I remember hearing about a company who changed their customer’s behavior simply by altering the default setting for their subscription check-box.
Their original version offered both annual and monthly subscriptions, with the monthly version selected as the default. With this version, they had about 11% of their subscribers sign up with annual subscriptions.
Utilize Your Default Settings on Your Packaging Options
They changed the default to set to annually when a customer visited the pricing page, which resulted in 33% of their customers signing up with annual subscriptions. A pretty impressive effect.
A more modern example of this technique being used is from Monday.com:
There are many others using this technique, because it is so effective at changing customer behavior.
One reasonable explanation is this: consumers are fairly indifferent when it comes to choices, and having a default selected for us takes away some of the friction of making a decision. Another explanation is that some consumers don’t even notice that they have a choice. Regardless of why it happens, we know that the number of customers who make a larger commitment can be dramatically increased simply by changing the default selection.
Do you have any other examples similar to this? How might you be able to apply this concept in your own company?
