What's the Deal? Addl Discounts this weekend?

[dtrose]

Received the following on 10/25 e-mail from Voipo indicating that there would NOT be any future discounted pricing and then there's another Black Friday / Sat promotion this weekend. Makes me question the validity of messages from management. Don't create a sense of urgency only to create another a month later.

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We heard you loud and clear. Based on the huge amount of requests we've received, we've decided tobring our Early Renewal Promotion back and give everyone one last chance tosave over 50% on your VOIPo service.
Last Call -Discounted Renewal Offer - Add 2 Years for $149
For the next 3 days, you cansave 50% on renewal and add 2 years of service to your VOIPo account for just$149.
Visit https://account.voipo.com/renew to learn more and take advantageof this offer. Don't miss your chance to lock in the heavily discountedrenewal rate and extend your service for 2 additional years for $149 thisweekend only.
The Future of VOIPo
As we announced earlier this year, weplan to move away from the heavily discounted prepaid plans for both newcustomers and renewal and focus on monthly and premium plans. While welove offering huge discounts, our goal is to provide the highest qualityservice with the most unique features and the best support rather than justproviding cheap phone service. Shifting away from the large discounts andfocusing more on business and premium service in the new year will allow us todo that. Of course, for those of you that take advantage of the renewaloffer this weekend, you'll lock in the current discounted renewal price whichis over 50% off our standard monthly price. The additional 2 years ofservice will be added to the end of your current plan so you won't lose anytime you've already paid for.

In July, we launched the newlyredesigned vPanel BETA, SMS text messaging on VOIPo numbers, portableinternational calling, and more. We're very excited that we were able tobring you premium features like SMS and we are hard at work with more newfeatures in development. We're very excited about these new features andupgrades and have more on the way.

Lock in the discounted VOIPo rate nowand get premium VOIPo service for years to come at the discounted price. Once this promotion ends this weekend, discouned renewal pricing will nolonger be available. We have a LIMITED number of renewals available atthis price at https://account.voipo.com/renew and we reserve the right to end thispromotion early at any time.

Questions
Next year will make 7 yearsin business. From all of us at VOIPo, thank you for your business. We truly do appreciate each and every one of you and couldn't have doneit without you. We love to hear from you! If you have any questions,need help, or just have some ideas for us, feel free to e-mail us at support@voipo.com and we'll be happy tohelp.
Again, thank you for yourbusiness!

-The VOIPo Team

[VOIPoTim]

In our promotions, we have to be very clear to customers that once the promotion expires, the discounted pricing is no longer available. That doesn't mean it will never be available..it just means that it's not available unless we run some sort of special deal which may or may not happen.

The goal is to set expectations because we always end up with a ton of people trying to take advantage of the deals after expiration. By being firm about the end date, it helps set expectations and also addresses the possibility of the promotion not being available again in the future.

It's definitely a balancing act, but you might be surprised how many requests come in after these end to take advantage of them. Since they're not something we can run all the time, we have to be firm about it and address the possibility that it's mat not come back as it's a promotion and not a regular thing. There's also the situation that with our current growth, many people are seeing the offer for the first time. There has to be a balance between a ton of things from marketing to setting expectations so discounts are not always expected to giving customers opportunities to save.

Our business model is rapidly changing as well and we are working to shift away from discount residential as we've said before. Wholesaling origination/termination service which we started offering this year makes up about 30% of our revenue but a massive portion of profit. We have a few single customers using millions of minutes per month (call centers). We're also about to roll out our Cloud 2.0 service which is origination/termination service geared towards businesses and advanced BYOD users and shortly after that, our Hosted PBX addon. Once those are in place, we will continue to develop our residential service, but we'll be focused more on premium service without all these renewal deals.The new Cloud offering is designed to automate that offering in terms of being able to make it available to the masses.

Bottom line...our goal with this is to simply make it clear that it's a promotion that expires on a certain date and once that happens it's gone and also to make sure that everyone is aware that it will not be offered again unless we choose to do some kind of special promo (which may not happen).