Retention tactics

Prompted by members asking for a family plan. The web quiz asks 'Do you have a gym buddy? Would you like to add them onto your plan?' Both users get 15% off. Those who decline see only a small gym buddy toggle on the pricing page, keeping the paywall simple. Buddies can see each other's workouts and meals and send nudges in the app.

Fitness app, first email after a trial starts: subject line changed from 'The benefits of HIIT working out' to 'Our most popular workouts'. Same idea in-app: a 'Popular' section (like Calm's 'Popular on Calm') to guide users through a large content library.

Most customers start on a free trial, and it is hard to win them back once they turn it off. In the cancel flow, besides showing the value they would lose and asking questions, offer to extend the trial by another 7 days.

Carrot: when the daily question goes live in the morning, send a notification ('Hey, come back, answer your question'). Stick: later in the day, if still unanswered, send a notification that you'll lose your streak and your partner will be sad/missing out. The stakes are tied to the partner's happiness, not the streak itself.

Changed the email subject line from 'The benefits of HIIT workouts' to 'Our most popular workouts'. Host suggests the same popularity framing ('Popular tours') for other apps.

Anyone who dismisses the onboarding paywall still gets 7 days of premium (widgets, live activities, delay alerts). A post-onboarding flow lets them customize notifications and theme, and a Pro button (top right) offers video tutorials. Day 5: push 'you're on day five of your 7-day trial, tap to learn about the features'. Day 7: final push with a discount (on annual). Works because costs are mostly fixed servers; AI apps with per-user costs may prefer ads to cover free users.

'Group Picture' inside Lobby's video hangouts: anyone presses a button, everyone sees a 3-2-1 countdown and their phone vibrates, and the app captures a boomerang of the whole group. The output is watermarked and gets shared to Snapchat and Instagram Stories. The button lights up every 5-10 minutes to hint it's time for a picture, and leaving a chat prompts a goodbye picture. It must be a shared moment everyone knows is coming (posing, silly faces), not a secret screenshot. Two effects: more sharing out, and friends who weren't in the hangout feel left out and join next time.

Instead of asking users at onboarding when they want to be reminded (morning, evening, a set time), schedule the next day's practice reminder for 23.5 hours after the user's first practice of the current day, so it tracks when they actually practiced the day before. Tested against many other scheduling strategies; user-set times lose because people are rarely free at the same time forever.

Daily practice reminder sent every day; stops after 7 days of inactivity. ~250 copy templates are eligible, and a multi-armed bandit learns which to send to each user. Templates carry eligibility criteria (e.g. streak length) instead of feeding many user features into the model. PMs keep writing new templates; each batch is A/B tested: control = bandit with 250 templates, variant = bandit with 260 (10 new). Measured locally (click-through of the new ones) and globally (top-line metrics). Bandit tuning changes can be A/B tested the same way. CTR is also drilled down by UI language; weak languages (e.g. Romanian) go to the localization team.

After an iOS update started truncating notification text after ~4-5 words, tested very short copy (titles under 30 characters, e.g. 'Got 3 minutes? Study Spanish now.'), especially for new or less engaged users on short streaks. For highly engaged users (e.g. 50-day streak), more complex copy referencing mechanics works too ('Hey, you're out of streak freezes. Don't lose your 50-day streak.'). Targeting is done via eligibility criteria on each template.

Measure when a paying user who never uses the app should hear from you. This app sold weekly subscriptions; when users were still paying after 2 months (eight payments) without using the app, it cancelled their subscriptions right away. Lighter version: email users who paid on the web but never downloaded or opened the app ('You're not using the app, please download it' or 'reinstall or cancel').

Match analysis is only used after each match, so they built a solid calorie tracker for wrestlers making weight. Users can upload their season match schedule and get reminders like 'your match is in 4 days and you're 5 lb over; here's how to make weight'.