Baremetrics increases annual billing by 30% using targeted messages

Intercom has been Baremetrics' platform for customer communication from day one, giving them insight into customers’ in-app activity, and the ability to reach them across multiple channels. With Intercom, they can send the right message in the right context, letting them build stronger relationships and increase the value of each customer.

A better way to encourage annual billing

The CEO of Baremetrics, Josh Pigford, is always looking for better ways to run his business. From hiring to product announcements, he relentlessly tests and refines every aspect of his business for optimal performance. Recently, Josh turned his attention toward customer billing. As a SaaS company, Baremetrics offers customers both monthly and annual billing options. Annual billing is preferred by Baremetrics, as it increases the predictability of revenue, reduces churn, and improves cash flow. Given these benefits, Josh wanted to find a more effective way to encourage customers to switch to annual billing than what he typically saw from other SaaS businesses.

“What we see a lot of companies do is a once-a-year email push in the fourth quarter to try and squeeze out a single influx of cash. We took this a step further and started sending out emails within a few months of a company signing up,” explains Josh.

The first step was to determine when customers would be more open to switch. Specifically, the time when newly-engaged customers grasped the long-term value of the product and no longer need the flexibility of monthly billing to opt out. Using Intercom, the Baremetrics team sent an email targeting users who had logged in more than 10 times in the first 30 days after signing up. To further incentivize these customers to switch, they offered three months of service free, instead of the usual two.

The results were good, the email had an 11% conversion rate, allowing Baremetrics to bill over $14,000 in additional revenue during the following week. But Josh wanted to go a step further to increase the response and conversion rate of the message.

The power of in-app messaging

By using Intercom, Baremetrics found that in-app messages are often the best way to reach customers – outperforming email in response rate and quality of the response.

Josh decided that given the potential impact on revenue, it was worth sending the same offer to the same audience via an in-app message. The simple act of delivering the message in a different context made a big impact – converting an additional 14% of customers. In total, Josh was able to increase annual plan subscriptions by 30%.

Josh attributes this success to the power of reaching customers in the right context. “With an in-app message, the annual offer is presented right smack in the middle of the user soaking up the value they get from Baremetrics.”

Unlike email, in-app messages don’t compete with other messages vying for your customer’s attention. They view your message when they are engaged and exclusively focused on your product – making it much more likely they will respond.

"When communicating with customers, email and in-app are not equal. Context matters."

Building a superior messaging strategy

The annual pricing message is one of more than 100 auto messages Baremetrics has created to improve the customer experience and their business. But their success isn’t due to the quantity of messages – it’s the quality. Josh explains, “the goal is not to message everyone. I think a lot of companies make the mistake of assuming their entire customer base needs to know something. That’s the wrong approach because your customers will tire of hearing from you.”

Baremetrics is careful to send only relevant messages. They gather customer feedback to help curate and optimize the content they send, create targeted messages to address frequently asked questions, and add informative content relating to their customers’ business problems.

An example of this strategy is on the customer’s churn dashboard. Josh explains that, “if one of our customers is on a churn page and their churn rate is above 15%, then we show an in-app message with a video from me, a few articles to help them decrease their churn rate, and invite them to shoot me a reply to see if I can help. So instead of having them ask us how to do something, we proactively show them. And now the messages we receive on those metric pages are more like ‘Thanks for sending over that information, it was a huge help’.”

The benefits of continuously onboarding

The ability to automatically deliver in-app messages throughout the customer lifecycle lets Baremetrics approach customer onboarding in a new way. “Often times you think of onboarding in the context of a new signup, but we look at onboarding as a continuous process for our customers. Whether its feature awareness or solution awareness, or helping customers find solutions to problems inside Baremetrics. The onboarding process doesn’t really stop for us,” says Josh.

Instead of overwhelming users by trying to convey all the features and functionality of the product when they sign up, Baremetrics progressively onboards and educates them based on their behavior. Users can now start using the platform faster, learn more about the features that matter to them, and avoid having read through dense onboarding material right when they sign up.

Looking ahead, Baremetrics wants to continue to build out in-app messages that enable their users to get the most out of the platform. By tracking customer feature usage and then piping that data into Intercom, they create a more complete picture of their customers so they can better serve their needs and find new ways to improve the customer experience.

"With Intercom we get the insights we need to constantly improve the customer experience. We can make fewer assumptions about our customers and message them at the best possible moment."