Since Audible is mostly audio books, I put this in Cafe Society, but if it works better somewhere else, I leave that to the mods.
OK. So, I have an Audible account. When my mother was alive, I used to drive out east pretty frequently, 7, or even 12 hour trips, and I had cousins in Chicago I used to see, but my mother and grandmother have all died, and all but one of the Chicago cousins have moved. I don’t do nearly as much highway driving as I used to.
When I was doing a lot of interstate driving, I was buying lots of books from Audible, so I had an account that accrued credits.
Now they pile up. I eventually use them. I still listen to audio books when I walk the dog by myself, and I do drive down the state to see my aunt pretty frequently, and it’s 90 minutes each way.
It seems that whenever I get three or more credits, Audible gets very aggressive, sending me two or three emails a day, telling me to use my credits, or lose 'em, and giving me lists of suggestions (always way off). It thinks I want to read Robert Parker for some reason.
It tags its emails as URGENT.
Why does Audible care whether I use my credits or not? They don’t have to refund me any money if I don’t.
I assume it’s so you use them and buy more. That said, it sounds like we’re on different Audible plans. I’m on the annual (24 credit) plan and I’ve got 2 credits. What Audible sends me is offers to buy a few credits cheaply.
I have a backlog of Audible credits, too, because I’m not commuting anymore (I used to listen to audiobooks while I was taking the train to and from work), and I get similar emails from Audible. My guess is that they have discovered that a surplus of unused credits correlates strongly with cancelling one’s subscription.
I think @kenobi_65 is probably on the right track.
There’s a financial term:
You may appear to be lagging in Recency and Frequency, endangering the future likelihood of you spending Money.
They’ll likely throw a lot more resources at customers with higher RFM, but – since they effectively have unlimited funds – it’s smart to try to bring up the rear, too
I also think there might be an accounting piece to this one. Your freebie is an outstanding liability on their books until you cash it in – much like a gift card (or unused frequent flier miles):
I’m no accountant, but IIRC unused gift cards show up as a “debt” in a company’s books, so it looks bad to investors if there are a bunch of unused gift cards out there. That’s why they used to expire if you didn’t spend them in a year or whatever, although many states have put a stop to that now. But anyway, I wonder if for accounting purposes unused credits are treated the same way, so they want you to use them ASAP.
I work in accounting and as others have said, credits are a liability on the books that reduces the profitability of the company. This is especially critical for a publicly traded company, which I believe Audible is.
There’s also customer retention and cost of new customer acquisition. Which is why companies like cell carriers and ISPs will give you major discounts to continue using their service. It costs money to acquire a new customer through marketing.
When I worked in flooring, the owner would chew us out if we had too many customers walk out without buying anything. “EVERY customer is a buyer, that’s why they’re here!”, “It costs $250 to bring that customer in!”. Even if the customer just bought a $2 door mat, we’d have to try to sell them something. After I talked to the marketing guy and mulled it over, I released the owner was right. It averages out to ~$250 in marketing for every person that walks in the door. Watch Shark Tank and they’ll ask about cost of customer acquisition.
I’m not worried about the backlog. Before COVID, I was still making enough trips that I was using a lot of saved credits all at once, and clearing backlog. As it is, if I have credits about to “go bad,” I’ll get something to listen to when I walk the dog or go to the dentist.
Here’s the thing: my pattern of use is to have a backlog that I use all at once, before a road trip I take about every eight months or so. That does not make Audible happy. Audible seems to want a monthly purchase with no backlog. So I get hostile emails. I delete them without reading them, but even the topic lines are aggressive.
It seems to me that if Audible would encourage a variety of customer purchase patterns, without harassing customers who did not follow a template, that would be the most conducive to the broadest customer base possible.
I, too, usually have a backlog of credits. I occasionally get emails of the “your credit summary” sort: here’s how many credits you have, here are some suggestions of what to use them on. But nothing I’ve ever perceived as aggressive or hostile.
Recently, Audible had a promotion (as they do every so often) where, if you use X number of credits within a certain window of time, you get a free $Y coupon.
I don’t deal with Audible so don’t have this direct experience.
But I have gotten similar from other entities. I tend to forward the email to their customer service along with a comment that I find their tone highly insulting and I’ll be cancelling my subscription the next time they do that. Of course that’s as useless as can be; nothing changes.
So next time I cancel my subscription.
We (collectively) get the products and services we (collectively) are willing to put up with. Sometimes a vendor needs to be bopped on the nose with a newspaper. The only language they understand is cancelled subscriptions.
If I could take my business elsewhere, that would be a choice, but there really isn’t an alternative. I can download a crapload of audiobooks to my phone at once, and use bluetooth to play them on my car stereo. The only alternative is CDs, and to play them on a laptop hooked up to a separate DVD/CD player, which is them hooked up by wire to the stereo, because even though the computer has bluetooth, it isn’t capable of playing things from the external DVD/CD player through bluetooth, other than to a freestanding speaker. It won’t play to something with its own equalizer, is the best I can figure.
Yes, I can download a few books from Kindle, or Amazon directly sometimes (I listened to a movie I’d seen before once, with the descriptive video feature turned on). But not the huge variety Audible has.
