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The worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons

andrewchen.com

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Re: The worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons

#111

Post by amtamt »

amluto wrote: post #103

> You have a target market and sometimes it takes time for a product to spread through its ideal users — this is magical because word of mouth is free. And when it happens in an organic way, the intent is even higher. But if these ideal users encounter the product via an incentive program, you often “pull forward” these users, thus costing you money, when you would have gotten them anyway. It’s worse than that. Some…

> The moral: set up your pricing structure and promotions to incentivize the behavior you want from your customers.

Is it aligned with the incentive digital marketing team has?

Re: The worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons

#112

Post by legutierr »

treffer wrote: post #74
red_admiral wrote: post #29

The kind of people who ran coupon schemes in the pre-internet days could have told you this. Back in the day, coupon schemes were things like you had to physically cut out and mail in vouchers from newspapers or magazines, and you got a discount on something like groceries in return. The point of this was market segmentation: you want to get people who (1) otherwise wouldn't buy your product, or at least not as much…

It becomes more funny once you shift online. Basically every checkout has a "coupon" field. Now you look for coupons, and some coupon aggregator of doubtful quality pops up. You find something that works. Or give up. Done. The coupon sites are usually of doubtful quality because .... Basically all affiliate networks forbid it. It's also the reason why "last click" attribution is horribly broken. Funnily enough it's n…

> The coupon sites are usually of doubtful quality because .... Basically all affiliate networks forbid it.

I wasn’t aware of this, and I’m not sure I understand why this would be the case. Do you have any more information about this?

Re: The worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons

#113

Post by 972811 »

ghaff wrote: post #49
steveBK123 wrote: post #36

Thinking more on this, I have a group of friends who partake in these types of deals. They are arguably a leading indicator of business models that are going to fail. Why? Because they will cycle through every single deal and never sign up. Every single one of them cycled through all the meal kit trial discounts during the ZIRP era, without ever signing up for one (it's free food dude). If you think I am kidding, go…

They still mostly were neither free nor a particularly good deal. I tried Blue Apron once (probably with a discount). In addition to the dark pattern of we'll send you meals next week by default they pretty much all used, they all seemed to have a really narrow use case. Basically, you had to be fine with cooking sometimes fairly time-consuming recipes for 2+ people three days a week, but didn't have a well-stocked p…

yeah surprisingly that was ideal for me when I was single. i enjoy the actual physical act of cooking but hate the constant planning/prep/shopping. guaranteeing a few healthy dinners a week that I don't have to plan was pretty nice. unfortunately the meal quality dropped a good bit and the recipes get redundant after a while

i'd still recommend it to anyone who's never cooked before at all and wants to start

Re: The worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons

#114

Post by Tomte »

fireflash38 wrote: post #95
ipaddr wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. A dollar off coupon will encourage purchasing otherwise ignored products. I buy toothpaste. A dollar off coupon will encourage another brand purchase to a more expensive product that may get repeated. The shop may get addition money by having me buy other items to save me the time of multiple store visits. There is a reason why each week a different item goes on sale. That loss leader leads to more purchase…

But would you continue to buy it afterwards, or just chase the discounts? Aka:are you truly a "conversion" or just a single discount sale?

Doesn‘t really matter if the discounted price still makes you a profit.

Re: The worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons

#115

Post by hakfoo »

dahart wrote: post #61
steveBK123 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She is a gym member maybe 1 out of 3 months because she is perpetually rotating through the deal she can get. The secret to this stuff is boring - persistent, continuous effort. If you can't even maintain a regular gym membership, you will not get that effort in. She's been complaining for over a decade as she continuous this charade.

To be fair, gym memberships are often crappy rent-seeking contracts. They love it when people start memberships for their New Year’s resolutions and then stop coming in February but keep paying, and they often try to hike the prices on you, renew automatically, and make it difficult to cancel. I’m perfectly fine with paying for a gym but I absolutely hate signing up for memberships. Currently I’m going to a city-run…

I'm amazed at this point, given the "subscriptions are a nightmare to cancel" meme, that nobody's turned that into a marketing message. Some of the gym ads say "cancel anytime", but "sure, just bring in this blood-endorsed document countersigned by at least five Supreme Court justices" is still implied.

Services that say "prepay up-front and we'll never bill you" is a viable selling premise. Gift subscriptions are an obvious viable business that comes out of that model.

I wanted to get my father a gift subscription to the local newspaper, and they basically had no idea how to handle a fixed-term subscription-- all they could point to were recurring auto-pay setups.

Re: The worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons

#116

Post by rib3ye »

dylan604 wrote: post #79
rib3ye wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I frequently use 50% off discounts to buy square pie guys pizza. Will I buy that pizza at full price? _probably_ not, but I will tell everyone that it’s amazing because is it. So it’s a $12 review, right? Compared to a $1k-$5k /video influencer, isn’t that a deal? I’ve even spammed their name in this comment. Disclaimer: I know nothing about marketing economics

> So it’s a $12 review, right? > Compared to a $1k-$5k /video influencer, isn’t that a deal? I mean, that totally depends on the "influencer" right? How many people will you actually talk to where you've spent $12? How many people will hear about it from the influencer? If they have 1M subs and get $5k, that's half a cent per view. Sometimes, simple arithmetic can disprove ridiculous viewpoints. Now, it's just a matt…

Well how many people do you calculate saw my comment?

Re: The worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons

#117

Post by [deleted] »

electriclove wrote: post #57
FredPret wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another answer is “someone who would slog through some effort to get a tiny bit of a better deal” and these people are definitely worse customers, rich or poor.

Why the downvotes / disagreement? “People using coupons -> worse customers” makes sense to me. The shop isn’t getting more money from these customers.

[deleted]

Re: The worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons

#119

Post by bombcar »

electriclove wrote: post #57
FredPret wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another answer is “someone who would slog through some effort to get a tiny bit of a better deal” and these people are definitely worse customers, rich or poor.

Why the downvotes / disagreement? “People using coupons -> worse customers” makes sense to me. The shop isn’t getting more money from these customers.

It’s the other way around. Not all coupon users are worse customers (who would refuse a 5$ discount offered during checkout?) - but the worst customers will also go out of their way to find coupons.

Re: The worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons

#120

Post by nerdponx »

steveBK123 wrote: post #40
AlexandrB wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really weird to frame this as a question of "mindset". I certainly had a "scarcity mindset" when I was younger and had no money. Now that I'm older and have some money I have a "growth mindset". But really the main difference is my access to resources.

It may come off this way, but I'm 40 and my friends doing this are.. NOT poor. The same friends who did this in college are the ones doing it now at 40 despite owning LV bags, $1M homes, etc. It's sort of a mindset difference between "I'm going to make as much money as possible" vs "I'm going to spend as little money as possible". Ideally someone can try to do both, but I've met near zero who meet that criteria.

I have experienced this as well, mostly among people who did not grow up with a lot of money but managed to make a lot of it throughout their adult life.
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