Boost Your App's Conversion Rate with These 9 Proven Strategies

customers money could become yours faster and safer it used to be simple a journey from pocket to pocket and now even though it's a single click selling software online has become incredibly complex now you have to think about taxes payment routing chargebacks fraud and getting it wrong means lost Revenue compliance issues or worse at paddle we've mastered this complexity as a merchant of record handling all the financial and legal responsibilities making the journey simple again so you can focus on your customers and growing your business it begins with a customizable and localized checkout designed to boost conversion where customers pay in their local currency and preferred payment method with a click our smart payment routing kicks in constantly optimized for successful transactions our Global Network of local payment providers entities banking relationships ensure your Dollar's journey is smooth and optimized to drive

the best payment acceptance rate for you regardless of borders and if your customer's currency is different from yours we convert it for you now we enter the Labyrinth of taxes but don't sweat it we take all the liability as your Merchant of record we automatically collect sales tax and V for you and then register file and pay according to local tax compliance even as the journey comes to an end padd's mission isn't over with paddle every payment is fully protected we help reduce chargebacks and fight them on your behalf so you avoid costly penalties we keep the journey on Loop by automatically recovering failed payments to increase customer retention we provide comprehensive insights into all customer transactions and the health of your subscriptions making paddle your single source of Truth our platform helps you set the right price ensuring your competitive and profitable without the guesswork localized for every region

so how does more of your customers money become your Revenue with paddle automatically we take care of everything so you can focus on what you do best serving your customers and welcome to today's paddle happy hour um I'm very very happy to be here very much looking forward to today's conversation um which is all about conversion rate optimization strategies for mobile app companies I'm very very pleased to be joined by Steve here from App Masters who's going to be sharing a ton of really great insight for you all um and we have a really exciting session full of great content um that is coming up we're going to focus on nine conservative conserv conversion rate optimization strategies I'm going to work through each of them one by one um Steve's going to be sharing a bunch of stuff that he's learned over his time helping launch thousands and thousands of very successful mobile apps um and I'll try

and bring some insight from from sort of the payments perspective um uh that I've built over my journey here at paddle so wanted to start by very quickly introducing ourselves my name is Lucas I amvp a product here at paddle I've been at the company for almost four years now um as you can tell by the accent I'm originally Australian but now live over in London um nearby paddle HQ um and I'm very pleased pleas and privileged to work with all of our team across paddle um as well as the thousands of software companies that we serve all around the world as I mentioned from the outet I'm very very happy to be joined by Steve who is the founder of ATMs I'll get Steve to introduce himself in just in just a minute um and dive into the content um but before that just wanted to let everyone know that we do have um some chat in the webinar platform here that we love to hear from you in um if you have any questions please feel free

to let us know throughout the conversation we'll try and address them as we move through the content um so we can stay focused on each individual topic before moving on so please do get active in the chat as Sarah mentioned there please let us know where you're dialing in from um and ask questions there's a Q&A tab there as well if you'd like to ask questions through the Q&A tab it just gives us a little bit more structure to keep track of the questions that are being asked um and there is also a docs tab there which can give you a bit more information and some and and some content and collateral for you to work through um on the topics that we're discussing today um but as I mentioned before the guest of honor today is Steve Young Steve I'd love for you to introduce yourself and then dive into some of the content and we can go that thanks Lucas excited to be here I like an interactive session so please put in

some comments questions in the Q&A the so I started Lucas I started app Masters on a whim right like I was building apps in 2011 I was running growth for a startup in San Francisco I'm out in California as you can tell by the accent and then I started a podcast because I wanted to take this little side business into a full-time business I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur all my life and I didn't know what that Journey would look like and I thought hey why don't I just start a podcast interviewing some of my heroes in the app space to see if I can turn this little side business that I have making ABS into a full-time business did that interviewed the co-founder of someone a fast forward we've been worked with a lot of different companies here but I've interviewed the co-founder Shazam the creator of cross color switch crossy roads and built up an audience Lucas who then started coming to me for app

marketing help app launch help and for the longest time I was like that first year on my own I quit so six months after starting that podcast in 2013 I quit so the beginning of 2014 I was like all right trying to figure stuff out but the one thing that people kept asking me for was hey help me with my app launch and so we've sort of taken all the strategies that I know works on the web sort of started implying it onto the app stuff too and we've seen some tremendous success that way and so because paddle is web and mobile and everything else in between I wanted to cover something my topics are going to be something that you know can apply to whether you have an e-commerce store or whether you have a Mobile app all right you're just some of the other people I've interviewed all right converion rate optimiz optimization why I love covering this topic Lucas is a lot of people feel like to grow you need

more downloads you need more traffic and I I like to focus on the you know the middle of the funnel the bottom of the funnel how do you convert more of your existing traffic into sales and so that's what we're going to cover today so number one it's that fouille firsttime user experience or onboarding experience for mobile apps all right so Lucas I I love playing here and hopefully you guys can play along at home but Lucas which one do you want well you already know the answer but I want you guys to decide in the comments below A or B which one do you think brought in more conversions a just shows the pay wall right away or B shows a little bit of like benefits of the app and then shows the paywall so I'll wait a second here Lucas but put it into the comments let me know what you think or just think about it right now and have an answer all right cool thank you Jordan all right Jordan you were correct

it was a 234 per increase in sales so here's the data what I love about this onboarding experience is it doesn't talk about features it talks about benefits lead you know I I'm reading a book and it says don't sell the transaction sell the reaction and that's what this is all about another way of saying you know really sell up the benefit and the best analogies a diamond ring you want the reaction right you're not focusing on the ring itself Lucas I think your audio is coming in from me if I'm not mistaken is strange can you hear me okay yeah I can there's some feedback all right so where most people buy in the app side of things it is during that first-time user experience most app downloads are actually really warm leads so make sure you have your pay wall during that firsttime user experience during that onboarding for apps okay here Shopify same thing on your website there's ways to start free trial right and I think a

lot of people try to hide it but look there there's going to be a section of your audience that's ready to buy there's going to be a section of your audience that needs to learn more but make it easy for them who are ready to buy to buy just quickly just quickly on that one while while we're talking about it I think something that I've always observed with these these onboarding funnels I guess if you like is like how do you how do you strike the right balance between sort of educating and buying in getting the getting the user to buy in but also making it as sure and frictionless as possible because you are introducing more steps right into the onboarding process and there must be a there must be like a nice healthy balance where it's most optimal versus making the process too convoluted how do you how do you think about that great question Lucas so we found that certain categories of apps especially in the

education and fitness space that longer on boardings actually convert better so getting users yes there's going to be more drop off but the people who actually make it all the way through will actually convert better and so Headway is a great example of an educational app that has a pretty decent size onboarding experience the you know a lot of the fitness apps out there will ask a lot of different information and we've seen that the longer onboarding screens do better the other way to so depends on the category so Fitness and education longer tends to convert better even despite the drop off and then to your other point Lucas it would be trying to I think three to five is a good number for most apps so I want to make sure I highlight the benefits and one app I saw that it's called recipe and it allows you to import recipes from all over your social media and they take you to that Journey Lucas and they

actually get you to import something so one client of ours in the photo and video space we saw that asking for photo video access before the pay wall actually increase conversions so is there something that you can sort of tie in with the user during that onboarding so that they're more likely to subscribe when you ask them to subscribe I love that that's great that's great advice cool all right let's get into to that homepage too so the second thing and especially on you know I kind of covered this on the Shopify example but again make sure there's a way to for people to buy we know this on the website of things but on the apps side of things we're kind of shy about it Lucas we're like let's get them to use our app a little bit more but as you guys can see from here the second most the second like 80 to 90% of all the people who end up buying in your app do so either doing the onboarding or your homepage so don't

hide your paywall on your homepage so Lucas Jordan there's got to be more than Jordan in that's going to play but all right a so the star right here in the top right corner leads you to the pay wall or B we change it to a crown on that pay wall so you guys guess A or B which one won a crown or a star come on Jordan I'm relying on you bro all right we got a couple of people in the public chat as well oh I see let me go there okay all right so it was actually B so a crown now I was talking to the client on this and I was like hey man I don't know if I'm right or wrong but I've always just seen crowns versus stars and so he was like funny enough Steve we're AB testing this right now and we found that the yellow star had the highest clickthrough rate 20% versus the the I'm sorry a Yellow Crown had a 20% click-through rate versus the the star and especially if it was a black star it was very bad but the star only had a

133% so you can see the difference between the two and leading just these subtle changes work really well and the last thing I'll add on all as we're talking about call the actions is get Pro features tend to convert the best two versus like unlock everything you you have to AB test and Lucas I'm always trying to find the lowest hanging fruit that will have the highest impact right and so what is one small subtle change I can make where I can see some immediate impact awesome that's really interesting what's your what's your view on sort of the the the design of a homepage and it it it appears that the homepage is like a pretty critical acquisition funnel right for for companies and their users how do they sort of balance the homepage as an acquisition funnel and the homepage as a place for perhaps existing customers to go to learn more about the product or something again I'm sort of I'm sort of exploring this idea of

balance between sort of driving acquisition but also ensuring um ensuring you're providing like the necessary other experiences that that that might also exist within that within that environment yeah I try to be clear versus clever right and a lot of times as marketers we try to be very clever oh what's something that we nobody's ever said before what's a tagline that I can use that would be so Monumental but it's really clear is better so you can see Shopify making Commerce better for everyone super simple for us Lucas it's we want to be the most affordable most effective at marketing agency perfect right and I think people get it's like get straight to the point and a lot of people like to use these Buzzy keywords all the time and it's like you don't really need it get clear because you have a few seconds to make sure your end user who may or may not have ever heard of you get straight to the point and

then next thing you know we see this on the website of things all the time but not so much on the appside of things have some social proof right like we my social proof I let it with I've interviewed the co-founders Asam I've helped these I have some social proof for you and on the appside of things we tend to forget about that social proof and I know if you're just starting out you're like how do I get Social proof If I'm just starting out you can always borrow right you can whether it's a quote from Einstein or you know for me we have a a pink noise app and it's like oh pink noise improves just put pink noise step into the Google and then you'll find that pink noise actually improves memory so it's like boom scientifically proven to increase memory that's how you sort of borrow social proof as well awesome awesome all right let's get into the flows too and one of the things I like to do especially as you're taking your

users onto your the onboarding or the initial user Journey you want to just focus on one thing at a time and then we've seen this work really well on the upside of things but I want to show show the web set of things with Shopify hey they're trying to learn more about you and this is Lucas to your point about like long onboarding short onboarding this is in the educational space you want to get as much data as you possibly can as a user goes towards that journey and so you'll see apps like Headway Shopify in this case ask a lot of questions because what you can start to see is hey people who are just starting out right here they tend to convert better so maybe we'll change our marketing materials to be like hey if you're just starting out on your e-commerce Journey Shopify is better for you for us what we notice in the mental health space for one of our apps we saw that anxiety relief had the highest

conversion rates and so guess what we did we changed some of our marketing copy to really talk about relieving anxiety because obviously you're selling a painkiller as an anxiety relief versus a vitamin which is might be considered meditation would be more of a vitamin so to speak mhm all right number four call Action like I said before this is one client we worked with this is just the figma file it's not their real actual payall but I was like all right let me let me play around with some of their copy here so all right Sarah you're gonna be the one that guesss all the time a is get started on their pricing page on their website and B is subscribed which one Want A or B all right I'll give it a second cool one more second all right it was a Sarah it was a 30% increase obviously people don't want to subscribe and I still see this yesterday Lucas I was on somebody else's website and I saw

subscribe and I was like dude nobody wants to subscribe right people want to get started people want to continue people want to unlock everything and so here's another AB test that we have we a tested get all features unlock plus unlock everything unlock lifetime so does everything else and we found that unlock lifetime insights had the best conversion rates because they're just charging a lifetime fee versus a subscription so really play around with your call to actions they do have an impact on this now I'm just going to pause really quick for the iOS side of things so iOS we found that continue works better than start free trial and on Android start free trial works better than continue so yeah little subtle changes look it's crazy I was actually going to ask Steve on the on the C action buttons like clearly there's some sort of demographic component to iOS users and Android users that means that certain words resonate

with them sort of taking that theme one step further do do you advise companies play with call to action copy color design Etc based on user segments so that you have I mean if assuming you know something about them is can you sort of segment your user base and test and experiment with different types of copy based on different types of users absolutely I mean I with IOS and Android kind of makes sense Android people are less likely to pay anyways so having that start free trial is going to be working better where iOS users tend to have a little bit more money and just spend you know without any cause but the yeah so I would do that I don't I think for the generally speaking you can probably get away with just letting everybody go so like get started subscribe there's a entrepreneur I follow he had like book a demo versus book a brainstorming session right and so he saw that book a brainstorming

session increase conversions and so and it it probably applies to most of your segment Lucas that's all I'm trying to say like I think platform and maybe localizations interesting but then for the most part most of your end users probably want the same thing great all right next thing I'm just going to hit on low hanging fruit blog post one of my clients to bring in the early users what she did was she wrote a blog post on her website comparing her apps to this is all public information so I'm not sharing anything private but she wrote a blog post like top apps for couples and she put her app as number one and she kind of had some other ones and her app led to a call to action so I have HubSpot up here as you guys can see if you have blog posts that rank really well on SEO on Google well don't forget to have some called the action some way for users to engage with that blog post because it can drive emails conversions

or even just downloads app downloads as well all right my next point I think this is one of my last ones before Lucas takes over is landing pages look if you're running traffic to a landing page you want to really look everything's mobile now right so you really want to focus now what I love about this is you want to be look the the T the the headline health insurance in China versus save up to 32% on health insurance in China so if you're targeting the keyword health insurance in China make sure you repeat that on your landing page lead with the benefit as well and then your call to action needs to be above the fold so really make sure we've seen that too Lucas I had one of my plans that I made for free we we had it below the fold and we saw that people were complaining that the offer wasn't there it was a lifetime offer and it was free and you had to scroll up up a bit to see that offer but

people just didn't scroll so make sure you have all the main points that you want to hit on social proof call the action show prices now and the benefit that leads to this led to a 79% increase in Leads Here interesting and and I think would you say the order of that information is important like when you're thinking about a landing page and how it's constructed right people are going to read top to bottom like how do you think about that yeah look I've seen this with apps too where we've seen if you have your first screenshot right as an app app example and I'm trying to Target health insurance in China leading with that keyword so that first one the before is great you have the the main keyword that people are searching on or you're bidding on or you're paying for right and then but what they did here on the after was you led with the benefit too it wasn't just like hey health insurance China it could be like the

number one health insurance in China hey we help save people and then they could even have there's a reason why you know they have some social proof here 4,000 people foreigners in China trust us it's like have social proof have the main keyword that you're trying to Target as well all right my next my favorite Point Lucas is pricing I love this stuff okay let's get into it all right I love this this the ATX Luke okay good thank you guys for putting in the comments all right rules of three this is what I believe in so I'm going to give a case study this was in the hacking growth book by sea Ellis and Morgan Brown a friend of mine and they covered this case study that I wrote back in 2012 right so here's what I read a book called predictably irrational by Dan areli and he said people when you're considering a vacation between Rome and Paris you're like ah they're both great they have pros and cons pros and cons

but then when you see another offer for Rome with free breakfast suddenly it becomes clear where you want to go and so it's really about sort of allowing users to see where the true value is and so here's the ab test and the the blog post was like how I made a how a made a product increased conversions by 233% so what we did here was we've been selling a for the longest time which is what most people sell especially in the app space monthly yearly monthly yearly it's the same offering right I then said hey why don't I make a a minus offer so instead of comparing monthly and yearly where it's a versus B I have a versus B and then an A minus offer which is the yearly in the middle and that's where we saw tremendous results so I'll give you in a we saw 60% buying the monthly 40% buying the yearly because it's cheaper it's less of a commitment I'd rather buy that in B it completely changed we saw

86% buying the yearly and 14% Buy in the monthly right and we also saw 233% increase in conversion so not only did we increase our conversions but we actually made more money upfront now you're going to have to figure out the r LTV maybe R LTV is higher on the monthly but what you want to do is wherever your highest value user is make it a little bit different and so for most web SAS products they might give you a discount if you sign up for the annual because you know that there's less churn on the annual on the app side of things I'll generally give a free trial to our highest LTV for AI apps that could be weekly for Fitness for most apps in general it's going to be yearly right photo and video and AI apps weekly tends to be the highest LTV for all other apps usually yearly has the highest LTV so I'll give a three-day trial on the weekly if I'm trying to push weekly I'll be have a 7-Day trial on the yearly if

I'm trying to push yearly and here's a stat that I found from Super wall and we've seen other companies talk about this too but and I know Lucas you guys paddle has a great relationship dapy dapy has the same report two plans we saw 61% increase versus one plan and then three plans 44% increase versus two plans so two plans better than one three plans better than two I lean with three all the time because usually the way I like to do this Lucas is I have my cheapest plan right which is going to be the monthly and then I have my decoy plan and then I have my yearly and that's why I like the rule of Threes the cheapest so for those who just want to taste it probably lowest LTV I'm just trying to make a little bit of money from you guys the the best LTV plan and the last one is the decoy plan to make my highest LTV plan the plan that's obviously the best plan that's awesome um it sounds like

there are variations in the types of pricing and packaging that you should deploy based on category I think you've mentioned a few times in the in the last 20 minutes or so some differences between like health and fitness and education for the folks in the room where can they go to get some of that information is that something that you can help with Steve my head no yeah I mean I think it's just playing around with it honestly just for me like the benefit was just talking to a lot of people a lot of the reports adapt has a great report about state of subscription apps they they kind of talk all about the appside of things which categories tend to do better with monthly and weekly and Lucas I found out the hard way I told my photo and video Clan I'm like why are you pushing weekly man should be yearly right and he's like no weekly we tested this weekly has the highest LTV this was 2021 and then I was

like I don't believe you dude and he's like all right let's test it then but then adapt came out with a report like a few months later and it said weekly has higher LTV sometimes and yearly I was like oh especially in the photo space and I was like oh my bad my fault was wrong I guess the message is that there isn't a one siiz fits all right so we would encourage people to experiment and play around with it themselves to find what works best for them I did my best to give you AI apps then photo and video weekly yeah then to have has LTV awesome good stuff Al righty should I jump in here and talk about pricing localization a little bit so um localization is a really interesting concept that we talk about a lot at cuddle um and I think it's important for us to get a little bit more Atomic with what we actually mean by localization that word gets thrown around a lot um so I think there are a few components that

can be nicely sort of segregated into the front end components of localization and the backend components of localization so when we talk about front end we're talking about the user experience a lot of a lot of what Steve has discussed already um and we're talking about the localization of language so making sure that you're speaking the language of your users in those regions we're talking about the localization of currencies um we're talking about the localization of payment methods so making sure that when you do surface your pay wall you are providing the right payment options to the right types of buyers in those regions and then we also talk about localization of price which means making sure that your price point regionally is reflective of willingness to pay and purchasing power in that region you'd be blown away by how many companies just choose to sort of go English US Dollars

credit cards globally right and you're going to have some success with that but you're leaving a lot on the table um we track a lot of metrics internally here at paddle around conversion rates in our checkouts um and you can see pretty meaningful differences which I'm going to share in just a moment when you choose to take a bit more care and and apply a bit more rigor to how you're expanding internationally and I think as software companies as app developers our aspirations are always International you know the ethos of what we do is very much let's be Global from day one um so you can set yourself up for Success much much better by really thinking deeply about localization up front and then the back end of localization which is sort of the behind the scenes piece um we won't spend much time talking about that today because it's not really on the topic but the localization of sort of payment gateways acquiring Banks

different entities all of these things um Can ultimately impact the performance of your payment stack so the likelihood that you're going to get a payment accepted and a transaction successful um for any given buyer at any given time you'd be surprised at how many companies um actually have very willing bought in buyers but a payment fails for one reason or another due to a multitude of reasons um that exists on this slide here and Beyond um and there are things that you can do to combat against that and ensure you're capturing as many of those users as possible through both your frontend implementation as well as your back implementation so to actually let the data tell a bit more of the story so um as I mentioned localizing payment methods super powerful um we work with 4,000 cust software companies all around the world as we mentioned and the data shows us that if you're a company and

you're offering at least one alternative payment method you're going to grow 20 to 25% faster yeah the figure we've got is 21.8% and it definitely varies between there but 20 22% faster for a company that is offering it at least one alternative payment method and what I mean by alternative payment method is a payment method that is specific to a certain region so for example um you're offering Ali pay in China right um or you you might be offering um a payment method like pix in Brazil right um to support the Brazilian buyers so if you're offering these alternative payment methods you're going to see more growth you're going to have more success because you're thinking about localization more rigorously and it's the same story for localizing currencies um again I mentioned this before but you'd be blown away by how many companies think that they can just sell in US dollar globally and you can don't

get me wrong like if there's going to be any currency in which you can sell globally it is the US dollar but if you are deploying region specific currencies so if you're charging an Australian dollars in Australia or in GBP in the UK in yen in Japan um you're going to experience a lot more growth um and here at padle companies that have 25 plus currencies turned on and they're using them and deploying them in the right regions um you'll see quite a bit more growth there um and even if you just do two so even if you just do something as simple as going US dollar for for the for the world and say Euro in the Euro Zone to just tackle those two major markets even if you're just doing that just doing two currencies one in the Euro Zone and one for the rest of World um you're going to get a nice little bit of growth there so 12.7% um and the reason for this I think is is is is probably obvious when people um

see their local currency at checkout they're more likely to press buy and there's a couple of reasons the first one is because um they're not entering into a subscription that could be subject to volatility in the currency so if their payment is pegged at US dollars right the exchange rates could go up and down so they don't really actually know what it's going to cost them um in their native currency when they submit their domestic credit card and secondly and I actually think um this is more important it sends a message to your user and to your buyer that you care about them yeah um it sends a message that hey like I know that you're in the UK I know that you um that you pay in GBP and I've deployed that currency for your benefit and that's a really powerful message to send your user so it's no wonder that they're seeing these sorts of growth rates um with this localization lever and the fourth one over there or the

third one on the right is localized pricing so companies that are choosing um to adjust their pricing based on willingness to pay um this is a really interesting one so we see a lot of companies who basically take the US dollar and Peg everything against the US dollar and then they just basic and then they just convert globally so in every other currency they just run a basic conversion um and assuming that that purchasing power across the world is basically the same as the us as the US which of course it's not um in some countries uh purchasing power is higher than the US in some it's lower um in a lot of northern European countries like the nordics you can see willingness to pay at 20 30% higher than the US dollar as a baseline in South America you can see it 20 to 30% lower than the US dollar as a baseline And if you are adjusting your P your prices based on purchasing power um you're not leaving

money on the table in those regions where purchasing power might be higher um but you're also making sure you're competitive in countries or regions where purchasing power is lower um and you'll bear the fruits of that labor 30% Revenue growth Revenue increase for ghost companies um who were choosing to do localized pricing so all this is to say localization matters and localization isn't just about creating a flow in the right language there are lots of other levers that you have from a localization perspective to make your business and your launch much more successful anything to add there St no I love this and completely agree you know I hate it when I see an s in locals I'm just kidding local instead of a z the but I wanted to talk do you guys have any reports on like how much we should go like I know Japan is a big market for some for some apps I know South Korea I know India is a pretty big

Market too but you know like do you guys have a report out there that we can be like okay if us UK is 100% here's 70% in these countries and 120% in these countries we do we do so we do have um willingness to pay reports and content out there which basically uses our data across the whole paddle stack to look at different price points and how they're performing in different regions um I think there's some on our website actually I'll let Sarah or any of the paddle team chime in in the chat and perhaps provide some additional links or documentation but yes that absolutely exists I love it awesome all right let's move through to web funnels also known as app to web or web to app lots of different terms that are being thrown around to describe web funnels we have already touch on this a little bit I think this is very much in line with what Steve has been discussing already about building a

really good onboarding experience but it sort of it it it adds an additional layer to that it adds the monetization component to that where you're actually building a web funnel that enables you to monetize and transact on the web but have the prim interface for the user remain as the app and lots of companies are doing some great things in this space um to leverage some of the benefits of web-based payments and web- based billing one of those being far lower fees um but also maintain um high levels of user acquisition and high levels of user retention so we're going to walk through some of that right now um so the traditional sort of app user acquisition funnel is you have a series of paid channels you have ad networks and you build a pipel and you push marketing dollars behind certain ad networks that drive users to your app and there are great advantages to this on the App Store so the app store for

for for all its faults um is is an extraordinary platform um Apple charges users anywhere on the planet on Earth which is wonderful um they will always have a billing method that's guaranteed because it's stored against your iPhone um involuntary churn on the App Store is very low you don't have any of the hassle of managing the paint Apple owns the subscriptions Apple handles all of the tax and compliance for you so it's a pretty frictionless and easy way to start monetizing your customers through um or monetizing your users of your mobile apps but there are also some challenges with the App Store the first one uh that many marketers will know about is some of the restrictions around attributions so the scan and the deprecation of idfa making attribution very difficult to to to track on the App Store as I mentioned before we have quite a high payment Commission of 30% on the App Store there are restrictions

around subscription and payment method and payment configuration so um as we alluded to before you have a lot more pricing and packaging flexibility on the web based on the web billing platforms you're somewhat restricted in the App Store environment um you can't use your own retention tooling and you also have a high level of competition so what we're seeing in the market is lots of companies choosing to explore and use the web in different ways to help improve business outcomes so you'll see that there has been a bit of a shift to web payments um from the Apple and Google stores from a lot of app companies for a multitude um of reasons which are are all very interesting and we're going to dive into some of those in the moment but to sort of set the scene a little bit where working with some companies who are seeing nearly 30 to 40% of their transactional volume occur on the web and what I mean by that is that as a

user my subscription is purchased and renewed through the web even though I interfaced primarily with the app so for example if I go through a web onboarding funnel if I land on a landing page like a rebel for example and I subscribe on the do com and then I go and log in on the app of course my account will will will exist and those two things are corrected but as a subscriber I'm subscribing through the web um and not through the app which is really powerful so what we then have is this this this new model which is somewhat the same as what it used to be but what we're adding in here is this concept of a web funnel and you're launching a web funnel from these page channels from these ad networks and what you're doing there is let's say you have an Instagram ad um and you hit um sign up or explore that will open a web browser and you'll go through an onboarding flow just like Steve walked us through earlier and the

pay wall at the end of that onboarding flow will be will be a web- based pay wall and enable you to then process that payment on the web via a third party web-based payment provider just like what paddle does um now one of the interesting things about this is that the App Store operates as a merchant of record it's great it has many wonderful advantages um and there's a perception in the market perhaps that you're not able to get those merchand of record benefits on the web um a lot of the traditional payments platforms like your stripe or your addan don't operate as merchants of record so on the App Store you have the app Apple the the App Store and Google Play Store which effectively sit between the buyer or the user and the seller or the app app developer to take off and to remove all of that burden um from uh from you around payments and billing and what we now have which is awesome and this is what

paddle does is we also have a merchant of record solution that does the same thing so you're you're you're deploying the same Merchant of record model on the App Store as you are on the web now as well which means you don't have to change things operationally you don't have to spin up a tax team and suddenly handle fraud and compliance and all this sort of stuff so the M model at least from paddle perspective um is the same as how it works on the App Store um where paddle as The Merchant of record will sit between um the user and the app developer so what are what are some of the benefits to web funnels um as I mentioned before improve tracking and and and attribution um there are now restrictions on idfa the idfa was deprecated which means it's difficult um to to to track where a user has come from which means it's harder to deploy marketing spend in the right spots um we also see customers have a higher LTV um

on the web for a number of reasons um obviously we have a lower commission but we also have more flexibility in the monetization strategies to different types of pricing packaging deploying different types of billing models as well as more flexible around free trials and discounts um which can drive LTV in the right direction um new audience and AD inventory and also higher subscription retention so a lot of our data actually shows that um if you're processing uh renewals through the web um because of some of the control you have around the cancellation flow you can actually see higher retention figures than what you'll see um on the App Stores so moving through here um web to app is growing uh as you mentioned Steve companies like adap and revenue C are really supporting this trend and helping companies deploy these types of models it's deploying it's growing about 50% year on year um and lots of apps are

choosing to scale their marketing spend by by deploying a lot of that through the web and entering a multi- Channel World so where they have App Store volume and then Web Channel volume um and trying to improve the unit economics outcomes by tracking the way that dollar dollars transition through those two channels and how that comes out the other end in terms of upsetting for the business um I think you mentioned earlier as well Steve that there are some great companies who are already doing this type of thing I think you walked us through a couple of examples there but Headway are a great example um of a company that are are doing this better me um n there as well as as blinkist all very very popular apps that are choosing to deploy this type of strategy and also apps at the lower end as well I mean we're working with a lot of companies that are much smaller than these than these Big Industry leading

apps and who have been very who have seeing very successful um results from web to app strategies a couple of those just to point them out um hubx who are a paddle customer as well as goodnotes are having a lot of success with these types of funnels um hubex are seeing global payment acceptance at 91% which is massive um and good notes have managed to open up some really interesting revenue streams based on some of the flexibility on the web and they' also as I mentioned before been very effective at localizing some of their pricing around the world to really Drive revenue and drive growth um anything to add from your side Steve on sort of web to app and web funnels generally no I mean some people are even some of our clients are actually thinking about they have they don't have the webt yet but they have an app they're grabbing emails and then obviously trying to get these people to convert on the web as well so it's

almost like app to web to app Lucas again but that's another opportunity I think it's it's going to be huge definitely it is yeah I mean is but F we've seen all this we've seen it every iteration of app to web to web to app to web to app to web it's getting a little bit it's getting a little bit tough we actually call it just web monetization here at paddle just sort of bit of a cal phrase because primarily the idea ising on the web right it's about processing those transactions on the web um so that's what we use as a as a cat all phrase wanted to close out today's session um by talking a little bit about the checkout experience in particular so you're through the onboarding funnel you've got a pay all you're about to hit pay then you go to the point at which you fill out your card details and again what we want to sort of communicate is the requirement of being rigorous across every step of the onboarding funnel I

think Steve spoke to some really interesting things earlier about packaging about about pricing about how you use your landing pages how you use homepages and blog posts and it's also important to think about how are you deploying the ACT checkout experience how are you making it really easy for customers to pay you when they want to pay you so they you know they want to pay you make it easy as possible for them to pay you um and again as I mentioned checkout legalization there are four key pillars to this the first one is have a checkout that is localized in the language of the user the second one is have a check out that's localized in their currency as we've spoken about the third one is have a checkout that surfaces and gives those users the option to buy in a payment method that they want to buy in um and fourthly make sure the checkout is showing the right price so and displayed at the right

price point um based on willingness to pay so again sort of repeating what what I just said before but for if if you're going to jot anything down right about about sort of checkout localization these are the four things I'd encourage you to jot down and go away and explore um and then if I move into here remember that a mobile checkout um or a web checkout for a mobile audience is probably a bit different to like a a desktop checkout right and it's really important that you think about that so the first thing is to make sure it's optimized in a onepage experience for Simplicity and speed yeah we talk about this a lot of paddle when we sell to B2B SAS or larger software companies that are primarily desktop people are taking much more care with the purchase they're thinking about it it's probably a bit more well researched and informed whether the checkout is multiple steps or one step is unlikely to impact

whether they convert through the funnel yeah um now when you're a mobile app or let's say someone's like scrolling Instagram on their bus on the way home from University yeah if they're on iOS they're looking for that Apple pay Button as quickly as they can right they don't want long complex card forms and addresses they want the Apple pay button where is it get me to that Apple pay Button as quickly as I can right so you want to optimize your checkout experience in a different way to how you might do if you were selling on desktop yeah so it's a really important thing to think about um we we all often I mean I I go out with friends and they jump on their phone if they're at the pub or something and to to to to buy something and they go oh this checkout sucks this checkout sucks and companies typically don't think about it but you need to think about where is your buyer what environment are they in what does the

buying experience look like and how do I surface and deploy a checkout is most likely to support their intent to buy yeah that will yield the best results so again the second point there is clear visibility of the oneclick wallet payment option so making sure that your surfacing Apple pay and Google pay right at the top of the tree there because they're most likely to be clicked um lots of web to app companies that are launching ads from Instagram and diving into web funnels we're seeing 60 to 70% of those payments being processed through wallets um so you need to make sure that those payment methods are being are being displayed and of course transparent pricing um and something that integrates really well in your pay wall so designing your checkout um around the experience that you're providing um that is all the content that we have to walk walk through today Steve was there anything else you wanted

to add as a bit of a closing remark for us not a closing one but s in the swick sorry if I screw that up he wanted me to break down why this one works so well real quick so if I can just rewind a little bit so why B works so well is we knew that there here's what I didn't cover core feature One Core feature two so I knew these were what people really really wanted from this service so I was like okay I'm going to make sure it's available on all our plans but as you can see the way it was there was no differentiation between a I I got everything I did I couldn't get anything more and so I was like oh there's a let me just pick the lowest one because it's cheapest and I don't know if I want this forever right we we hate commitment so we pick a but with B you get so much more for just $10 more you get so much more and so that's why B really worked because and you know what Lucas frankly whatever you bought you

got all of it right that's how much of a growth hacker I am it didn't matter because I didn't want to fil I wanted to see if this would work first before we even had these plans available so whether you bought the monthly the yearly whatever one you bought you got all the features because I was just trying to see if presenting it this way would have an impact on conversions but that's sort of a break down that they do a good job yes or no all right Lucas awesome thank you very much well if we don't have any more questions we can probably call it there unless anyone wants to jump up at the last minute um just as oh there we go just as a reminder our next paddle happy hour session is happening next Thursday um it's going to be on the subscription value Loop which is a framework for growing consumer subscription businesses we're going to be joined by Phil Carter who's the founder of Elemental growth um

and he will be talking to Andrew Davies who is our wonderful CMO here at paddle so join us for that one um if you'd like to we'd love to see you there but thank you Steve um for today thank you for showing your Insight um it was a pleasure um I learned a lot and I'm sure the audience learned a lot as well um and for those who'll be watching the recording um if you have any questions or follow-ups please don't hesitate to reach out to the paddle team or the app Masters team as well thank you all for your time we appreciate it um and we'll see you for our next episode of Happy Hour