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Duolingo · B2C · language learning app

When users run out of hearts, offer a free trial so they keep their lesson progress

Users much more likely to start a trial; no numbers

Workedpaywallupsell-expansion

What they did

When a learner runs out of hearts/energy mid-lesson, position the choice as: if you don't continue you lose your progress; pay gems or start the free trial now to keep your progress and finish the lesson. Still shows a sense of progress so it isn't punitive.

What happened

Users 'much more likely' to start a trial with this framing.

In their words

How Clarity and Personalization Help Drive Duolingo’s Growth – Anmol Tiwari, Duolingo

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David BarnardAny other lessons around clarity, in copy? I know Duolingo has done a lot with multi-step paywalls. Seems like another way to introduce clarity. Any other lessons there?

Anmol TiwariOne of the things that I think users, of course, also care about is not losing their progress. And so what we've seen is that users are just much more likely to start a trial when the decision or when we position it as like, "Well, if you've run out of hearts or energy, if you don't continue, you're going to basically lose your progress." And I think we've done it in a way that's like balances, kind of showing still some sense of progress, but trying to basically also indicate that, "Well, if you pay gems or if you start this free trial now, you'll be able to maintain your progress and finish this lesson."

Anmol TiwariI think the other kind of big lesson that we have seen is that there isn't no one size fits all. A really great example of that is new users versus current users. We know that when a user is brand new to Duolingo, they're actually way more likely to convert. And what we've actually seen is that instead of trying to just take our standard upsells that try and promote Super Duolingo and just put them in the onboarding flow, we found that it's much …

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Tags: loss-aversion, contextual-paywall, copy