Posts Tagged ‘pricing’

Campaign Management with CashBox

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011

Digital merchants constantly experiment and test different pricing models in order to broaden their acquisition pipeline and improve customer retention. The CashBox campaign management capabilities we announced today will even further help digital merchants to drive acquisition and increase retention. Some common questions digital merchants ask us include:

  • Should we have a trial promotion period for our new service, and how long should it last?
  • What benefits can we expect to generate if we provide a one-time discount for leads referred to us by an affiliate partner?
  • What are the A/B testing results from different price promotions and what changes should we make based on the result?

Pricing for a service faces the same life-cycle considerations as the service itself. But with the new campaign management capabilities now available in CashBox, merchants can now:

  • Manage all prices, promotions, and coupons associated with a service from a single environment
  • Analyze and act on the results from various campaigns run through built-in reporting and dashboards
  • Work closely with partners to offer discounted services to complementary products and understand relative successes

We continue to introduce CashBox product enhancements that focus on the twin themes of customer acquisition and retention. With markets and economies continuing to splutter, those digital leaders who understand how to optimize across both will be the ones that survive and thrive in the long run.  We invite you to learn more.

Sanjay SarathyTags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted by Sanjay Sarathy in Best Practices, Industry News, Marketing, Vindicia Press Release | No Comments »

Vindicia’s Spring 2011 Webinar Series Kick-off

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

We’re happy to announce that our Spring 2011 Webinar Series kicks off on Thursday, April 21. This season we’re covering hot issues, such as, how to sell digital content and avoid the 30% land grab that Apple and Facebook are taking from the pocketbooks of gaming and other digital content companies; ways to increase the lifetime of your subscribers; and optimizing your pricing and decide whether now is the right time to change pricing. In addition to our CEO, digital innovator Gene Hoffman, we have two other insightful guest speakers that will share their strategies and best practices as digital industry insiders. This Webinar Series cover the following topics:

Selling Online Content Without Giving Up 30% to Apple and Facebook with Vindicia CEO, Gene Hoffman

Three Ways to Increase Your Subscribers’ Lifetime Value with Editor of SubscriptionSiteInsider.com, Sean Donahue

Is Now the Right Time to Change Your Price? with PricingWire CEO, Chris Hopf

Please join us for our Vindicia 2011 Spring Webinar Series and register for these webinars. Additionally, if there are any other topics you’d like to see us cover in upcoming Webinars, please contact us with your suggestions and/or questions.

sjorglTags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted by Stephanie Jorgl in Best Practices, Events, Industry News, gaming | No Comments »

The Guardian Changing Media Summit

Friday, March 18th, 2011

Next week Vindicia will be participating in the Guardian Changing Media Summit in London. We’re very excited about debating and sharing ideas on how media, content, broadcast and game publishers of all stripes can navigate the transition to digital business models.  As yesterday’s New York Times pricing announcement reveals, it’s still an open question as to what the right model should be to achieve what every media company cares about:  long-term customer loyalty.  Should it really cost more to get the standalone digital version versus the digital and print bundle? I’ve schlepped enough newsprint to the recycling bin…

Both my session and that of my colleague, Sanjay Sarathy, will focus on a variety of issues that our clients regularly face, including those related to business model decisions, the impact on customer retention, the context of demographics, and much more.  A recent online video provides some additional color on my views related to this area and while experimentation will undoubtedly continue, our existing clients like Boxee, Mind Candy, and Next Issue Media are proving the thesis that media companies who think about themselves as offering a service rather than just a paywall to content will be the ones who remain the digital leaders of tomorrow.

Gene HoffmanTags: , , ,
Posted by Gene Hoffman in CEO Blog, Events | No Comments »

Murdoch: Go Back to the Drawing Board

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

Rupert Murdoch is out making news today that pay walls are a great idea and fingering Google Search as his nemesis. He’s off the mark on two points.

Paywalls are attempting to monetize access to content. That model died the day Tim Berners-Lee released CERN HTTPd. Raw access to content will or has been commoditized and that trend will only continue. Especially in the realm of content creation where there is little value add (read hard news), there just isn’t enough invested that the crowd can’t do as well or better that allows for simple monetization of that access. In point of fact, using the paywall in such a way that you break the network effect devalues the the content in question by taking it out of the conversation.

This is why I say that Murdoch has the wrong boogeyman. Murdoch is not competing with the Google search and Adwords. He’s competing with Google Reader.

As Reader continues to improve it will start to learn how you consume news and start to make staying informed easier for the end user. The real challenge for major news organizations is how to go back to the product development drawing board and understand their businesses as services that add value for their end users.

Newspapers were begun to facilitate news aggregation and to  make keeping informed easier, more reliable, and enjoyable in the days where telegraphs were expensive or even earlier where 6-8 knots or 20 horse miles per day was the speed of information.

It is now time for news organizations to start thinking about how they are particularly able to add value in ways that leverage the network effect (instead of hindering it) and starts to organize the crowd and the news in ways that both entertain and speed the end users acquisition of news information.

Money can be made and subscriber bases can be grown by major news organizations, but they will be grown because the news business makes a pitch to news consumers that adds value to how the consumer uses their content today instead of simply disconnecting content from the open network. News organizations that choose to try to understand the news I want and offer it to me for one price across my PC, iPhone, iPad, game console, Boxee Box, etc. will give me a reason to be their subscriber.

I’ll note that I have but one login to Netflix and that login knows what I like, what I’ve consumed, helps me find new stuff that will amuse me and comes with a single cross channel price.

Which news organization will compete with Google Reader to make me happy to pay them?

Gene HoffmanTags: , , , , , , ,
Posted by Gene Hoffman in CEO Blog | 1 Comment »

Pricing, Macmillan, and Disintermediation

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

The book industry is doing some things right and some things wrong. On the positive side, it appears that most of the book publishers have decided to embrace disintermediation by internet enabled digital channels. They’re correct that, for now, piracy of books isn’t as easy as it has been for movies and music. By making compelling digital editions available they are staving off some piratical demand.

However, the Amazon/Macmillan price spat speaks to a darker side of the problem. Some commenters imply that everyone will lose money should the price of an ebook be less than the traditional hardcover. The reality of the matter is that consumers do expect to make direct monetary gains from the cost savings of digital distribution. There is certainly an argument that the ebook is a superior user experience (just have a hankering for a few new books and take a multi-leg round trip with only carry-ons to see what I mean) but there is no real economic argument on the other side that publishers have the same cost structure that they had in the physical book.

Unsurprisingly, price elasticity is in full effect and Amazon has shown publishers that the lower prices for which they are advocating sell more books. The usual economic rule here is that the unit increment (with no additional print/storage/ship/over inventory costs) increase will more than offset the revenue per unit decrease. Unlike the music industry, there is no historical bundling issue where the music business was selling you 1 song for the price of 12.

To assume that Amazon “taught” users that ebooks should be cheaper simply ignores the intelligence of the average book reader. Books are now going to be a full participant in the Napsterization of commerce and I predict book publishers and retailers will start to have to think about how to create longer customer lifetimes and higher customer lifetime value. I look forward to ebook subscription services.

Gene HoffmanTags: , , , ,
Posted by Gene Hoffman in CEO Blog | No Comments »