Duolingo · B2C · language learning app
Offer the same user a free trial three or four times over time
Effective in aggregate across attempts, per guest; no numbers
What they did
What happened
This shipped together with other changes, so the result can't be credited to this alone.
In their words
How Clarity and Personalization Help Drive Duolingo’s Growth – Anmol Tiwari, Duolingo
David BarnardYou were talking about multiple trials. Tell me more about how that works. And especially in light of tactically, Apple on any one SKU will only allow the intro-free offer to be eligible one time. So then you probably have some way of resetting that or sending them a different SKU or something like that. So it's not been typical, and Apple doesn't really make it easy either. Why offer multiple trials to users?
Anmol TiwariWhat we've realized is, I mean, as with anything, it's ultimately a question of like, what's going to be the easiest for a user to both basically feel confident in trying something out. But also we've also quickly realized that users are not always in the same lifecycle stage. And so there's advantages in having multiple trials for us. The first is, it's effective for us because we can try to understand, "Well, okay, maybe in the first time you didn't fully get to understand the benefits or maybe you tried it and you weren't sure."
David BarnardOr you tried it and you were super busy that one week and didn't actually get to experience it.
Anmol TiwariExactly. And maybe a simple framing of all of this is that imagine if I asked you from a business standpoint, or even from a user standpoint, you might benefit from having trying a product over multiple periods, but spread across a little bit. And from a business standpoint, it's better because now you as a user have to decide four times, three or four times, whether you want to make this purchase or not. And of course, aggregated across those, we'd see that it's an effective lever.
Anmol TiwariThe second point that I want to make is what we've seen is that of course, not everyone is as comfortable to start a trial. Or for whatever reason, there's a lot of hesitation despite all the things that we try and do to try and increase clarity of when you're going to get a reminder, et cetera. So we have this concept of a free taste where we basically can offer you a trial-like experience, which is three days, but with no strings attached. You …
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More from this episode
- Let trial users pick which day they get the reminder before being chargedTested; added friction but built trust and delayed cancel decisions. No numbers given
- Show what happens on each trial day and exactly how refunds workGuest says clarity beats persuasion for trial starts; no numbers
- When users run out of hearts, offer a free trial so they keep their lesson progressUsers much more likely to start a trial; no numbers
- Ask new users in onboarding if they want to learn with or without adsSignificantly higher uptake; one of the biggest wins of the year
- Cut the free trial from 14 days to 7More conversions overall and experiment results twice as fast
- Give 3 free days of the paid tier, no card needed, even to current subscribersEffective for free-to-paid and for upgrading subscribers to the top tier, per guest
- Give users one free AI video call from the top tierEffective lever for getting people to try the feature, per guest
- Give the free 3 days as a reward right after a finished lessonFelt more rewarding than on the learning path; no numbers
- When free days end, say 'Your benefits have ended' and show how to rejoin
- Use each user's signals to pick between your own upgrade ads and paid adsGood wins, per guest; no numbers
- Let a bandit algorithm pick which upgrade ad each user sees after a lessonSome wins so far, still improving; no numbers
Tags: free-trial, multiple-trials, lifecycle