Retain Customer by Extending a Free Trial

You can extend a trial period in a free trial subscription as a strategy to retain customers. The following contains relevant information about this use case:

Preconditions and Considerations

• The subscription's status is Active.
• At the time of purchase, the customer provides payment details for future billing.
• The free trial product automatically converts to a paid subscription after the initial billing interval.
• The date to which the next billing date is updated must be in the future. If the date must be set to today, set it at least one minute in the future.

Description

1. On February 1st, a customer purchases a publisher's XYZ subscription that includes a 14-day free trial.
2. On February 13th, the customer, having been busy, realizes there was no chance to use the subscription and evaluate its value. To avoid being billed for the subscription, the customer logs into the publisher's subscription management page. The page uses the Get Subscription API endpoint to display details for the subscription.
3. The customer clicks a Cancel My Subscription button.
4. Hoping that the customer can be retained if given more time to use the subscription, the publisher displays a page that offers the customer two options:
   • Extend my free trial for 30 days
   • No thanks, cancel my subscription
5. The customer selects to extend the free trial, triggering the page to use the Update Next Billing Date API endpoint to extend the next billing date by 30 days.
6. On March 14th, the free trial billing interval ends and the Cleverbridge platform automatically bills the customer the $79.99 monthly subscription price for the XYZ subscription.

👍

Tip

Obtain the customer's consent for changes to subscriptions. For more information, see Best Practices: Obtain Customer Consent.

In the call to the Update Next Billing Date API endpoint, pass the following two parameters:

Illustration