A year ago, COVID-19 hit the US in full force—and MarketMuse, a SaaS company that helps marketing teams build smart content strategies—saw an opportunity to boost subscriber acquisition by leveraging coupons and promotions.

“We've experimented a lot in the past year after launching our self-serve product. When the pandemic started, we tested giving people three months of our product for free so they would have enough time to try it out,” says Elizabeth Irvine, VP of Marketing at MarketMuse. 

The result? “The test resulted in a huge spike in new users,” Irvine says.

None of this experimentation would have been possible with MarketMuse’s previous tech stack. The company only used to use a payments processor, which limited what it could do from a customer acquisition perspective. That’s all changed thanks to MarketMuse’s adoption of Recurly.

“Now that we use a fully-featured subscription management and billing platform, [all the] struggles [we faced before] are a thing of the past,” Irvine says.

It wasn’t just coupons, though. MarketMuse has grown in the last year by testing a referral and affiliate program, as well.

Read the full MarketMuse case study to learn more about which promotional strategies worked for this SaaS brand, why MarketMuse gets more value out of signup discounts vs. free trials, and how the company optimized its onboarding flow to improve subscriber retention.