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My Secret App Monetization Strategies

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App Masters13:42Open on YouTube
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The bottom line

Apps earn more when they make an offer at the moment a user shows intent, and let the user choose or come back to it. Each of these five tactics reuses effort already spent on getting a user, so it costs far less than buying new ones.

Key takeaways

  • Users who show intent are the best people to sell to. 8:00
    • Headway shows a 70% offer after a user closes the first paywall on a book, and it is a top five in-app purchase.
    • Users who add to a cart or finish editing a photo have already shown they want the product.
  • Letting users choose their own price beats one fixed discount. 1:16
    • An A/B test of a pay-what-you-want slider beat a blanket 50% off, though the offers were the same.
    • Use no more than three options: one nobody takes, the one you want, and one that is expensive.
  • Users who cancel or leave can be won back. 2:45
    • A normal trial to subscription rate is 30 to 40%. Apple signals a cancelled trial, so a push notification can send an offer.
    • A cancel flow in settings that offers a discount, asks why and then links to the App Store builds goodwill.
  • Email and reminders are cheap ways to bring users back. 5:17
    • A Curio email asking users to share the app for 30% off got a 5% conversion rate.
    • Cart reminders at one hour, one day and one week gave a 13x improvement in conversions.
  • The best time to ask users for something is right after a good moment in the app. 10:46
    • Prequel shows a discount after a photo is exported and saved.
    • Asking for a rating at the same point greatly improved average ratings, especially on Android.

It's easier to ask for something in reciprocity after the user is happy.

Chaim, B7 Dev

Chapter summaries

0:00 Pay what you want

Showing users a range of prices to pick from sells better than one fixed discount.

  • The offer is a simple slider with the target price in the middle. 2:17
    • Sliding left gives a cheaper discount, and sliding right pays more.
    • Most people don't pick the most expensive option.
    • Some users pick the higher price, so the choice does not just lower revenue (1:42).
    • The discounted plans need their own yearly subscription without a trial. The normal pricing keeps its trial (2:30).

2:43 Win back cancelled trials

A cancelled trial is a chance to recover effort already spent, in a push notification or a cancel flow.

  • A win-back offer recovers some trial users who would otherwise be lost. 3:27
    • Masud, from the App Masters Academy community, shared the idea and saw good results.
    • The win-back offer can be pay what you want instead of a single 50% offer.
    • A trial rate below average points to a pricing issue, a trial length issue or other variables.
    • Steve's view: something is better than nothing.
  • A cancel flow in settings catches the user before they leave. 3:43
    • The user taps unsubscribe, then gets a 50% offer, then a question about why, then a link to the App Store page.
    • Audible runs a similar flow.
    • The answer to "why" is usually price, but asking gives real knowledge.
    • Keeping an existing customer is easier than acquiring a new one (5:09).

5:14 Email offers

A well-written email with a discount brings users back at a very low cost.

  • Asking users to share the app wins either way. 5:20
    • Hannah of Aperture London shared the Curio case in a webinar with RevenueCat.
    • The email is signed "Hannah from Curio" and opens with can you help this account and a smiley face.
    • Few users share, but many use the discount. Either way they return to the app.
    • The main cost is writing good copy, which is far lower than the cost of ads.
  • A welcome email can be followed by a discount within minutes. 6:30
    • Steve got a welcome email and then a 20% offer in the same few minutes.
    • He doesn't know whether it converts, but he likes the approach.

6:51 Pay early, and remind cheaply

Paying users stay and use the app, so push for payment early and keep the reminders cheap.

  • Getting users to pay early lifts retention. 6:56
    • Most users leave within 3 days.
    • People who pay keep using the app.
    • Apps with web subscriptions are valued more than apps that only sell on the App Store.
    • A web-to-app campaign through Stripe works with tools like Adapty, FunnelFox and RevenueCat, which tie the web payer to the app user.
    • Strike while the iron is hot. The worst case is a no.
  • Cart abandonment reminders work in any app with a cart. 7:57
    • DoorDash and e-commerce apps are obvious fits.
    • A reminder needs no discount. Add one only if it's needed.
    • A past podcast guest working on Zeno found that more reminders worked better. Going from two to three helped.
    • An in-app timer can remind users after no activity on the cart. Push and email both cost little.

9:23 Timed discounts

An offer lands best right after the user does something that shows interest or happiness.

  • Headway locks most content so the product feels premium. 9:29
    • Everything is locked except one free daily read.
    • A user who says no to the first paywall gets a 50% offer on the app's homepage.
    • The top in-app purchases of any app are visible in the app stores.
    • The speaker doesn't know how much Headway earns from this.
  • Saving or exporting work is a good moment to ask for something. 10:46
    • Prequel shows a discount once a photo is exported, because saving signals that the user likes the app.
    • The same moment can bring a discount, a rating or something selfish.
    • The user is happy, so it's easier to ask for something in return.
    • A cold request for a review or a sale is the weaker alternative.

In the growth library

Steve P. Young and Chaim (B7 Dev), Steve P. Young, founder of App Masters; Chaim, app development firm founder at B7 Dev. Five lesser-known app monetization tactics: let users pick their own discount, win back canceled trials, send discount emails, run cart abandonment reminders, and trigger timed discounts after high-intent moments. Examples include a 5% email conversion rate, a 13x conversion lift from a third cart reminder, and a 70% second-paywall offer that ranks among Headway's top five in-app purchases.

Lessons that draw on this:

More from App Masters · The whole library, and ask it anything

Transcript380 lines
0:00

coming up I'm going to share with you five of my most secretive most effective app marketing strategies that I have yet to share stay tuned what is up app Nation it is Steve p young founder of app masters.com the place you go when you want actionpack content related to helping you grow your app downloads I try to say this really fast but it is my tagline app downloads and more importantly why you're here your revenues and joining me today and for the last part of our three part series to really break down what's working in the app space is my friend from B7 Dev himim himim welcome back to the show hi stepen thank you for having me all right him we're GNA break it all down here heim's got a great app development firm and we've been working together since 201 what 14 him 13 when we first discovered each other and so he's my trusted partner when it comes to app development go check him out it is

0:54

b7d dev.com all that link is in the favorite podcast app and the YouTube description all right let's break it down here are the most secretive at marketing strategies the little known ones the new strategies that I have yet to share that I'm going to break it down for you guys today and the first one him is the best one that I've got it is the pay what you want model so rather than showing a 50% discount discounting early works I've shared with you guys case studies on that but allowing users to pick their discount is actually working better better than just showing a blanket 50% off so here's one of our apps we AB tested this we seen better results with this type of flow than just giving them a 50% off so technically speaking they're getting the same offer and they're buying the same offer and some are actually picking the higher price one but allowing that user to pick which offer they want is seeing better results

1:52

than just saying hey here's the one offer that you got just a small tip don't use more than three screens don't clutter too much the screen with these kind of options okay one should be the one that no one will take because it's too obvious that it's not convenient you need to Center the one that you want for them to subscribe and then one that is maybe too expensive but it works anyways no more than three screens please yeah and for our UI we it's just a little slider that they can pick so it shows you the middle one they can slide to the left to pick a cheaper discount and then they can slide to the right to pay us more and most people don't pick the last one but this one has a trial and technically speaking you will need a couple of different yearly subscription plans do not have a trial on these discounted offers this is our normal pricing but these ones you'll need a new subscription plan that is a yearly

2:41

without a trial that's what these are number two win back so I'm we work so hard to get first the install and then for people to activate a trial what happens when you cancel the trial so a normal trial to subscription rate is anywhere from 30 to 40% you're doing that that's average if you're doing more good on your mate but if you're doing less you got to figure out what's going on that could be a pricing issue it could be a trial length issue there could be a lot of variables to do that and I'll break that down in a future video but here's a shout out to massud who's in our app Masters Academy community and he shared this and he said hey Apple will tell you when somebody's canceled a trial if you can pick that up you can send them a push notification trying to win them back now what massud you could be doing now is rather than showing them the 50% offer the one offer you can do a pay what you want offer

3:29

here but you work so hard to get that trial go ahead and try to win them back and he's seen good results with that trying to Repose the big effort that we already did into getting them to use the trial something is better than nothing so we can at least recover some pain users with this technique and one flow I really like is allowing users to easily and I know it's counterintuitive but trust me you'll build a lot of trust with your audience is allowing I saw this flow and I love this flow So within the settings you know your profile settings you if I you hit the settings you see this cancel trial unsubscribe then I come here to this page and says yes I want to unsubscribe or no go back right yes they try to win me back they give me an offer I'm like oh cool thank you 50% off so if I continue done y on me back if you ever try to cancel an audible subscription you'll see stuff like this now if I hit I don't want I

4:21

want to lose my discounts good waranty here they ask me why and then if I hit unsubscribe still they'll take me directly to the App Store subscription page where I can cancel my trial and I really like it one they try to win me back with an offer two they're asking me why so you have knowledge most people might just say pricing that's the number one reason and three they're making it easy for me to cancel so that builds Goodwill with your users excellent idea again as you said maybe it sounds counterintuitive to have an subcribe so high in to the settings but the idea is to capture the intention of cancelling before jumps out to the domain of the app itself okay so we are saing a huge Coast into reg getting some user into the app already the best customer you know is the existing customer easier to keep a customer right him than to try to acquire a new one all right let's get into the next one it is email so Hannah

5:17

from aperture London she has her own marketing firm she shared this case study in a webinar that we did with Revenue cat I really like the messaging here the email is very creative she says can you help this account inside smiley face I love that I like that it says Hannah from CUO as well so it's more personal to just CUO team as an example said hello you've been using curio for a while we would love it if you could try to share it with your friends now I'm going to take it so that you guys can copy this exact email copy and as a thank you we're going to give you a 30% off and what Hannah said during the webinar was hey people open this email and she got a 5% conversion rate not a lot of people share the app but they certainly took advantage of of that discount so I really like the messaging here instead of just saying hey here's this discount come back they're sort of saying we want you to share it even if

6:07

you don't we'll give you a discount either way you know what is the biggest cost of sending an email of this kind of campaign to write in it okay to make a good copy but the the cost is really really really low comparing it to ads so this is a excellent technique to at least if they don't recommend you they will use the discount and they will back to the app or install the app so it's excellent hi I'm going to give you one more actually so this is an app that I discovered I really like it now I don't I have I have no idea if it's going to be effective or not but literally they sent me an email saying welcome Steve to our community literally two minutes later five minutes later I don't know but pretty much the same time definitely the same date and definitely within minutes of this they sent me a 20% offer and if you open that email you check out through stripe and the reason why I bring it up is I like this

6:54

aggressiveness most people leave your app within 3 days so you want to get people to to subscribe because people who pay pay attention your retention will go up if you get more people to pay for your app people will use your app people who pay will use right that's what we value so I really like the aggressiveness the other point I want to make is apps that have web subscriptions are more valued Than Just Apps doing stuff on the App Store this opens up a stripe possibility a web to app campaign that if you use anything like adap funnel Fox Revenue cat they can all help you with with getting users to pay on the web and tying that user to the app side of things they make it really easy so I really like this strategy here I like the concept of hammering while the iron is hot okay in the worst case scenario they say no it's something that is wor the shot great the strategy and then also again mail is really cheap the

7:50

most important part of the email is knowing how to write it so you need to be experimenting all the time with the copy for the the next one is cart abandon so you will see e-commerce websites doing this all the time but card abandonment works for an app that has card abandonment or card right like maybe a door Dash or even like any e-commerce apps out there think about a card abandonment campaign so here's a case study in a lot past podcast guest of ours who did stuff on Zeno and what they found was the more reminders they sent the more effective it became so they went from sending just two remers and I forget when they did it but it was just two reminders I think it was just 1 hour and one day and that's it they added a one week I think don't quote me on that but essentially going from three to two is what helped out so they sent a card abandonment reminder one hour after and then card abandonment one day after

8:47

and then one week later and they saw 13x Improvement in conversions your users are already shown intent they added something to the cart try to get them back into it you can you don't even have to do deal discounts like hey don't forget this is still in your cart you showed that you wanted it come back and if you need it do a discount go ahead and do a discount but super cheap to run too either through push or through emails really cool even if you are browsing into the app itself without the need send I mean you can put a timer after no activity on the cart after selected and then reminding that you still have items on the cart that you didn't check out so it's also another point and the last one H is timed discounts now this time discount is very similar to what we kind of talked about so this is from Headway and Headway is an app like blinkist it summarizes the best non-fiction books out there and I

9:36

really like their monetization so Headway will actually give you a 50% offer if you say no to their initial pay wall they give you a 50% offer right off the Jump on their homepage of the app now everything in the Headway app is locked except one free daily read we've seen good results with that too lock up most of your content it's premium content it says hey man I'm a premium product so they give away one free thing now when you select a book that is not free for the day like I did I selected rest I hit listen or read what I get is a pay wall so I can hit start free trial because I never started the free trial if I hit X on this what I get is another offer hey we got a special offer for you I hit open show me they give me 70% off so they give me a bigger discount because they know I've already shown intent I want something I selected something here and just because I said no to that initial pay wall you can try

10:29

to get me on that second pay wall now I don't know how much they're making from this but their most popular Ina purchases this is definitely one of the top five inapp purchases when you look at the app stores you can see the top inapp purchases on any app and this 70% discount is one of the top five all right the last one I want to share with you guys this example of a Time discount is prequel I saw it on prequel it's a photo editing app I'm editing my photo this is my brother you can see the resemblance Brad fit after I'm done editing the photos and I hit export and Save shown you I like the app I used your app I showed you I liked it by Saving doing something that says I like it they show me a discount and I really like this H we did the same exact strategy but instead of a discount we asked for a rating and we've seen huge improvements in our average rating especially on the Android side when

11:17

we're running this strategy for a client of ours you can do rating you can do discount you can do something selfish after somebody shows a really great moment and they've experienced your app in a really great moment you built it for show them a discount show them a review it works really well since you establish a dialogue through menus with the user you are using the fact that the user is happy is happy with what is happening so it's easier to ask for something in reciprocity after the user is Happy done like a cold calling for leave me a review or I don't know if you want to buy okay this is the right moment all right that is it five different little known secret strategies that finally revealed to the rest of the world and if you want to implement any of these strategies you can use some of these tools and what we did was we just hardcoded it and if you need help hardcoding it in your app well I

12:10

recommend go check it out my friends heimes website and Company it is the letter B the number seven dev.com they are an app development firm and I really like it they're not going to try to charge you exorbitant amounts of money just to get something easy done I trust himim he's very honest with how much time certain things to take why I like working with the him so much is we're both aligned in our goals we want customers to stay with us for a very long time we're not looking for quick win and just get you to build an app and be done with it he's invested in your success of the app he sends us clients like Steve you should work with this clients he's he's invested in your app succeeding he wants to build a cool product that will eventually succeed so go check them out it is the letter B the number7 dev.com bev.com and if you like some of the heimes Insight he's got a YouTube channel that I will link up into

13:01

our description and your favorite podcast feed go check them out there as well hi if the audience wants to connect with you in any other way do you want to send them anywhere else contacting me on the contact form B7 dev.com is very easy okay I usually answer really fast so I really like to hear about your ideas your requirements you can have a chat for free understanding what you need and then we can take it from there all right guys that is it make sure if you like this video make sure to share it with some of your friends maybe you don't want to because I'm trying to be secret about this right but make sure you hit that subscribe Button as well all right until next time I'll see you on the next video