UPDATED: This is an archived blog originally published on 24th June 2008. This offer is not currently valid. Please see our product pages at http://www.plus.net for the latest offers for broadband and home phone.
We are pleased to announce the launch of a new special offer on signup, which gives all new customers the chance to get three months half price broadband!
The offer is dependent on signing up for one of our current broadband products, along with one of our Home Phone products, and taking both on a twelve month deal.
With broadband now starting at £4.99 for the first three months, and Home Phone including evening and weekend calls for £9.99 it’s an excellent way to try out our products, or make the switch from that old dial up connection.
Frequently Asked Questions
* What if I need to change products once I’ve signed up?
During the three month offer period we will recalculate your discount and reapply it at the relevant rate for your new product. Outside of the three month period you can change product once every 30 days as normal.
* What if I want to cancel within the twelve month term?
If you wish to cancel either broadband or Home Phone you will be required to pay the remainder of the twelve month term for the relevant product, or both if cancelling both services.
* Why is this offer not available to existing customers?
We have run a number of initiatives over the last few months allowing customers to recontract for a twelve month term and receive various financial benefits on their products and so feel that most customers who wish to enter an annual contract will have already done so. However, if any existing customers would like to discuss options regarding contracts please get in touch with myself or our support teams directly.
If you have any questions or feedback please either add them as comments here, or head over to our Community forums.
Regards
Mand
This entry was posted by Mand on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 9:07 am and is tagged with and is posted in the category PlusNet News, WWW Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Hmm. I'm sure PlusNet said a year or two ago that they were going to stop selling yearly contracts, yet it seems that it's getting easier and easier these days for someone to get themselves caught up in an annual contract. And I feel this offer is particularly bad for that... I quote:
'With broadband now starting at £4.99 for the first three months, and Home Phone including evening and weekend calls for £9.99 it’s an excellent way to try out our products'
...then...
'If you wish to cancel either broadband or Home Phone you will be required to pay the remainder of the twelve month term for the relevant product'
Erm? Has someone thought this through properly? In no way is it a good way for someone to 'try' PlusNet if, should they decide they want to leave, they have to pay off 12 months' worth of service. A much better solution would have been to say that someone would just have to pay back the three months' of savings they were given if they left within 12 months.
Furthermore, I also don't like the fact that the big banner on the summer sale page states 'get award-winning PlusNet broadband from £4.99 a month' - sure, there's a little superscript '1' there too, but that's not an excuse for slightly misleading wording. Much better, in my eyes, would have been something like 'get half-price award-winning broadband for your first three months!'. Adverts that advertise cheap broadband without mentioning it's just an offer for a couple of months really annoy me... PlusNet's certainly not the only one to do that; I saw a similar thing on Orange's website a couple of days ago... but I guess I'm just disappointed to see PlusNet stoop to that level.
Oops sorry, must've messed up a bold tag somewhere in the first quoted paragraph... am always doing that...
I'm really disgusted. Thought PN were better than that.
As an option 3 customer, Can I agree to a year long contract and receive the three months half price?
Afternoon guys
Thanks for taking the time to feedback on the pages. This is the first of these offers that we've done here at PlusNet so your feedback on the pages and blog is really useful. I'll review your comments and work with the website team to see if we can improve the presentation of the offer this afternoon.
Actually the first time you did a deal "like this" was back in March (albeit only with home phone). I expressed concern about headline pricing then too.
I do think we generally agree about headline pricing, and we do try to avoid it. In this circumstance we wanted to do some quick promotions before our year end in April, and as we couldn’t get any development time to do anything more elegant at such short notice, these sorts of offers are about the only thing possible…
From a personal perspective I can certainly appreciate the concerns shown here. It's a symptom of the market we are operating in at the moment that we need to compete with the similar offers from our competition. If we had better options to achieve the same outcomes, we would certainly take them. The fact is though that all the data shows offers like this do work very well in terms of attracting new customers and sign-ups, and we would be remiss not to try it if the business ended up suffering as a result.
The fact is that ISPs have to grow in order to survive, and like any business we have targets to meet in terms of gaining new customers. The process of doing that isn't always nice, but I think we've done more than most to keep the offers dignified and honest. We've also made good offers to existing customers with things like the recent £5 a month off for re-contracting to us, and there will be more of those in the future I'm sure.
Regards,
Ian
The last time I recall you doing a £5 per month off offer was way back sometime in 2007. I would have dearly loved to have taken up your offer then but I couldn't as I was already on a "free" router offer. Now that my "free" router has been "paid for", would you care to offer me a 12 month contract at a reduced monthly rate. I'm not too happy that n00bs to PlusNet should enjoy cheaper monthly rates than those of us who have been loyal to PN for many years (including the dark days of 2006!).
Regards,
Martin
We've had a look 
From the website perspective, the offer page (http://www.plus.net/summer_promo/) doesn't feature the same explanation as the homepage (http://www.plus.net/). This was a deliberate approach to bring more variety to the journey, as all the info is available as text on the offer page.
That said, after your feedback we're going to put the same banner from the homepage onto the offer page, so that we've got a consistent approach on all pages. The homepage banner includes the homephone offer and 3 month period in more detail, and should answer the points you raised above about the website. This will be live tomorrow morning.
Hope you guys think this is an improvement, and will illustrate the offer more clearly.
Although I'm an existing customer of PlusNet, I'd like to "sample" 3 months worth at a cheaper price please.
I understand that I would be locked in for 3 months (or even 12 months - it's not clear), but I'd like to go ahead anyway.
To be honest, I don't think that's much of an improvement at all: the crux of my earlier complaint - the 'longevity' of the price - is still in small print. As a result, the headline still isn't really being as honest to customers as it could be.
Furthermore, I still haven't heard any explanation as to why the offer must lock someone in to PlusNet for twelve months, as opposed to my earlier suggestion.
I will also just add that I'm not particularly against this method of gaining subscribers... as Ian says, I realise a company needs to make competitive moves in a competitive market. I am, however, against the way the offer is being executed, even though I acknowledge that it won't affect me.
omg plusnet what you doing to your self's. when ever an advert on t.v for another isp that sells like this i allways flip the channel over and explain to my family not to be drawn in by these types of deals. i pay the 20 pounds for option 3 from you because you where open and honest about every aspect of your bussiness and explanied why you need traffic managment to keep the proudcts running just how i need my connection to run.
I just hope that when these new customers take the bait and sign up that at the end of the 3 months when they start to pay the preminum price i pay to get a realible speed day and night and good ping times so i dont get fragged that they dont break out in a sweat when they see the price there paying and start to rub pn's name in the dirt.
i understand u have to grow and increase your profits what company dosent but please rember why your current customers signed up at the full price.
honesty is the best policy.
I really don't believe these offers work because they end up misleading people, or that people get a surprise when a promotion term ends (especially not in this case given how clear the message is). In reality I reckon these offers work simply because they are a good deal and people have to go to some trouble in switching ISPs, and on that basis they want an incentive to give them a push.
The re-contracting offer to existing customers was £5 a month off for 6 months, with a minimum term of 12 months in total. If anyone here missed that then feel free to drop me a mail (iwild@plus.net) and I will see what I can do to find something that works for you along those same lines. Be aware though that I can't preclude a different offer coming along for everyone in the mean time, and you won't be able to get that you still have an existing recontracting offer running...
Remember that attracting new customers is a major cost for any business like ours, (of course, so is keeping the ones we have but that's a different game). Our challenge is that if we didn't maintain reasonable growth we'd very quickly not have much of a business left to do anything with at all, which is really the nature of being any ISP - If you don't go forwards you go backwards.
Ian
I think it will be difficult for any ISP to continue to grow as saturation point is reached which can't be far off.
There is also the problems of LLU ISP's that can offer very much cheaper (if not free) service which other ISP's can't possible match at the moment.
George
Churn! Churn! Churn!
We've kept on with the plan and updated the offer page as I posted yesterday. It's now got a modified version of the homepage box, which manages to squeeze all of the components into one banner.
Again, thanks for your comments. I'm happy to hear feedback on other areas of the site via direct messages or in the forums.
Oh here we go again - lets look after our oh so important 12 month contract cusotmers and the monthly contract rolling customers can go and stick it.
I've been a customer for at least 4 years now (all be it on a monthly contract) - clearly PN dont reward loyalty.
Do existing customers get the discounted monthly rate?
Evening Mark - Ian answered this in his second comment above. HTH
Why make thinks sooooooooooo complicated? If we believe PlusNet is such a great ISP (we all do think so of course) can't you simply say "come and try us for 3 months at half price"? Hopefully if people like the service they will stay.
I'm not sure I follow - You mean it's complicated by restricting it to people who take home phone as well as broadband, and by requiring a 12 month contract?
If so the answer is that we have to cost any offer like this before we can get it signed off by the bean counters. The only way to make an offer like this work is to ensure that it costs in for us in the long term, and doesn't result in an overall loss - our first job as a business is to make a profit! With an offer like this it takes a long time for the initial investment to be repaid, but as a long term proposal it does work.
We can be as confident as you like that our service is flawless, but that won't stop a certain percentage of people from always moving onto the next best deal. Without the terms of the offer being as they are, we'd simply have no way of ensuring that we can recoup our investment, and as such the offer couldn't be signed off.
Hope that answers your question!
Ian
[...] the moment we’re running a special offer of half-priced broadband for the first three months, provided the customer takes our Home Phone service. Previously [...]
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