When people cancel, offer 7 more free days instead of a discount

David BarnardWell, once people do start that free trial and as a hard paywall, keeping them and having them convert is that next big key, what were the unlocks there for helping people convert and any stats around your trial start and trial conversion rates that you want to share?

Brett BaumanI feel like web and e-commerce have had a really big lead when it comes to this stuff, like the real optimizations and the benefits of being outside of Apple's walls. It's more of like the Wild West of what you can do. We wanted to try some cancellation flows there on our website and there's like this standard asking questions about why they're canceling, things like that. And we were able to retain 25% of people from canceling, which we felt like was pretty big.

Brett BaumanAnd to do that, we tried three things. One of them is your standard discount offers. You get 30% off if you stay or something like that. Another one is pausing. So because we have students as our users, they come May or June, they don't want to keep paying over the summer. And so we thought we could try pausing for three months.

Brett BaumanAnd then the last one was trial extensions. And this is one that I haven't seen that much, but basically if you're on a free trial and you go to cancel, then we basically say, "Do you just need more time?" And offer them seven more days. And that was the most successful one by far, and it really keeps people on that auto-renew. And I think it's so hard to get them back onto auto-renew once they leave, but that was a big win for us. And I think there's a way to actually do this on Apple and Google now too, and so I'm going to be exploring that.

David BarnardApple does now have, it's in limited beta right now and you have to ask for it and get approved and everything like that, but it's a retention offers in App Store settings when they're actually outside of your app trying to cancel. You can now show a screen and offer a discount and things like that.