How to Use Segmentation to Maximize LTV — Greg Stewart, Ladder

Defined granular personas, each served by a coach-led 'team' with its own workout style (e.g. Pilates-influenced at-home dumbbell training for women new to strength vs advanced gym-goers with full equipment). Each persona gets its own creative on social platforms. A pre-download quiz asks workouts per week, modalities, equipment and where they train, giving a real-time view of who is entering the funnel.

7-day free trial with no payment details collected at start, so the product (getting users through one or two workouts) does the selling. Chosen at launch on a hunch that it is a better consumer experience and to stand out in a crowded COVID-era fitness market.

Workout completions are the input metric instead of LTV; target is three workouts per member per week, with most iteration on the first week: what users see first, getting them through the first workout on the right program fast, then the second, and pacing the introduction of chats/social features so newcomers are not overwhelmed. Roughly 90% of iteration time goes to activation vs 10% to deals.

Home screen shows avatars of people currently working out with a progress ring; double-tap to send an emoji 'cheers'. After finding that cheers received correlated with workout completions and long-term retention, Ladder works on incentivizing outbound cheers so recipients, especially early in their trial, get a 'basket of cheers'.

First round: price testing and iteration to find the annual 'clearing price' for people willing to commit upfront. Then paywall experiments anchoring to annual and adding incentives/extra features to the annual membership. Near trial end, users who completed a workout are pitched annual as the cheaper monthly equivalent with added features and a year of accountability.

Users who completed zero workouts in trial are not shown annual (they lack context for a premium price) and are pointed to monthly. Users who passed the first/second workout see annual right before and right after trial expiry. If they don't convert, they move to monthly intro offers: a first-month discount that steps up to full price in month two. The happy path (converting within two weeks of trial end) is not segmented.

Leads who didn't convert after trial (often zero workouts) get a $5 first-month offer that renews at $29.99/month. It is a small share of conversions but gives a user spike in month one and ARR growth in month two from those who stay.

Workouts are programmed in six-week 'strength series'. Before each new series, marketing, coaches and in-app messaging tell the story of the next series and its themes; the lead database gets an urgency message ('tomorrow is day one') with discounts/coupons to lower the barrier to entry. Many leads convert months after trial as fitness needs change seasonally.