Practitioner pattern · Vahe Baghdasaryan (Sells paywall optimization services (Tangent); all paywalls shown are built on Superwall)
Call the trial plan 'Try it free' instead of 'Annual', showing the price below
Up to ~10% more abandoned purchases, but a net gain if trial-to-paid is above 30%
What they did
What happened
In their words
Vahe Baghdasaryan - Our No-Code Apps Made $50M Using THIS Paywall
Joseph Choiwhich actually makes a big difference, especially if you're doing paid acquisition. Like that $4 gives you an a buffer to spend $4 more on every ad. I think you had another paywall that you wanted to show that's not quite in the meta yet, that's like a little bit interesting. Can we look at that one?
Vahe BaghdasaryanI think we discussed this in a Claim paywall case, when you present your payment option not as an annual plan or monthly plan, but if it has a free trial, just call it free. And then here, you mention the price. Just again, the same way, the idea here is to make sure user knows this is free, and it's good to explain users and frame it as much as possible around the idea of it being free, to make it feel like very effortless to take the the free trial.
Joseph ChoiOn almost all the other paywalls that you showed, they were they showed the weekly or the monthly or the annual price, and it said free trial, but it says the price on it. For this one, you don't even show the price on the product card. So that that's like the main difference, you would say, for this one?
Joseph ChoiDo you see any drawbacks to this? Like do you get more transaction abandons, like once people hit that, you know, "Redeem 3 days for $0," the Apple native card comes up, and then it says, you know, "Free trial for 3 days, then $29.99 a year," are people like, "Oh, shoot, I didn't realize that it was going to be an actual subscription after," and then you're getting higher transaction abandon?
Vahe BaghdasaryanYou might get some like a 10% more transaction abandonment, but again, it's a chance to convert more users on transaction abandonment, because uh transaction abandonment paywalls usually also have a good kind of conversion rate. So the only drawback is like, if you have a low trial-to-paid conversion rate product, you might see an increase of refunds, or overall drop in your install to paid conversion rate. So in anyways, you got to test it. But if you have a strong trial-to-paid conversion rate, let's say above like a 30%, I don't think it is going to harm you very significantly. You'll see kind of good uh improvement by kind of renaming your payment cards like this or using this strategy.
Joseph ChoiSo all all of these that you're mentioning, like A/B tests and experiments, are all of these paywalls in Superwall?
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from this episode
- Say 'free' 5-7 times across a 3-screen paywall before showing the price34% trial start rate; multi-step paywalls lift conversion 20-40% vs one screen
- Drop the free trial once trial starts and trial-to-paid are both strongMore revenue without the trial, guest says; no numbers given
- Show a spin wheel that lands on 80% off instead of just showing the discountDouble-digit conversion lift vs a plain discount screen in an A/B test
- Let users skip the free trial for a lower price: $6.99 vs $9.99 a week
- Let users turn the free trial off, at the same price, for high-intent appsSome users buy right away, guest says; no numbers
- Show no prices on the 3-page paywall until users tap 'Start my journey today'The biggest win on this paywall, guest says; no numbers
- When a purchase is cancelled, offer a discount on the annual plan onlyWeekly or monthly discounts failed in dozens of tests
- On the abandoned-purchase offer, give 80% off with a trial or 90% off without~10% of buyers skip the trial and pay right away
- Fix paywalls for five months while installs stay flat, with no ad spendInstall-to-paid rose from 1.1% to ~4% in five months
- Add paywalls at app open, after scans, and on cancel before testing designsGuest's first step for every new client; no numbers
- Borrow discount and urgency tricks from Temu and Shein for paywall testsSource of the spin wheel and 'limited spots' ideas; guest says it works
Tags: free-trial, plan-naming, copy