Microsoft 365 · office apps suite
Sell subscriptions inside the app through the App Store, not just on the website
About 5x higher trial-to-paid than other direct channels, plus lots of organic traffic
Workedpayments-checkoutaso
What they did
Microsoft 365 consumer plans (personal, family, Copilot Pro) are sold via App Store/Play in-app purchase alongside ~10 other consumer channels and a large direct web business. Users already have a card attached and trust Apple/Google/Amazon to manage subscriptions, and many use the phone as their primary device. The team treated the store fee as the normal cost of any acquisition channel and invested in the mobile apps.
What happened
Trial-to-paid is almost 5x higher on mobile than on other direct channels; App Store is one of the highest-converting channels, and its organic traffic 'blew our mind'.
- Stage
- scale
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Operating Like a Start-up inside the World’s Biggest Company — Ramit Arora, Microsoft“And we see almost a 5x higher trial-to-paid conversion rate on mobile than on other direct channels sometimes because of very obvious reasons like this. Credit card is already attached, and there is a frictionless experience, people trust providers like Apple, Google, Amazon to essentially manage their subscription.”
“And App Store just gave us so much organic traffic that, sure, we pay some percentage to the app stores, but anywhere you acquire, you have to pay some percentage.”
Related topics
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More from Microsoft 365
All 16 Microsoft 365 tactics- Put 'Try free for one month' on the buy button, not 'Buy now'Worked in tests; no lift numbers shared
- Show paywall benefits as cards with GIFs instead of lines of textConverted better in tests; no numbers shared
- Show the yearly price as a monthly amount, like $8/month for $99/yearVery successful in an A/B test; no numbers shared
- Put the pricier Family plan first as the default, above the Personal planBoth plans sold more; the cheaper plan sold a lot more
- Pick App Store keywords for the jobs people do, like resumes or invoices
- Swap out keywords you've ranked top 3 on for a year; add new ones monthly
More from this episode
- Microsoft 365: Rank for both your brand name and the tasks people will pay forAims to hold a top-3 spot in most categories; no results given
- Microsoft 365: Pack many once-a-month tools into one subscription so people keep payingGuest says suite-level retention holds up; bundle is 50-60% cheaper than separate apps
- Microsoft 365: Support every new Apple feature on launch day, like Dark Mode and Vision ProGuest credits it for keeping a leadership position; no numbers
- Microsoft 365: Use AI to let people do desktop-only work, like whole documents, on a phone
- Microsoft 365: Rank every idea by how many users it affects; fix failed purchases firstFound 5-6% of purchases failing; simplest fixes often turn out biggest
- Microsoft 365: Buy attribution and messaging tools before the mobile apps had product fitDidn't work: privacy problems and big bills for tools barely used; redone years later
- Microsoft 365: Use every App Store discount tool: promo offers, promo codes, contingent pricing