Bill
The strategy. Reframe the price from a monthly number into a once-a-year non-event, then point that same idea at lapsed customers with a sequence built to be measured: one hypothesis per email, one page to land on, one button.
Written by a former Mint customer who left for a free-phone promo and still remembers what month he used to pay in.
Mint's whole brand is that it doesn't take itself seriously, and its whole business is annual prepay. The two have never been the same joke. Last Year's Bill makes them one: the Mint customer is the person in the room who is slightly bored by the phone-bill conversation, because she isn't having one.
Every piece follows one rule. The Mint customer never sells. She answers questions, briefly, and goes back to what she was doing. The other person in the scene does all the reacting, because the other person is the audience.
The spot introduces the idea. The email sequence takes it to the people most likely to already believe it: customers who left. The landing page is where both send them, and it says the math once.
The Spot
MAYA and DEV, both 30s, sit opposite. A stack of bills on Dev's end, a notepad and calculator on Maya's.
Dev checks one of the bills. Brow raises.
He looks at her, deadpan. Back to the stack.
She looks up from the notepad.
She goes back to the notepad. He waits. Nothing.
He looks at his own bill. One-eighty. Then the stack under it. Same envelope, eleven more times.
SUPER: Pay once a year. Forget you have a phone bill.
SUPER: Mint Mobile. Plans from $15/mo, paid annually.
Why it's built this way. "USPS, usually" establishes Maya as the dry one before the product comes up, so her being bored by her own phone bill later is character, not brand behavior. Her only line of product information is "It's a year thing," and she has to be asked for it. Dev gets every reaction beat because he's the audience. The ending returns the first joke aimed at the right bill, so the scene closes without anyone saying anything nice about Mint.
The Win-Back
Hello Dev,
You left Mint about a year ago, which means you've paid a phone bill roughly twelve times since. We've paid attention to zero of them, because that's not how we do it here.
Quick reminder of how we do it here: you pay once. Then you don't think about it for a year. That's the whole feature. It's a very short feature.
See what a year costs nowYour old number's still yours if you want it back. We kept the light on.
Hello Dev,
Here's a year of Mint on our Unlimited plan: $180, once. Here's a year of most other plans: a number you'd rather not add up, twelve times.
We're not going to add it up for you. We're better than that. We're barely better than that.
Do the math on one pageBringing your number over takes about ten minutes. Then you're done for a year. We mean that literally.
Hello Dev,
This is the last email in this little series, and we'd like to end it the way we'd like you to end your phone bill: once, and then not again for a year.
Your number's still yours. Your old plan's still here. The price is on the page, and the page is one page.
Pay once. We'll see you next year.If it's a no, that's fine. We'll go back to not thinking about you, which is our specialty.
Why three, and why these gaps. Day 0, 5, and 12 is a cadence that gets out of the inbox before it becomes the thing it's making fun of. Each email goes only to people the previous one didn't move, so the sequence narrows instead of repeating. And every email is a version of the same joke: we don't think about your bill, and soon neither will you. That's the campaign idea doing lifecycle work, not a separate promo bolted on.
The Landing
Twelve months of unlimited talk, text, and data, billed one time. Then nothing, until it's January again.
What happens after a year? We email you. Once. You pay again, or you don't.
Can I pay monthly instead? You can pay for three months at a time. But then you'd think about it in April, and that's the thing we're trying to help you stop doing.
One page, one number, one button. The math block is the whole argument, and the third figure is the joke: zero bills in February. The FAQ answers the two objections a lapsed customer actually has (what happens at renewal, and can I avoid the lump sum) without a dropdown. Measure: button click rate from each email source, and time-to-port for people who click. If the math block isn't the most-viewed element on the page, the page is wrong.
Want the full sequence logic, the segment definitions, and the test plan? Ask.