What are offer prices?
Offer prices are what your customers will pay to have access to a content offer. How a price works depends on your monetization model.
For recurring offers (eg. subscriptions), a price will be automatically paid by a customer at the start of every billing cycle. For transactional offers (eg. VOD or temporary passes), the price represents a one-time payment for the customer.
Different price points and pricing models allow you to:
- Experiment with monetization strategies
- Find the best way to package and market your content
- Capture different types of customers with different price points
Where do I create prices?
Prices are created in Cleeng’s content monetization tool. Each pricing model (subscriptions, passes, TVOD, Live PPV) represents a slightly different pricing strategy. For passes and seasonal subscriptions, it is also possible to create multiple price points per offer (eg. early bird offers or mid-season offers).
After selecting your content offer type, and defining the basic offer information, the next step will be to define your pricing.
How does pricing work for different types of content offers?
Subscription pricing
Subscriptions use recurring billing. This means that you will create a price that the customer pays to both start the subscription and renew the subscription for each new billing cycle.
The frequency of billing depends on the billing cycle you define, which can be any of the following:
- Weekly
- Monthly
- Every 3 months
- Every 6 months
- Annual
- Seasonal
When using coupons for subscription offers, you can choose how many billing cycles a discount will apply for.
Pass pricing
Passes can have either one-time purchase or recurring pricing. When creating a one-time purchase price, you can select your price based on the length of access you provide your customer (eg. day passes, monthly passes, season passes).
A second option is to define a common expiry date that will apply to this pass regardless of when the customer purchases it. This is most used by sports broadcasters to package seasons.
Renewable passes provide a lot of flexibility for content pricing. Just some of the options available are:
- Defining multiple special price points in a season (eg. early bird or mid-season prices)
- Automatic renewals from special prices to the full season price
- Defining renewal prices based on the customer’s initial payment price
These options help you continue to attract new customers over the season while retaining and renewing them at full-season prices.
Live Pay-per-view pricing
Live pay-per-views (PPV) are one-time purchases. The price you define will be the price the customer pays for full access to your event. The length of this access will depend on how long your event runs.
Transactional Video-on-demand (TVOD) pricing
TVODs can be used with two main types of pricing strategies. The first is for unlimited access to VODs. These work as a one-time purchase. Your customer pays the offer price, and will then have continuous access to the video you are offering.
The second TVOD strategy is for rental offers. Here you can create different price points based on how long you want to grant access to a video for:
- Short term rentals (48 or 72 hours)
- Longer term rentals (7, 30, or 90 days)
How can you use prices effectively?
For media and entertainment brands, it’s important to use pricing strategies that spark curiosity and excitement. This means balancing your long-term offers with appealing entry points and free trials.
Here are some factors to think about.
Provide multiple price points
Having multiple price points is effective, even for sports broadcasters with highly seasonal content. To maximize growth, you should try to accommodate low, mid, and high-motivation customers. Align your billing cycles with these price points (low = monthly, mid = 3-month, etc) and focus on incentivizing longer-term commitments.
Aggressive pricing with longer-term commitments
The New York Times used very aggressive discount pricing ($0.50 a week for one year) to convert unconvinced users into subscribers. You can try this by generating long-term discount campaigns for monthly offers, eg. 50% off a $5.99 offer for 12 months. Such offers boost signups but have the added benefit of creating stickier customers thanks to the long-term discount.
Clear premium choices
Make sure to facilitate your super-fans. These customers will want to pay more for your service and you should think about how to create premium-level value for them. This can be achieved in a simple way through Annual plans, with special messages for these customers. You can also use session control management tools to create special multi-screen premium offers for these customers.
Can I update prices after my offer is created?
You can update the prices of your Pass, Live PPV, and TVOD offers at any time.
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.