Building More Successful Paywalls in Subscription Apps - Sylvain Gauchet

0:00hello I'm your host David Barnard today's conversation is shorter than usual and will be featured in Revenue cat state of subscription apps report each episode in this series will explore one crucial metric and share actionable insights from Top subscription app operators with me today syvan Gus director of Revenue strategy us at Babel and chief insights minor at grams on the podcast I talk with syon about top strategies for paywall optimization the danger of over optimizing and why the screen before your pay wall might actually matter more than your pay wall hey saon thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today hey D really excited to be here I got some good stuff

0:41for you looking forward to div in all right you've been you've been mining gems all year and I wanted to talk through some of the best pay wall related gems you've mined this year for those who don't know syvan he run something called growth gems where he watches all the industry videos and listens to podcast and then shares the top tips mind's the gems from those so let's kick it off what's your top gem for 2024 on pay walls it's actually kind of framing the discussion kind of gy it's actually on everything leading to the payall because I is if I don't talk about that at all so the gem is from

1:18Daryl Stone they used to be at CZ and so the gem is get your users excited about your product by telling the W Stone through the flows that present the pay wall think about the user mindset when they open the app and the story you reveal to them through the onboarding so that when they see the pay wall it's contextualized and I wanted to mention that one because I consider the P really the ask of the sale and if you don't frame anything before you can try and optimize it and you might get some wins but you you're missing out so I I think that story especially focusing on the

1:53very beginning and kind of your hook in the on boing and kind of the pick and Rule of handing strong before the pay wall is is what will make the pay wol successful or a big part of it any examples of apps that you think do an incredible job leading up to the pay wall yeah rise sleep is one that is often mentioned I particularly like the hook and kind of the story they tell at the beginning same thing in terms of the hook andle how we feel I discovered an app yesterday called 222 that has like a video essentially on boarding and hook at the beginning that's pretty amazing

2:26so yeah I think those those are doing great awesome all right gem number two gem number two it's about loss AV verion as part of the onboarding have onboarding questions then a generic pay wall then more question related to specific premium features or even have users set up those premium features then have a feature payall and say these are part of the Premium plan the way that works because you know to try and explain it visually is essentially you have people set up features throughout the onboarding then you PR them with a with a pill wall that essentially you know it's like now get that get it and

3:01if they don't get it you explain to them everything they're going to lose and they're going to essentially lose everything that set they set up so there's some some CA fallacy and the idea is that the projects themselves during onboarding you show that after they reject the uh initial pay wall and it's that last AV verion that pushes them to convert yeah that's a great one all right next gem next gem there are multiple things you should test display during the all experience a list of features and explanation of how the free trial Works social proof a comparison of basic versus Pro Plan this can be done

3:37for long scrollable screen or multiscreen payall and this is from a Catarina was at mimo and she was mentioning that a mimo the multiscreen option led to 60% increase in the trial op rate and I've been seeing those multiscreen pay walls more and more especially for free trial where you know instead of showing the blinkist timeline they actually break it down down in multiple screen to tell you what's going to happen in 2 days what's going to happen in 5 days Etc but it can work also fun you know if you don't have a free Tri and essentially what I like about it I guess it's it blurs the line

4:12between what's on boarding and what's a payall it's like if you have a screen before the pay wall is that part of the onboarding is that part of the pay wall but it gives you that possibility to show benefits explain better the actual like transactional aspect and have kind of like some last minute pitch or recap to push people over the edge yeah that's such a great one as well I would guess that part of why this works and this is just maybe a truism that you should use throughout your entire onboarding even is that people don't read so if you have a lot to say a long pay wall can work especially

4:48for a hard pay wall because then people maybe will take the time to scroll if you have a hard pay wall and they don't have an option but to read but if you don't have a hard pay wall especially and it's a premium product and you have a lot you want to communicate communicating in smaller chunks that are easier to digest in multiple steps is a great way to take the things that you would think should be on the pay wall but can actually be kind of one at a time stepped through in a way that and you were saying this earlier is with the first gem from Daryl about what's

5:20leading up to the pay wall is that this is like the perfect example of like really controlling those last few steps before the paywall with like really strong message meing and again messaging that you maybe think should be on the pay wall but by putting it in individual Pages it can just be so much more impactful and the choice between long pay and multic Screen I mean that's something you you want to test but I agree if you have a long pay well you're typically going to get only the real explorers scrolling down and dividing it it pces is usually helpful to get people to really see it also an often main

5:55mistake is you know your plans are not above the fold if you had a long Pall cuz you decided to put too much stuff on it and and then you miss out this is actually fairly easy to test so if you currently have a long pay wall take that pay wall break it up into three or four pages and experiment with the multi-stage pay wall because you might be surprised just how well that performs compared to the long pay wall 100% all right next gem next gem is from Toma P Favorite growth consultant it's the conversion behavior of users during onboarding and post onboarding is different so you probably want a

6:28different bill for the two when you AB test your pay wall separate the analysis between the onboarding pay wall and the post onboarding pay walls and I like it because typically you think one pay wall but you essentially display it in a bunch of places so you can make one change to your pay wall that's going to help right at the end of the onboarding or even during onboarding but that can hurt after and same thing can be true the opposite if you start showing that free versus pay chart on your first pay wall then you're probably going to hurt yourself but if you use it as a second

6:59pay wall later on when some people access a feature you're actually helping them understand what they could get in addition because they'll probably already know to some extent what they can get for free since they did not convert initially now I have a caveat on on that one is that if you're starting if you're early stage if you're not super sophisticated you probably don't want to bother with that because chances are you have 80% of your conversions on the first day allall and and diving into optimizing you know the remaining 20% is probably not the best effort you can put to increase LTV and conversions in

7:36general this can be relatively low hanging fruit though so like if you do have a pay wall that has a description of each of your main premium features then just remixing that one pay wall to focus on each of the premium features so that when a user Taps on that specific feature they see kind of the pitch for that feature more prominently those kind of things can probably be done fairly straight forward so maybe there's ways to maybe do it easier and less sophisticated and still make it work but I think you're totally right it's like it's too easy to get lost in the weeds and like spend way too much time over

8:11optimizing when you're early you know if you're making 100K a month or more it's like these are the kind of things that are going to help you get from 100 to 200 to 500 to a million is starting to optimize things like this yeah in the end you need to to do the math little rise prioritization and see if that's let's say a better opportunity than changing something in your own Bing and maybe it depends you know if you have reue C and it's easy to do then yeah if there's an effort that's limited so you can turn that over pretty quickly you actually set up things very nicely for

8:40the next gem with about impulse it's from the 2.5 Gamers show and it was mostly J RR that was presenting it it's create feature SL qu/ report specific pay Wells focusing on what the user could get based on what triggered the pay well when they Clos the the specific payall show popup telling them about all the benefits they get with premium access if they decline again give them the option to access the initial feature for I AP so it's essentially a multi-layer thing where you saw a specific feature you click on it and you get a p that's specific to that content you try to access is unlock it with

9:22premium but if you don't unlock it you reiterate everything else you can get with premium so you have essentially a second pill that says here's everything else you can get with premium and if they close it then you have an i AP and you have purchase to give them access just to that one feature or piece of content and so you piece it like that to hopefully increase conversion and target people you know alongside the demand curve yeah I really like this one and at upth annual and we weren't able to share the recording but at appgrowth annual employee from Google Tammy was sharing how much Google is seeing apps that use

10:02hybrid monetization have been really succeeding and I think this is something folks who are focused on iOS can actually learn from Android and it might be just as impactful if not more on iOS and that's this idea of hybrid monetization is like if somebody is willing to pay for something but they're not quite ready to pay for the whole experience and subscribe and have recurring payments you know some people are just not wanting to subscribe you know they have so many subscriptions even when you have a ton of subscriptions if you find it valuable you're going to pay but then they might be enticed by the single in app

10:37purchases so again probably not something early stage that you want to get too sophisticated with to your point earlier but it can be a powerful unlock to get them to pay experience the value and then want more so yeah I think it's fantastic yeah with exactly that same caveat on on your growth stage it absolutely might not be the thing you want to focus on if you're early and same thing goes with you know anything you're price testing to death and haven't tested anything else you're missing out so you need to go in areas where you don't have diminishing returns or where you have big opportunities all

11:10right what's the next gem the next gem is also from tomap and it's aggressiveness of monetization comes in many different shades and those tricks often work so you can have free tral toggles Wheel of Fortune on or after the pay well backup offers but you need to find the B so you don't give an overall scammy feeling and we end with kind of firming the discussion again is like how many of the tricks are you going to layer into your app and how much is that in line with your app its concept your audience or how much is that going to maybe annoy them and deteriorate their

11:49brain perception yeah I've been thinking a lot about this I actually recently did a podcast with a golfing app and I loved the way Alex the CEO there framed being more conscientious of your users and the example he gave was that he actually has imaginary conversations with users in his head anytime he's writing copy building features going through flows this is a perfect example of like if somebody walks into a golf shop they would expect somebody to walk up and say hey what are you interested in today you looking for clubs you need some balls that's expected right and that's not annoying when somebody asks hey you need

12:28some help but then if you say oh no I'm just browsing and they're like oh we have this and oh we have that and they'll follow you around the store that's awkward right that's the experience we don't like as humans and so I think this is actually a really good analogy to draw go through your own onboarding and have a conversation in your head with the user this page says that how does that make the user feel what do they say if I'm talking to another human being or roleplay with colleagues or something and how does it feel going through all this and I think this point from Thomas and the way you

13:00shared it is really good that if you layer on too many of these it starts to feel like that uh used car salesman and if you're spending a ton of money on ads and you got to hit that row as and the brand isn't important to you you're okay with higher turn or whatever maybe you do layer on a bunch of these together and it just it is what it is it can be very effective but I think you need to do that kind of with full realization of how you make your users feel and then what that means to the long-term performance of the business

13:30and so if you're using all of these tactics and laying on so many you should expect higher turn because you're doing kind of a high pressure sale which then leaves the user not as fond of the brand and maybe a little more on edge so yeah I think this I think is a a fantastic way to kind of wrap up this whole pay wall optimization conversation is that you can't go too far and that that may not be good for the business even if the ab test is successful yeah I mean if it's a s you're running out of Runway and and you have to close shot then then

14:02yes you know the the the choice is easier but also even for the same tactic the implementation matters so much I'll take two examples this you know the example of endle which I believe is an app where you can listen to sounds to focus Etc and the way they did they gamify their offer is you choose I think you try to find in which tra there's an apple and or you choose one of the trees within an apple and like it gives you a discount and like I I don't really see the connection and I was a little confused and I was not expecting that in

14:32in that app but you take Cal's implementation of kind of the daily gift the way they did it you have a meditation bow and you have to go with your finger around the bowl and that kind of triggers you know the spinning the wheel motion but there's no wheel it's it's just a ball and it's very much in line with you know the concept of meditating so it's it's a much softer implementation than let's say a spin the wheel gamified offer awesome well syvan this has been so much fun chatting through these gems anything you wanted to share as we wrapped up no I mean go visit grow jams on suback

15:08subscribe to the newsletter I have awesome content coming up I think it's going to become a must read for anybody in subscription apps so go check it out awesome thanks so much for joining me today have a good one thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat. subclub docomo our private community [Music]