Better upselling for premium subscriptions
To be blunt, the upselling experience for paid subscribers has been…bad. This is entirely my fault!
When designing the paid subscriptions experience, I had a few blunders:
- I assumed the majority of paid subscribers would be new subscribers. The flow is optimized for individuals who start out completely unsubscribed, and so the desire path is for folks to immediately be upsold after subscribing.
- Buttondown is structured intentionally without much concept of a “subscriber-user”, meaning that subscribers interact with Buttondown entirely with their email address. This is good for portability reasons, but bad for state — meaning that the version of a newsletter that a subscriber views online is nigh-identical that which someone who isn’t subscribed views.
Both of these choices manifest in a number of less-than-ideal ways, but one particularly egregious one is the flow by which subscribers upgrade to premium subscriptions. Up until this week, they would have to go to the click a link in the footer of their email, re-input their email address, and then they were prompted to sign up. It was a confusing thing that spawned a lot of emails, and I get it. It was bad! No way around it.
Now, though, things are better. Rather than bore you with some of the technical details of how things are better, I’d like to just show you! This is the page that a subscriber is brought to when they’re prompted to upgrade their subscription in an email:
No fiddling with inputs or remembering what email address they used. Just a simple Stripe-powered checkout page. This has rolled out automatically, and you should see a healthy uplift in conversions!
And if you’re interested in dynamically inserting this link at an opportune moment, you can! The magic template variable is {{ upgrade_url }}, so you’d want to write something like:
[Click here]({{ upgrade_url }}) to become a paid subscriber today.
Previous posts
- Support for Stripe Payment Links
- Pay-what-you-want subscriptions
- Spring 2021
- Support for HTTPS tracking links
- Email tracking is now off by default
- You can now integrate with Plausible!
- A nicer subscriber importing experience
- Referencing subscriber tags in your newsletter
- Accept whatever currency you want for your paid newsletter
- Slightly nicer Design settings
- Webhooks and the Programming page
- Buttondown in 2021
- Undo send
- Navigation updates
- Open Beta: European mail servers
- Set a custom unsubscription URL for your (sadly no-longer-subscribed) subscribers
- Compare analytics from multiple emails
- Saved draft recipients
- Buttondown's funding of open source software
- Why you need to include a physical address in your newsletter
- Adding a Buttondown subscription form to Weebly
- Annual subscriptions for paid newsletters
- Reminding folks to confirm their subscription
- Adding a Buttondown subscription form to Squarespace
- Adding a Buttondown subscription form to Webflow
- Embedding Instagram photos into your emails
- Customizing your subscription form to tag new subscribers
- How to opt out of analytics and email tracking
- Managing your drafts through the API
- Open Beta: Multiple newsletters
- Easy subscriber filters
- Scheduling emails through the API
- Sending newsletters that get delivered
- May Updates
- April Updates
- March Updates
- February Updates
- Winter Update
- June Updates
- May Updates
- April Updates
- March Updates
- Nicer archive pages!
- Markdown is easier than ever
- January Updates
- 2017: In Review
- Introducing subscriber events
- Learning about unsubscribed users
- A new blog
- Learn more about your subscribers!
- Send emails to certain tags!
- Gravatar support
- Subscriber sources
- Embeddable subscription widget
- Creating drafts via email
- Subscriber and archive search