A walkthrough of how to setup downsells
Downsell plans are an effective way to reduce voluntary churn, and retain more of your members profitably. By giving them an offer in real-time as they go to cancel their membership we’ve found success rates are 3x higher than trying to follow-up with the customer by phone, email or text.
For DRB Customers: Rinsed DRB customers can use this link to specifically schedule a consultation to set up downsell plans in SiteWatch!
Prior to setting up downsells in Rinsed, you need to set up the downsell plans in your POS.
Here are our downsell plan pricing recommendations:
Additionally, we recommend creating images to increase success of downsell retention programs. Heres an example of a great downsell image that includes the details of the downsell offer:
How to setup Downsells:
Initial Setup:
When you open the Rinsed web app, you can start your downsell setup by hovering over the “Ticket” button in the top left corner of the screen. A menu will appear, and you should select “Downsell plans”.
Once there, hover over “Actions” in the top right corner of the screen. A menu will appear, and you should select “New downsell plan”.
The name field is not customer facing. We recommend that you use the convention “[Plan type] - [% discount] - [length of discount] - downsell”.
The price field only controls what appears as the price in the confirmation email that a customer will receive upon accepting a downsell offer. The default language of that email says “Your new low rate of /month has been locked in”, so in this case will come from the price field.
The plan type field indicates the type of plan that the customer will be entering when they accept the downsell. This typically matches the same plan that they were already in. If, for example, this downsell was targeting your “Ultimate” tier plan members, the plan type of the downsell will likely also be “Ultimate”.
The replication group essentially refers to which database we should be looking at to pull in plans from your POS. There will definitely be separate replication groups for different points of sale, and there may even be multiple replication groups within one POS. If you have any questions or doubts about which replication group to select. You can usually tell if you’ve selected the right one by seeing which plans populate under the plan field dropdown.
The plan field is a dropdown menu of all available plans for the chosen replication group. You should select the plan that corresponds with the downsell you’d like to offer - there will typically be something in the name of the plan that indicates a discount associated with it.**
Please Note: A common blocker here is when plans are not actually exposed to the API properly in the point-of-sale. If you have a replication group selected, but you're not seeing any plans come through, you can use the "Chat with Us" button at the bottom right corner of your Rinsed web app to get in touch with a support rep who can help.
The “is active” toggle should be on if you would like customers to start receiving this downsell offer when they use the Rinsed ticket form to cancel their membership.
The locations field is used to restrict which location’s members should receive the downsell offer. If you want the downsell offer to apply to all locations, you can leave the field blank.
The minimum visits per month and maximum visits per month fields restricts the downsell offer based on customer usage.
Typically, tenants will leave minimum visits per month at 0, since members who use less frequently cost your wash less. The exception to this is if you’d like to enable different downsells based on usage. In that case, you might have a downsell where the minimum visits per month is 2.1 and the maximum visits per month is 5 for “higher usage” customers.
The maximum visits per month field is usually set to whatever point at which the business would no longer be profitable.
If, for example, it costs your business $2 for someone to go through your Basic Wash, and the downsell is going to offer the customer a Basic Wash membership for $14 per month, you wouldn’t want to set maximum visits per month higher than 7.
The minimum membership age in months and maximum membership age in months fields restrict offers based on customer age.
Rinsed Tip: Customers will often use minimum membership age in months to prevent people who purchased a plan that was already promotionally priced from receiving a downsell. Example: if you’re offering people 50% off their first month, you might want to wait until the second or third month of membership to offer them a downsell.
The minimum days since last accepted downsell offer restricts downsell offer recipients based on the last time that they accepted a downsell offer.
Our aggregate data shows that people will typically stick around for 9 months following the acceptance of a downsell offer (dependent on the offer). For that reason, we’ll typically recommend that people set this number at 270.
Plan types entered in the eligible plan types field are the plans that are eligible to receive this downsell offer. Typically, a downsell offer is for a discounted version of the same plan type that the customer is already on. That means that the plan type in this field will usually match the plan type chosen on the first section of this page.
Plan types entered in the ineligible plan types field will not be eligible to receive the downsell offer. Note: you do not need to use both the eligible and ineligible fields at the same time. If you indicate, for example, that only your Basic plan type should be eligible for the downsell, the system understands that all other plans are ineligible.
Adding Images
Downsell acceptance rates are higher when customer’s know the deal that they’re getting - and when that deal is visually appealing
If a customer qualifies for the downsell offer given the parameters set above, they will first be shown the image housed under Global Membership Benefits design (first part of cancellation flow). If you click the “Edit” button next to that section, you’ll be able to see Rinsed’s default language:
You can disregard the “name” section, but the “title” will appear at the top of the page (above whatever language or image you input). The default language is “Are you sure you want to cancel?” and many Rinsed customers choose to keep that title.
The “body” is where you can input an image. We recommend that this image follows your branding, and highlights more specific benefits of your wash.
Rinsed Tip: Contact your Customer Success Manager for an image template to use (if desired). Once you’ve edited the image to your liking, send it back to your CSM so that they can convert it to HTML and add it to your cancellation flow.
When the customer is presented with this image, they will have two choices: keep membership, or cancel membership. If they choose keep, they will exit the cancellation flow and no changes will be made to their account. If they choose to cancel, they will be presented with your actual, discounted downsell offer (that you set up above). You’ll set the image they’ll see with the downsell offer in the Retention Offer Design (second part of cancellation flow) section.
The interface used in the Retention Offer Design (second part of cancellation flow) section is the exact same interface used throughout Rinsed to build emails. To add an image, start by dragging an “image” content block to the “No content here. Drag content from right.” section of the editor.
You can then click on the image box (being pointed to by the blue arrow below), and select “Upload image” from the right side. Select the image you’d like to use from your desktop or downloads, and it will appear.
Switch Back Configuration
A standard downsell offer will have a customer switching back into a fully priced plan when their promotional period is over. The great news is that Rinsed will automate this switch back for you.
Days to wait tells the system how many days the customer should be on the discounted plan before switching back into the regularly priced plan. If, for example, you wanted to give the customer a 3 month discount, you would set days to wait to 90.
The replication group here has the same function as the replication group section earlier on in our downsell configuration - we are determining which database we should be looking at to pull in plans from your POS. It will almost certainly be the same replication group you selected initially.
The plan field here is referring to the plan that the customer should be switched into when their downsell period is over - the fully priced plan.
The “enable delayed switch until next recharge” toggle will delay when the customer is actually switched into the downsell plan initially.
Example: a customer’s recharge date is always on the 27th of the month. They go to cancel on July 22nd, and are offered (and accept) a downsell on that date, the 22nd. Let’s pretend that they should stay in the downsell plan for 3 months (so days to wait is set to 90). If the “enable delayed switch until next recharge” toggle is on, the customer will have 90 days from July 27th on the downsell plan. If the toggle is off, they will have 90 days from July 22nd on the downsell plan. |
Click “Create Downsell plan” and you’re finished!
Tracking Performance
Measuring the success of your downsell offers allows you to apply a data-driven approach to your business. When you first launch your downsell offers, you’ll be able to see total vs. accepted offers by navigating to Tickets >> Downsell plans.
There, you’ll be able to see the downsells that you’ve created, as well as the basic statistics for each one.
Once you’ve had 10 accepted downsell offers, a tab in your Rinsed analytics will populate titled “Downsells”. This tab contains a wide variety of data associated with your downsell offers, including lifetime value added, revenue generated from downsells, and overall number of members retained.
Here is a video walkthrough of the downsell setup process: