Special Coupons & Discounts

A subscriptions-based model thrives on conversions and renewals and dies by churn rate. To ensure you fall into the former category, we’ve implemented special contextual discounts to improve the commercial experience for your users and customers.

You can access our four special discounts in the Developer Dashboard by navigating to Coupons and clicking on the Special Coupons tab:

There, you can set four types of special discounts using coupons:

• Cart Abandonment Recovery Coupon
• Exit Intent Coupon
• Subscription Cancellation Coupon
• Manual Subscription Renewal Recovery Coupon

Here’s how they work:

All special coupons require a discount coupon to be created.

How to create a discount coupon

1. Go to Coupons page in the developer dashboard
2. In the Coupons section, click the Add Coupon button
3. A new panel will appear with a form to add details like the coupon name, lifespan, discount, redemptions and who can redeem the coupon.
4. Scroll to the end of the panel and click the Create button to add the new coupon.

For ongoing(forever until deleted) coupons, please leave the end date empty in the effective date section. The coupon can also be active or deactivated by toggle of a button.

Cart Abandonment Recovery Coupon

This special coupon integrates with the Cart Abandonment Recovery mechanism. In addition to surfacing your money-back guarantee and encouraging users to subscribe for a trial (if you have one), you can offer a discount as an extra incentive to encourage more prospects to complete the checkout they’ve abandoned.

Simply create a coupon with the preferred discount. Then, switch to the Coupons → Special Coupons tab and choose the coupon you’ve created:

Since the search is based on the coupon codes, we recommend using a code that includes CART_RECOVERY in it when you create one.

Once the coupon is selected, a discount is offered in the third cart abandonment recovery email automatically as a final attempt to win the customer:

The special discounts logic was built on top of our coupons infrastructure to give you control of whether the discount applies to the first payment or the first payment and subscription renewals.

Clicking the purchase button opens the checkout with the context of the saved cart and automatically applies the discount without revealing the coupon’s code:

Exit Intent Coupon (+ 1 Hour FOMO)

An average of 69% of online checkouts are left incomplete. Capturing abandoned carts is one of the biggest opportunities to meaningfully impact revenue because the prospect has already shown intent to purchase.

While we do address abandoned carts through an email campaign, an email Cart Abandonment Recovery mechanism is fully dependent on the user entering their email address before abandoning. This makes an exit intent discount a highly effective complementary method of recovering abandoned carts, there and then.

In the Coupons → Special Coupons tab, select the checkout exit intent coupon:

Once set, every person who indicates an exit intent before filling out their email address will be prompted with a FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) 60-minute timer — where they can choose to apply the coupon. If the coupon is applied, a FOMO countdown timer appears right next to the coupon row:

We recommend starting with a symbolic 5% coupon and tracking the change in sales. If 5% doesn’t have any meaningful impact, try bumping up the discount by 5% increments until you get to 20%. Depending on your profit margin, you can test with even larger discounts.

If you’re concerned about potentially devaluing your offering by applying this coupon, consider assessing it from a financial perspective. Acquiring a user through paid ads or affiliate marketing for 5%, 10%, or even 20% of their total payment makes financial sense. This coupon serves as a direct means of converting new users into customers, essentially becoming part of your customer acquisition cost.

Subscription Cancellation Coupon

This special coupon helps to maximize subscription renewals and reduce churn rate.

Simply create a coupon with the preferred discount.

To leverage this coupon to its potential, we recommend defining a 20% to 30% subscription cancellation discount.

Then, switch to the Coupons → Special Coupons tab and choose the coupon you’ve created:

Once the coupon is set, a promo is offered to customers when they initiate a subscription cancellation process by clicking the ‘Cancel auto-renew’ button in the User Dashboard. Customers can apply the promo with a single click and there’s no need to collect the payment method again.

You can discount on the next renewal by creating the coupon with ‘First payment only’ selected. Or you can create a coupon to discount all future renewals by choosing the ‘First payment and renewals’ option:

Important to Note

1. You can’t modify this setting once a customer applies the subscription cancellation promo discount. Therefore, if you’d like to change the coupon’s behavior on future renewals, you’ll need to create a new coupon and use it as a special coupon (instead of the previous one).
2. A subscription cancellation discount can only be applied once per license. It means that once a customer has received a cancellation discount for a given license, they won’t see the offer for that license again.
3. The only properties in use for this special coupon are the discount (absolute or %) and whether it should be applied on the next renewal or all future subscription renewals. The redemptions limit, plans, licenses, and billing cycles are all ignored. Effectively — even if you’ve configured the coupon to only apply for a five-site license — the promo will also be shown when a customer initiates cancellation of a single-site license.

If you are running a BFCM (Black Friday Cyber Monday) promotion that applies to previous customers too, some who subscribed last year would likely want to cancel and re-subscribe to secure a lower price. By deploying this coupon, you can mitigate subscription churn, discourage cancellation, and generate more revenue by offering a slightly lower subscription renewal discount. For example, if your BFCM promotion is set at 30%, you can offer a 15-20% discount to canceling customers.

Due to PayPal API limitations, if you offer a discount that is over 16% only for the next renewal (not all renewals), then a customer with an active PayPal subscription will only be offered a 16% discount.

Manual Subscription Renewal Recovery Coupon

To retain customers who have cancelled their subscriptions, configure a manual subscription renewal discount as an incentive:

Once set, the discount is incorporated into the manual renewal recovery email campaign automatically. This helps to capture customers who are on the fence about renewing before their license expires.

Clicking the button opens the checkout with the discount applied (without revealing the coupon’s code). A countdown is displayed to encourage users to take action, clearly informing them that the discount will expire when the license expires:

Unlike the automatic renewal discount that you can configure in the Plans → Renewals Discount section (which discounts renewals for active subscriptions), this coupon serves the exact opposite purpose.

Freemius does not endorse discounting automatic renewals, and businesses have since shifted away from this practice. If you do not offer a discount for automatic renewals, we strongly recommend utilizing this coupon to win customers back into an active subscription.

If you already offer a discount for automatic renewals, we recommend avoiding the manual renewal discount. This is because we already emphasize that subscription cancellation will cause the loss of the automatic renewals discount, so offering a discount for a manual renewal will contradict that message.

If you choose to offer both, we recommend using the same discount.