Setting up a Subscription Offer

Introduction 

Setting up a subscription offer using Cleeng Core is super simple. Below, you'll find a comprehensive guide on how to do so using the Cleeng dashboard. But first, what do you need to start selling your content?

• Content that you have the right to sell and that you believe will attract subscribers quickly (e.g., videos, e-learning materials, or other digital assets)
  
• A website where you plan to sell your content
• An account with the relevant hosting or content management platform (e.g., OVPs for video content) to upload your content before selling them with Cleeng.

Once all of the above are ready, you can take the next big step and the best part is you don't need to be a super techie to do it - it's really easy to do with the Cleeng dashboard!

Step-by-step guide

Subscription is a type of offer with recurring billing. Once a customer subscribes, they are billed automatically for the set period:

• For Weekly, Monthly, Every 3 months, Every 6 months, Yearly follow the guide below.
• For Seasonal please refer to the guide dedicated to Seasonal Subscriptions.  

1. Log in to your account.
2. Select offer type.
3. Provide basic information (the title at the least).
4. Provide pricing information (the billing period and price at the least).
5. Optionally, add offer localizations.
6. Sum-up.

Get started

Offer creation process consists of 4 main steps — they correspond to 4 sections in the offer setup wizard in the dashboard. Let’s go to the dashboard to get started:  

1. Log in to your Cleeng account.

2. Click on the Offers tab under the Offers & Coupons section on the left menu of your dashboard. From here you can create new subscriptions and edit the existing ones.

3. Click Create offer.

Step 1. Select offer type

1. Select the Subscription tile. A pop-up with additional information about this type of offer will appear.

2. Click Next.

Step 2. Provide offer information

1. Enter the basic information about your offer (only the title is required):

• Title (required) - give the name to the offer; it will be visible to your customers. If you don’t want to add any of the optional information, jump straight to Step 3.

Optional information: 

• Thumbnail URL (optional) - you can add a URL for an image that a web app can display for this offer, e.g. in the checkout 
• Description (optional) - here you can add a longer teaser for the offer if you want to display it in your web app
• Add tags (optional) - tagging an offer controls which categories a customer will gain access to. By default, all offers are created with the tag “all”. You can learn more about using tags.

Advanced settings:

• App store product IDs (optional) - this allows you to match an existing in-app version of your offer with Cleeng's platform. Read more about connecting your In-App offers with Cleeng.
• Custom params (optional) - these allow you to add your own data to an offer, and are only shown to customers if you choose to do so.

2. Click Next.

Step 3. Provide pricing information

1. Enter the information about pricing (only the billing period and price are required):

• Billing period (required) - choose how often subscribers are billed for this offer: weekly, monthly, every 3 months, every 6 months, annually, or at the beginning of every new season. 
  Please note that you can create daily subscriptions for testing purposes only in the sandbox environment.
  
  • Important: Make sure you have Dunning Action Settings configured for each billing period and each payment method. Dunning Action Settings must be set up for the recurring billing to function. Check with Cleeng Support Team if you are not 100% sure of your settings.
    Example: If you sell monthly and annual subscriptions, and offer 2 payment methods (Apple Pay and PayPal), you need to create settings for the following method-cycle combinations: 
    • payment method Apple Pay and cycle monthly
    • payment method Apple Pay and cycle annual
    • payment method PayPal and cycle monthly
    • payment method PayPal and cycle annual
  • If you choose Seasonal, please switch to this guide.  
• Price (required) - enter the price for this offer. 
  • The currency here is based on your default currency. Cleeng converts the price to customers' preferred currency by using an auto-detect feature. 

Important:

In general, Cleeng does not recommend changing prices after the subscription offer is purchased as it may cause legal implications and affect customer satisfaction. In practice, you can manually lower the price of the purchased subscription offer in the settings in the Cleeng dashboard. 

However, if you would like to increase the price of subscription offers, you can do it with the assistance of Cleeng Support Team.

Such a solution is aimed at protecting the end users from uncontrolled price fluctuations and guarantee their seamless experience.

 

If you don’t want to add any of the optional information, jump straight to Step 4.

• Free trial (optional) - decide if the first offer period will be free: if you click Days or Months and set the number of days/months this trial should last, your subscription will always start with one free period. After the free period is over your customers will be charged at a full price. If you don’t want to add this option, select None.
• Purchasable as a gift (optional) - if you'd like to enable users to buy this offer (subscription) as a gift, select Yes, and go to Offers & Coupons > Gift Checkout to set up the checkout url. See more: Gift Subscriptions. 
• Geo restrictions (optional) - use it to limit content access to specific countries. You can either select Allow in or Block in and choose the countries from the drop-down list. By default, no geo restrictions are applied - content is available everywhere.   

 2. Click Next.

Step 4. Add localizations

This step is optional. You can find out more in Creating offer localizations.

If you want to adjust the offer you’re creating to customers in different countries, you can create offer localizations in the Localization section. For each country you select, you can adjust the title, price, currency, description, and free trial period.

Depending on what is more convenient for you, choose one of these options:

• Add One - choose it if you want to adjust the offer for one or a few countries from different regions. You’ll get a pop-up as below: 

• Add Multiple - choose this option if you want to adjust the offer for more countries from one region (e.g. Europe):

1. Select the region.
2. Select countries (you can tick the option Select all to bulk-mark all, or just tick the countries you want).
3. Click Add local offers.
4.  Once they are added, you can adjust local settings: click the Edit button next to each country and make your adjustments. (If at this point you decide to remove a localized offer, you can click the Delete button to do it).

Sum-up

1. Review your offer.

Note: When you click Finish setup, you won’t be able to delete the offer in the dashboard, however, you will be able to deactivate it. 

2. Once you’re happy with your newly created offer, click Finish setup.

3. You’ll see the summary of the settings for the subscription offer you just created.

Your offer will have its ID assigned (e.g. S123456789_PL). Offer localizations will have respective country codes added (e.g. S123456789_CA for Canada).

On the right side of the screen, you can see a menu with actions you can take, for example editing the offer or creating checkout. 

If you’re setting up an offer for the first time, continue below to find out about creating checkout.

Create checkout

Select the Create checkout option from the menu on the right side of the screen. It will trigger a popup with a few-step instruction. 

Example

A streaming platform wants to introduce a new monthly subscription package that includes various sport content. The offer will be available in the United States (5,99 $) , Canada (5,99 CAD), the United Kingdom (6 GBP), and Australia 5,99 AUD. 

Log into their Cleeng account and navigate to the offer section. Click on the “create offer” button in the right upper section.

In the newly opened popup window select the offer type - subscription and confirm by clicking on the “next” button.

Fill the offer information, especially the name of your offer. The rest can be filled later. Having done that, press the “next” button.

Go to pricing where you can select the price and the countries where the offer will be allowed. Start from choosing the billing period from the drop down menu, in this case choose “monthly”.

Enter the price. The default price is set in euro - this is determined by the currency chosen during your account creation. The default currency in your offer is set, however you can change the price for each country in the further steps.

At this step you can also decide if you want to offer your viewers a free trial or if your offer could be purchased as a gift.

Next, choose “allow in” in the geo restriction section and choose all the countries you would like to broadcast your content from the drop down menu. Confirm by clicking on the “next” button.

Go to the localizations section and choose the option “add multiple”.

You will see a popup window where you can add the regions and then specific countries.

Countries should be added manually one by one.

After confirming you will be presented all the offers. At this stage you can edit all the prices by clicking on the edit icon next to each offer. As you can see the default currencies were set for each country. Click on the finish setup. Your subscription offer is ready!