If you’re trying to move customers onto annual plans, one extra question might be all it takes. New research from Wharton marketing professor Marissa Sharif shows that asking customers to either confirm their initial choice or switch to a yearly subscription boosted the likelihood of customers choosing the latter.
The impact is similar to what companies can achieve by defaulting users into annual plans, which typically bring in more revenue and keep customers for longer. Based on experiments in real businesses and lab tests, the paper — published in the Journal of Consumer Research — calls this tactic a “confirmation nudge.”
Sharif said: “The biggest practical takeaway is that confirmation nudges are a surprisingly powerful but very lightweight intervention. They can be pretty easy and inexpensive to implement.”