GTM Sauce

Duolingo · B2C · language learning app

Change the buy button to say 'Try for $0.00'

Beat 'Try for free' on both trial starts and trial-to-paid

Workedpaywallexperimentation

What they did

Iterated purchase button copy in A/B tests: 'Subscribe' (baseline) -> 'Start my free trial' (big uplift) -> 'Try for free' (better) -> 'Try for $0.00' (best; believed live). Part of ~400 concurrent A/B tests, many on the purchase flow.

What happened

'Try for 0.00' meaningfully lifted both trial-start conversion and trial-to-paid conversion over 'Try for free'.

In their words

Why Your Free Users Are Your Real Growth Engine – Cem Kansu, Duolingo CPO

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Cem KansuAnd of course, for the record, we're talk a lot about monetization. That's not the only place in the app where we're doing this. Our onboarding flow is the same. Our session end is the same. Our lessons are the same.

Cem KansuSo we take maximal care into improving all these flows, but monetization is no exception. But that button copy, we've experimented a lot. And that is one learning that I honestly didn't have or didn't really expect. What you say in the purchase button makes a massive difference on your revenue curves.

Cem KansuWe have tested many things. There's a couple magic strings that were, you look at the graph and you're like, "There must be a measurement mistake. Why are the numbers so green?" The two specifically were, we went from, I think, start my free trial.

Cem KansuSo I think we said something like, "Subscribe." That's your baseline. And then we tried many things, but one of the big uplifts was, 'Start my free trial." That was very good. And then we tried, what did we say? "Try for free," that was better. And then we tried, "Try for 0.00."

Cem KansuWeirdly, that is the string that, I think, hacks your brain to really grock that button is entirely free. 0.0, two zero decimals. Now I think that's what's live in the app, if I'm not mistaken. And that performed really well.

David BarnardAnd just changing try for free to try for dollar sign 0.00, you saw a meaningful uplifting conversion?

Cem KansuCorrect. Yes.

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Tags: cta-copy, button-copy, free-trial, ab-test