Rise Science · B2C · sleep and energy app
On the web, charge half price for the first month instead of a free trial
Tested better than free trials; ads stop finding people who cancel at once
What they did
What happened
In their words
Why Web Onboarding Should Sell The Problem, Instead Of The Solution – Leon Sasson, Rise Science
David BarnardAnd you're getting high chargebacks and high refunds, which means your payment acceptance rate is lower.
Leon SassonNow, back to your real question of monetization, packaging. I mean, like everything, we experiment a lot. We have found two major learnings. One is, yes, it needs to be different. We tend to skew to shorter-term plans, so monthly, quarterly. But we test everything, because we found the users are in a very different consideration phase. And then two, we tend to not offer free trials on web, which is maybe the biggest difference. And in some cases we do offer, but most of the time, we don't. And instead, we found that offering heavily discounted trial period, so, "Hey, the first month might be half the price." Or whatever measure it might be, ends up being a lot more promising for a bunch of reasons. It helps the algorithm optimize a lot better, so it's not finding people that start trials and then automatically cancel a minute later. So we have found through testing that that works better for us.
Leon SassonI know some people do find that through trials in web works just as well, so I don't think this is a... Everything on pricing, monetization, it sort of depends heavily on your space, and your app, and your brand, so everything needs to be tested. But for us, yes, pricing, packaging is very different than the app directly.
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More from this episode
- Rebuild the app's onboarding as a web funnelDidn't work in two tries, 'not even close'; project parked
- On the web, help visitors see their problem before pitching the appFounder calls it super promising after hundreds of iterations; no numbers
- Test each ad in both web-funnel and app-install campaigns, separatelyAds that flopped for app installs sometimes win on web, and vice versa
- Push monthly and quarterly plans on the web instead of annualFounder says web needs different packaging; no numbers
- Build a separate web funnel for each ad's target personaEarly, interesting wins; not a big breakthrough yet
- Make canceling, refunds and plan changes easy before judging web testsWithout it, trial conversion looks falsely high and chargebacks pile up
Tags: paid-trial, discount, no-free-trial, ad-optimization, web-funnel