App Monetization Tactics No One Is Talking About

Coming up, I'm going to share with you some little-known app monetization strategies that will help you convert your new users and those pesky [music] free users that have been on your app for a long time and never paid. Stay tuned. What is up, App Nation? It is Steve P. Young, founder of appmasters.com. And in this course, I'm going to break down all the little-known app monetization strategies that are working today. Let's get started. All right, here it is, little-known, hopefully till now, app monetization strategies. The first one, I think it's an obvious one. I've shared this in the past. It is three-screen paywalls, and I'll tell you exactly what that means. I first discovered this on Resemmee. And they have an onboarding experience, and towards the end of the onboarding experience, I wanted to include this screen. They have a video.

I really like that, right? Like, "Hey, are you ready?" Yeah, I'm ready, right? And we're going to offer you 7 days free, so anyone can cook with Resemmee. Really cool. Continue. We'll remind you 2 days before your trial ends. And then they'll hit you with that reminder prompt. And then lastly, so here's a reminder prompt, they hit you with the paywall. And this is well-known to increase conversions, especially if your main monetization is through the yearly offer. So, it works really, really well.

We've test We've AB tested this, and it's performing a lot better than any other monetization test. This is an interesting one that I actually first found on LinkedIn, but I wanted to capture this and make it my own. It is trial to discount, okay? So, I first discovered this in an app called Flow, and I will go through their onboarding sequence right here. You got their first page, you got the agreement, name, all that stuff. So, I'm going through their onboarding, right? I'm Stephanie.

I'm going through it. Now I'm hit with this paywall. The interesting thing here is when I hit free trial enable and I try to check out with this start 14-day free trial. See, sometimes 14-day free trial works better than seven. It's very rare. Most of the time seven works better, but for certain apps, you know, maybe you need an extended period of time. When I hit start free trial, I'm taken to actually a web checkout, right?

And you can starting to see some trends. We've seen this actually perform worse than just using the default Apple subscription checkout flow, but this was interesting, so I kind of left it in here. That's not all, so I went back into the app. I hit X, and then now they're like, "Hey, discover how Flow can help you feel more empowered than ever before. Tell me more. Know your body." So, now they're kind of taking me through their entire onboarding and trying to get me to retain.

I do also like this. We have seen that asking for registration or sign-up after the paywall actually performs better. And as you can see, I can hit X off of this as well. Wondering why I put like period and pause stuff in here. And so, they're asking me if I want to score. I say, "Yes." Sending this to someone, no, I'm not doing that. So, I'm like, "Say yes, let's do it." And I'm going through this chat sequence. Now, I've also heard from other founders that this way of this chat onboarding or this chat flow does perform better than just having people, you know, go slide, continue, continue, continue. So, pretty interesting here. So, I'm answering all these questions, understood, all that stuff. And then now they hit me with another opportunity to buy the app, okay? So, I hit free trial enabled there.

Here, I did get the default Apple prompt and payment. I decided to go ahead and start that free trial. So, I did it. I started the free trial, and then I congratulations, you can start using Flow and all the premium users. I love that. Now, here's the most interesting part. They hit me with a discount. Now, I don't have any data on this, but I think it's a simple math formula that you can use. And this is especially true for an app that may have low trial to paid numbers. So, the industry average is about 30 to 40% trial to paid.

If you've got anything lower than that, you can easily do the math and find out that, "Hey, if I can get, let's say, 10% to convert on this discounted offer, I'm actually winning." So, that's a simple math formula that you can use to see if this is something that you should be deploying within your own app. All right? I just thought it was interesting. I don't have data to say either way whether you should do it or not. Okay.

I said, "No, thanks." And then I continued on to the app. So, here it is again, just for those who want that visual. All right. Let's get to the next one. And I really like this next one. All right, this is the paid intro offers. As you can see, I'm a naming specialist. All right. So, I'm going to point back to Resemmee. I discovered this in another app ages ago, but Resemmee was the screenshot I already had readily available. So, you remember from the onboarding, they had that three paywall sequence, then they hit me with this normal paywall.

7 days free, and then renews at $60 a year. Great. But this $1.99 is actually $1.99 for the first month that renews at $59.99 per year. Now, I love this, and I think this is the next best thing to do for all apps. Because for monthly users, now, it is app dependent, but for most apps, the monthly LTV is very, very low. It's about three, 3.5. But the yearly obviously has a higher LTV. So, instead of trying to charge, let's say, $15 or $10 a month and only getting 30 dollars for that whole user, here's an opportunity that you can use to get people to subscribe, okay? And I love this because I have some numbers where we found that most of the people who sign up for that monthly intro paid offer, they tend to convert a lot better than the free trial users. It makes sense. It's easier for you to upsell a current customer than trying to find a new customer. And these are people that are showing you willingness to pay. And

I really love the $1.99 price point because this is ages ago, but way back in the day I had a paid app, right? And that's all you can do because there was no in-app purchases. So, you make a paid app, and I had this paid kids app that was 99 cents for the longest time. I bumped it to $1.99. Yes, we got less customers, but we actually made more money. So, I love that price point. It's enough to feel like it's a premium product, but not too much where you're like too afraid to even try it out. It's a low enough offer, okay? So, I really love this.

And you can see they charge 10 bucks a month. At the time that I was taking screenshots from Resemmee, sorry, guys, they were AB testing a few different paywalls. So, I want to kind of highlight this, one where they just go straight into the free week, and another one where they do have the $1.99 offer. Now, I shared this in the community as well, and somebody in our community, Sebastian, great guy, he recently tested this, right? Where he had $70 with the 70 free offer, $1.99 bing for that first month, you pay up front, and that renews at $6.99 as well. And he ran the experiment over a month and a half, and it worked incredibly well for one of his apps. His conversion rate went from 19 to 25%.

That's conversion rate. And his proceeds went up by 21%. Really, really cool. And we're seeing this work pretty well for most apps. The next one is really cool, so you want to pay attention to that one. All right, this is one of my favorites, and this was shared in a live stream from John. Great, great live stream. I'll try to link that up into the show notes and so that you guys can check it out as well. It is called reverse trials. I didn't make it up, John made it up. And he like highlighted this, and I really love this idea. So, he's got a value-based onboarding. I wanted to pay respects to John and keep his presentation style together, but his app's called Momingo. Go check it out if you take the bus or train to work.

Really great app. He's got a value-based onboarding. I really love this. I wanted to kind of have this on this screen as well, just to show you that he's not highlighting the features. He is in a way, but he's using benefits to get you to see the value of the app. So, get there on time stress-free, share your location just in case you need to send it to a friend to make sure you're safe or get to work on time. Never miss your stop again. I love the social proof right here every single time. Over 5 million riders. Here's a quote. 50,000 five stars. Another quote.

And he's got this He sort of combined that three paywall screen that I shared earlier with this. So, you'll get a reminder 2 days before your trial ends. Awesome, right? People are more likely to actually activate that trial when you they feel like, "Hey, you're just going to remind me." Love this paywall as well. The other thing I want to call out from the paywall, he's found that photos work better, right? And I actually like the less clutter that you have on the paywall, probably the better it is. So, add all your value up front, and then just less clutter at the very, very end, right?

Some social proof here. I also like this, pay as you go. That seems to be working a bit better for us as well. So, instead of calling it weekly, you just call it pay as you go. And it is a weekly subscription. So he does yearly with a 7-day trial, weekly, and then lifetime. So you here. Now here is the reverse trial. So if I activate that trial or I pay one of his plans, they say he says welcome to pro. Perfect, and then you're off on your way.

But if I hit X on this, he says, "No problem. Enjoy a week of pro on us." Again, really cool. So what you can do here, it's it's the same flow. If I hit X, I get enjoy a free week of pro on us. Boom. What I really love about this as well is that during the onboarding, right after this, so right after the paywall, he gives you a secondary onboarding to try to get you to activate some of the premium features. And I'm going to show you these premium features. Customize your notifications. Look at this is pro. So when I scroll down, this is pro.

You can see that some of these, if you turn them on, they're going to go away. So give your users a little bit of a taste of your app and then eventually let them know that, "Hey, it might go away, right?" So let's take a look at what happened with his free users, that conversion rate. The before was 0.4% and the after is 4.5. Probably not 100x, okay, but what an improvement, right? And on average, it's about 2% of all free users converting to your a paid customer. So this is an amazing amazing stat. Now obviously not every app can do it, but if your app doesn't have high usage costs, it's definitely something that you should be trying out. Now I want to cover pay what you want. I love this. I don't see a lot of apps doing this, but it works. So rather than showing one discounted offer, you let them slide to that one discounted offer. So this is one of our apps. You got this free gift for you. This does convert. You can see

that's put it right in the middle. And why would you select the middle? Why would you not just put it all the way to the very end and get that discount for 50% off? And if you go all the way to the beginning, you get that 7-day that default offer that we have during the onboarding. And so this is for people who started using your app. This is a great way, like John, maybe stacking these monetization strategies with the reverse trial as a reverse trial. And you can say, "Hey, pay what you want and, you know, unlock your discount."

Now what we found is most people will slide all the way to the left. So rather than showing that 50% for $29.99, letting users choose increases your conversion rates. Here's one of our clients that's doing the same exact thing. These numbers have shifted quite a bit since we put this together, but you can see that most of his revenues are coming from the onboarding paywall, but then there's a pretty good number of folks over a close to a thousand dollars a month for this relatively smaller app.

It's about 10% of his overall sales is doing that pay what you want discount. Now, at the time, people were selecting the higher price offer, but now everybody's selecting the lowest price offer as of this recording. All right, that's it. Let me know which one of these strategies is your absolute favorite. And [music] if you want access to that exclusive, that full course where I'm revealing everything I got in my treasure chest of monetization tricks, go check out appfounders.co.

It is appfounders.co. We have over a hundred amazing app founders [music] and we meet twice a month to go through some of the wins, some of the losses, what's really working well in the app space. We got folks that are growing through meta. We got folks that are growing through Google Ads for iOS app installs. Got some amazing amazing folks in there. So if you're interested in joining, go check out appfounders.co. All right, till next [music] time. I'll see you on the next video.