Lose It! · B2C · calorie tracking app
Show sale offers as in-app messages instead of sending email blasts
10x more money for the same offer
Workedupsell-expansionemailexperimentation
What they did
Instead of an email blast, sent the same offer as a shorter in-app message. Test design: take an entire eligible user segment (whether or not they opened the app), split 50/50 between email and in-app message, and measure revenue over the whole eligible cohort. In-app messages also let marketing iterate on copy and inject sales without waiting on engineering to build contextual promos.
What happened
Same offer in a different format made about 10 times more money; Lose It! became in-app-message first.
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Achieving Mission & Profit with Freemium — Erin Webster-Shaller and Paul Apollo, Lose It!“So in the very earliest days, when we were going to send an email blast, we sent in-app messages instead with basically the same offer, shorter form, the same content.”
“And we would give 50% one treatment and 50% the other. And in this case, we'd send emails or now we were sending in-app messages. And so even though only a small subset of those people were actually seeing the messages, the denominator was the cohort of folks who were eligible for them.”
“And we were seeing that like, "Oh, man, when we do exactly the same thing and change the format, we're making 10 times more money."”
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More from Lose It!
All 24 Lose It! tactics- Retest higher prices you once rejected; double the yearly price if it breaks evenTest broke even for the first time; rollout matched tests and gives room for paid ads
- Build in-app sales timed to each user's journey, with deeper discounts off a higher priceHigher base allows 25-75% discounts to more users; no conversion numbers
- Keep the free version good enough to reach the goal without payingRetention very stable after doubling the price, per guest
- Raise the price only for new users; keep current subscribers on their old priceAvoided an untestable churn risk; no numbers on the effect
- Add ads to the free app, one-off purchases, and affiliate partner deals
More from this episode
- Lose It!: Ask more questions in onboarding, even ones you don't use, to lift trial startsTrial starts up double digits; free-user retention also improved
- Lose It!: Let people set up premium features in onboarding, then show what they'd loseUsers who opt into the calorie-cycling feature convert more; no exact numbers
- Lose It!: Ask new users to set a carb goal during onboardingLost badly in A/B test; many premium setup steps clogged the flow
- Lose It!: Lock all macro-tracking features behind premium as a testEarned little extra money and made users angry
- Lose It!: Keep basic calorie counting free; put macros, keto and fasting in premiumPremium grew to 40+ features; carbs and device syncing drive most upgrades
- Lose It!: Talk about how much people save, not about features, in upgrade messagesDiscount messages beat feature messages in tests; no numbers
- Lose It!: Spend big on paid ads to stop relying on organic users~10% predicted ROAS at scale; money burned and the push was dropped
- Lose It!: Charge about half what rivals charge, since you don't need ads to pay backPrice set by testing on organic users; about half of the main rival's price
- Lose It!: Market the free app through app store search and word of mouth, not ads50M+ users over 15 years, mostly organic
- Lose It!: Email users when they hit weight-loss milestones and ask for their storyStories feed social, email and in-app marketing; impact not measured
- Lose It!: Give users a $10 gift card when a friend they refer upgrades to premiumRoughly broke even but didn't scale; exposed users had lower LTV; killed after a year
- Lose It!: Offer steeper and steeper discounts to free users who haven't paid after 30 daysTurns cohorts that almost never convert into some revenue; no numbers
- Lose It!: Offer a deep premium discount to users on a 30-day logging streakA/B test win; big efficiency gain on a small group
- Lose It!: Show upgrade messages after people finish logging, never in the middleMid-task messages caused drop-off and fewer upgrades; after-task messages did better
- Lose It!: Aim in-app sales at new and returning users, with a warm 'welcome back'These users are half of bookings; first-time sales do really well
- Lose It!: Pin a 24-hour sale countdown to the top of the main screenKept the sale visible after people closed the pop-up; no numbers
- Lose It!: Try network ads inside a free app that earns from subscriptionsNot much money and a pain to manage; not worth it for a small team
- Lose It!: Pay staff bonuses only if both revenue and user weight-loss goals are met