Target users whose subscription has expired or will expire soon

Often you will want to target users who have had a subscription or membership to your product or service, but whose subscription has either lapsed or is about to lapse. This tactic is ideal for offering a renewal discount to visitors whose subscription is expiring in the next 30, 60 or 90 days. You can even create different incentive Actions depending on how close the user's subscription is to expiring.  This tactic is really a very simple operation: create a segment of users who meet your criteria, then tie that segment to a specific action using the Target Manager. You can target users with a pop-up/interstitial message, a banner ad target through DFP, Revive or OpenX, an e-mail message to that user, or a redirect to another page or web form.

You may decide to break out different groups for different offers. In other words, a subscriber who has a subscription that is about to expire might be sent to a renewal form, while one who has already expired receives an offer for a discounted subscription. In either scenario, you will need to create a segment, and then define the Action that you want deployed to that group.

Under Activation Choose Segment Manager. You will see a list of existing segments that have already been defined in the system. Next to each segment, on the right side, you will see several tools. The pencil tool allows you to edit the segment. Clicking on the garbage can icon will delete the segment. Clicking on the user character with a + sign will add you to that segment (useful for testing). If you click on the box with the triangle on it on the far right side, the segment will expand and show some top-line data, including the segment size and how many users have engaged with the segment since it was created.

Click on Create Segment in the upper right-hand corner of the window to create a new segment.

There are five tabs on the segment screen. In order for this segment/action combination to fire, the segment definition tabs must all be true. That is to say the segment tabs are cumulative. If you define a demographic criteria on the First Party tab, such as job title or state, and then a behavior on the behavior tab, all of those criteria must be met in order for the user to fall into the segment.

On the first tab, define your segment by giving it a title and a description. These elements are not customer-facing, so you can name them whatever makes sense to you. In this case, we are going to create a segment of expired subscribers.

This segment will be purely behavioral, meaning we are targeting people who have a subscription that has expired. Therefore we can ignore the First Party and Third Party tabs and click on the Behavior tab.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Selecting demographic criteria may limit the size of your segment. If you create a segment with a web behavior, such as visiting your web site three times, and a demographic criteria, such as a state or job title, the segment will only apply to "known" or identified users. This is because ONEcount must have identified a user in order to know his or her job title or home state. So while your behavioral criteria might include thousands of web site visitors, adding a demographic criteria to that segment could substantially limit the number of users who fall into the segment.

On the behavior tab, choose the type of behavior you want to define this particular segment. For example, from the Category pull-down, we'll choose Package Transaction. There are several options under Sub Category that quantify the type of transaction, and we'll pick Expired. Enter the Target of the segment, which would be the Product or Package that you are interested in. If you would like to define multiple products, you can click the Add button and add more conditions (products or packages) to this segment. You do not need to choose a Frequency for this criteria. If you are choosing multiple products or packages, decide whether you want the criteria to be And (ie., someone who has expired from Package A AND Package B), or Or (ie., someone who has expired from Package A OR Product B).  Please note the Date Range–the defined behavior must take place during this date range. In other words, our example will match any person whose subscription expired between June 24, 2020 and July 24,2020.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Double-check your SEGMENT date ranges and your ACTION date ranges. Most of the problems users have stem from not paying attention to the date ranges. In other words, the segment below is defined bast on PAST behavior, but the ACTION date range must start with today and be in the future. These are the default settings, but it you are testing segments over the course of several days or weeks, you may need to change the default ranges.

We can also target users whose product or package Will Expire at a date in the future. This is useful if you want to remind users that their subscription is expiring soon and needs to be renewed. You can design an Action to offer a discount for early renewal. This allows you to offer a discount or incentive only to those users who are expiring in the next N days, when they visit your web site.

On the fifth tab, you will define your Action. This is what will happen to users who fall into the segment you are defining. You can define a range of different actions, including a banner target to target the user with a DFP/GAM campaign on your web sites, a redirect to redirect that user to a subscription form, or as shown below, a pop-up which will generate a pop-up form created in the ONEcount form builder when the user comes to your site.

Using ONEcount's built-in forms has several advantages over linking out to third-party forms. ONEcount records both abandon and complete statistics for the forms, showing how successful your campaign has been. ONEcount also has built-in A/B testing for its forms, allowing you to try two different form layouts to see which is more effective at reaching your completion goal.

ONEcount requires you to enter a date range for the action (ie., when you want this pop-up to deploy), as well as the priority level of the campaign and its frequency. Priority level allows you to give higher priority to advertiser campaigns than house campaigns; frequency determines how often the user sees the pop-up message (once a day, once a week, once, etc.).

Click Save to save your segment. To learn more about how to build your pop-up forms, click here. To learn about A/B testing, click here.