Overview 

Chargebee's Lifecycle Offers enables subscription businesses to achieve predictable revenue growth by driving acquisition, expansion, and retention across their subscriber base. This solution provides Growth & Retention Managers with automated plays to easily build, test, and deploy them offers within the subscriber's context.

Using lifecycle offers, you can.

• Test different offer variants and determine what works best for your subscriber base.

• Eliminate engineering dependencies for your team and deploy high-performing offers in a few minutes.

• Orchestrate and automate different experiences and subscriber actions in various downstream applications, such as billing, or trigger Slack/email alerts.

• Gather performance insights of your offers and experiences to help you optimize your approach.

• Identify at-risk subscribers and target them ahead of the moment of cancellation to improve retention rates.

The following is an architectural diagram of Chargebee???s lifecycle offers solution.

Here is how the flow works.

1. The end subscriber logs into the customer???s web application and triggers various events such as page visits, button clicks, and more. The lifecycle offers SDK detects and requests the lifecycle offers solution along with the subscriber context, such as customer ID, subscriber ID, and other information that helps us uniquely identify the subscriber.

2. The lifecycle offers solution integrates with billing and CRM solutions to enrich subscriber information with relevant attributes, allowing further evaluation of the rules.

3. The lifecycle offers then evaluates the most eligible play for the subscriber in context and returns the corresponding offer to the SDK. The offer is then displayed to the end subscriber within the customer???s web application.

4. The customer reviews the offer and either accepts or rejects it. The same is then relayed to the lifecycle offers as an offer event.

5. Offer acceptances that require the offer to be processed directly in the billing system are processed automatically.

6. Offer events such as accepts, rejects, and views are utilized to update the play performance reports and dashboards.

7. Any downstream systems configured to be alerted upon the offer accepted are alerted with a suitable payload.

Integrating lifecycle offers SDK 

Chargebee offers a Software Development Kit (SDK), a Javascript library with functions for implementing Lifecycle offers in your product.
To initialize the solution, you need to embed retention.js into your application.
<script src="https://app.retention.chargebee.com/assets/webpack/retention.js"></script>

You then need to create a new Chargebee Retention instance by passing the application ID of your retention application. To find the application ID of your Chargebee Retention application, navigate to your retention application and extract the app ID from the browser URL. For example, kav8jMaojO is the application ID of the retention application in the application URL below.

<script>
(function ()) 
const cbretention = new ChargebeeRetention({
api_key: kav8jMaojO
});
</script>

Once you have created a Chargebee Retention instance, you can initialize the lifecycle offers by calling the init() function and passing the relevant context, such as customer ID, user ID, and more, to help us identify the logged-in user or customer.

<script>
(function () {
const cbretention = new ChargebeeRetention({
api_key: kav8jMaojO
});

cbretention.init({
customer_id: "5634354", // Customer ID within the integrated billing site
user: {
email: "jdoe@fantasyworld.com", // Your end user's email address
roles: ??["engineer", "admin"], // End user's roles
},
});
})();
</script>

You can also pass us the custom context regarding logged-in customers by passing us the custom object. Below is how the script will look.

<script src="https://app.retention.chargebee.com/assets/webpack/retention.js"></script>

<script>
(function () {
const cbretention = new ChargebeeRetention({
api_key: kav8jMaojO,
});
cbretention.init({
customer_id: "[merchant id]",
custom: {
site_name: demo-test
},
user: {
email: "jdoe@example.com", // Your end user's email address
roles: ["engineer", "admin"], // End user's roles
},
});
})();
</script>

We recommend embedding the SDK and making it available at a common location with your application to automatically initialize the Chargebee retention instance.

If you have a single-page application, such as a React app, you can include our SDK in the index.html file. Doing so will automatically include the SDK code on all the pages.

If you use a multi-page application, you must include the SDK code on all the pages to load the SDK.

Setting up the billing integration 

Chargebee's lifecycle offers is tightly integrated with your Chargebee Billing system. This integration enriches the subscriber context with additional customer and subscriber attributes from your billing system. It also processes automated offers, such as plan changes, discounts, pauses, extensions, and more, directly into the billing system.

If you are an existing Chargebee Retention customer with an application already integrated with the Chargebee Billing site, this step is not required; you can continue leveraging the existing integration. New users who have not set up this integration yet can refer to this article  for more information.

Setting up field mappings 

Chargebee's lifecycle offers allows customers to map fields in retention applications with the source fields in other business applications. If your Chargebee Retention application is integrated with Chargebee Billing, the field mappings are automatically populated with standard fields available in your billing application. You can also extend the field mappings by adding custom fields and populating them with other data sources.??Refer to the documentation  for more details.??

Setting up alerts & notifications 

You can choose to get alerted on Slack or email when the customer acts upon an offer. At present, we only support alerting whenever the customer accepts an offer. You can set up alerts upon offer accepts within the Retention settings module. Since the alerts & notifications are shared across Chargebee Retention and lifecycle management, you may want to add offer attributes such as offer name, offer objective etc to differentiate these offers with the offers in your cancellation experience.??Refer to the documentation on how to set up alerts and notifications in Slack  and email  upon offer acceptance.??

Setting up offers 

If you wish to set up offers, you can proceed with this step. However, setting up offers before you move ahead is not mandatory, as offers can be created later from within the lifecycle offers interface. To create new offers at this stage, refer to creating new offers with AI  and creating new offer  articles.

Setting up audience segments 

Audience segments, like offers, need not be created ahead of time. If you wish to create an audience segment later, you may proceed with the next step. To create a new audience segment at this stage, refer to the article create a new audience segment .

Setting up plays 

Plays are the orchestration and workflow module for lifecycle offers. This is where you can define your target audience and map them to the desired offers and experiences you want to present them. Refer to the article, managing plays in lifecycle offers  to know more about them.??