of the session date.
    
    AND
• Condition 2:
  • Property: "Subscription Activation Date".
  • Operator: "happened within".
  • Value: "365" days of the session date.

Audience 2: More than 12 months old

Create an audience with the following condition defined:

• Property: "Subscription Activation Date".
• Operator: "happened before".
• Value: "365" days of the session date.

3. Create the pricing tables

Pricing table 1: Discounted Business price

1. Create a pricing table as the Discounted Business price table that matches your standard pricing table.
2. [Customize the pricing table][customize-subscribers-docs] to lower the Business price:
   1. Open the pricing table and select the New User tab.
   2. Select the Business plan, then go to the Edit Pricing tab.
   3. Enter the discounted Business price in the [Price][price-override-docs] field for the yearly price. To highlight the discount, you can also enter the original price in the [Strikethrough][strikethrough-docs] field.
3. Select Preview to confirm the pricing table shows the discounted Business price.

Pricing table 2: Business Loyalty

1. Create a pricing table as the Business Loyalty table that matches your standard pricing table.
2. [Customize the pricing table][customize-subscribers-docs] to add the Business Loyalty plan:
   1. Open the pricing table and select the New User tab.
   2. Select Manage Product Catalog and add the Business Loyalty plan you created in Billing.
   3. Remove the standard Business plan from the pricing table.
   4. Drag Business Loyalty into position before Enterprise, and set its description, feature list, and button text.
3. Select Preview to confirm the pricing table shows the Business Loyalty plan instead of the standard Business plan.

3. Create the Expansion play with sub-audiences

Use a single play to map each sub-audience to its pricing table and set the standard table as the fallback.

1. In Growth, go to Plays > Expansion.
2. Select Create New Play, select the Pricing Table play type, and then select Proceed.
3. Under Choose your Audience, select the audience of active Plus subscribers you created in step 1.
4. Select Targeting & Experimentation.
5. Under Actions, select Add Sub-Audience:
6. Select 3 to 12 months old sub-audience and assign the Discounted Business price table.
7. Select Add Sub-audience again.
8. Select More than 12 months old sub-audience and assign the Business Loyalty table.
9. Under Fallback, select your standard pricing table.
10. Select Review & Publish, set the play Priority, and then select Publish Play.

Result

Active Plus subscribers now see a tenure-appropriate upgrade experience from a single play: those 3 to 12 months in get an annual-commitment discount, those past 12 months see Business Loyalty, and everyone else sees the standard Business upgrade table. After the play runs, open the play report to monitor how each cohort performs.

Summary

In this tutorial, you learned how to:

• Create a parent audience of active Plus subscribers.
• Set up Business Loyalty in Billing to recognize long-tenured subscribers with added value instead of a discount.
• Build two tenure-based sub-audiences, each mapped to its own pricing table.
• Run a single Expansion play that uses sub-audiences with a fallback.
• Apply the same sub-audience pattern to other targeting dimensions, such as acquisition channel, industry, or company size.