Subscriptions are projected to become a mind blowing $1.5 trillion market by 2025. From mobile apps to John Deere tractors, the future looks like it will be subscription-based. Subscription marketing is a frontier opportunity for marketers wanting to succeed with subscription products or services.

In this article, we will explore the five critical strategies that can equip you to become a world-class subscription marketer:

1. Enhancing your CRM for subscriptions
2. Adapting marketing automation to the subscription lifecycle
3. Paywalls as your best low-hanging optimization opportunity
4. Viral loops to help subscriber acquisition and subscribe retention
5. Churn is a lagging indicator so you also need a leading indicator

Let’s dig into each of this.

Enhancing your CRM for Subscription Marketing

The relationship you have with your customers (and potential customers) requires special consideration in the subscription era. For subscription products, the customer journey needs to be modeled around a customer’s interaction with and through the subscription lifecycle over time.

Actionable Subscriber Segments

At a high level, a subscription-based offering has four high level customer segments:

• Never Subscribed: Prospects for trialing your subscription for the first time
• Currently Trialing: Customers who may convert into paying subscribers
• Active Paying Subscriber: Customers you need to work hard to retain
• Former Subscribers: Former paying customers you can win back

Within each of these segments there are also sub-segments your subscription marketing efforts need to take into account. For instance, within Active Paid Subscribers there sub-segments. Each need to be marketed to very differently. Here are some examples:

• Auto-renewing: Subscription is active, customer currently will renew at the end of the current billing period
• Not auto-renewing: Subscription is active, but customer is not renewing at end of the current bill period
• In grace period: Subscription is only still active due to a billing grace period. If the customer doesn’t current a billing issue they may involuntarily churn
• Cancelled: Subscription is active, but customer has cancelled effective at the end of the current billing period

It’s also important to recognize that subscription segments are fluid. Customers can and will come and go from segments and sub-segments as their relationship with a subscription changes.

Adding Subscriber Context

Your CRM system needs to be enriched with subscription context so you know a customer’s status within the subscriber journey at the current moment in time. You also need to know what their historical subscription journey is.

For instance, a customer may have been an Active Paid Subscriber for a dozen billing periods but is not currently paying. This customer is likely a high-potential win back opportunity versus a customer who was churned out quickly after one billing period.

To summarize, your CRM needs to be enriched for subscriptions in three key ways:

1. Current subscription lifecycle status
2. History of interactions through the subscription lifecycle
3. Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Armed with this you can effectively execute a subscription marketing automation strategy built for the subscriber lifecycle.

Subscription Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is a key strategy for lead nurturing in B2B sales since the sales cycles are long. It’s also becoming more common in B2C marketing as brands go beyond simple e-commerce use cases to a more holistic view of customer interactions across channels.

Marketing automation is perfect for subscription-based products and services. Similar to lead scoring, subscription marketers can use the CRM enrichment combined with interaction data to score customers.

Subscription Lifecycle Scoring

For subscriptions, a few different scores are needed. However, which is useful for a given customer depends on their current subscription lifecycle status. For example:

• A likelihood to start a trial score if the customer has never subscribed
• A likelihood to convert to paid score if the subscriber if currently trialing
• A likelihood to renew score if customer is an active paying subscriber

These scores, along with a customer’s current subscriber lifecycle status and CLV can be used for marketing automation campaigns.

For example, if a customer has never subscribed and their likelihood to start a trial score is low, then consider a marketing automation series focused on educating the user about what they are missing out on. This isn’t the moment for the hard sell. These users need to be nudged.

Similarly, if a customer is currently trialing but their likelihood to convert to paid score is low, then make sure they know how to get the most of their trial. They may not be aware of all the features and benefits they currently have access to.

Remember, subscriptions are a long game. Customers may come and go. However, you always have a chance to bring them back into the fold.

Too many brands focus on jamming users through the acquisition funnel and into a trial start before the customer even truly know what the offering is about or whether they even want it.

This is especially true in with mobile apps due to the reliance on paid acquisition, high D1 and D7 churn rates, and the post-IDFA privacy landscape.

Subscription marketing automation can help you leverage your customer data to target the right message to the right user in the right subscriber journey state.

Paywall Optimization is your best low-hanging fruit

So much effort is spent on acquisition campaigns to fill the funnel, at rightly so. However, it can be incredibly difficult to optimize your paid acquisition efforts.

This is partially due to the incredibly complex advertising technology landscape. It’s also because of the changing regulatory environment around end user privacy.

Many subscription products view the paywall as piece of transaction technology wrapped in a utilitarian user interface. A necessary screen that helps customers transact.

The paywall can be so much more. In fact, the paywall should be your most important subscription marketing asset.

The Right Paywall Infrastructure

Believe it or not, the paywall is one of the least optimized elements in many subscription businesses. This is because it’s often owned by the technical teams. Changes are infrequent and require a development cycle. Improved are requested by, but not managed by marketing.

It turns out with the right infrastructure, paywall optimization is one of the best low-hanging fruit opportunities. Conversion rate improvements of 2-5X are achievable through modest changes.

In order to optimize your paywall though, you need the right paywall infrastructure. The right solution should be able to meet the following requirements:

1. Create, deploy, and update paywalls using a paywall CMS
2. Show the right paywall to the right user with paywall segmentation
3. Run paywall A/B tests to improve conversion

In addition to the paywall, there is another experience you can deliver that will help drive down customer acquisition costs (CAC) and improve Retention. Let’s take a look.

Viral loops can help subscriber acquisition and subscribe retention

Customer acquisition is hard. In subscription businesses it can be even harder. While subscriptions can offer customers the benefit of a low monthly price for a product or service, you’re asking customers to have an ongoing relationship with you.

As we’ve discussed, optimizing paid acquisition is one of the most challenges aspects for subscription marketers. Viral loops can be a game changer that help your acquisition and retention efforts.

Here are some examples of some subscription product viral loops:

• A Currently Trialing customer gets time added to their trial by referring a friend who signs up. The trialing customer will likely become stickier, and you just acquired a new prospective customer at a much lower CAC.
• A news app Active Paying Subscriber can share a paywalled article with a friend. The paying subscriber feels good about sharing, and could even earn additional shares or maybe branded merchandise. Meanwhile, a new prospective customer gets a taste of what life is like as a subscriber.
• A Freemium User (e.g. prospective customer) gets a certain quantity or time premium access if they get a friend to sign up. Dropbox famously executed this strategy giving both sides of the referrals 500MB of free storage.

A successful viral loop, like a dual-sided referral program can be an excellent way to create loyalty-building moments with potential customers and subscribers.

Meanwhile, the quality of audience acquired is higher and the CAC economics to support the program are completely within your control.

Churn is a lagging indicator so you also need leading indicators

Subscription marketing requires great measurement. Yes, you need to track core business metrics such as MRR and Churn. These metrics are important.

Just remember, these metrics are lagging. You don’t have MRR growth until more trialing customers convert from free-to-paid and/or you have less churn in your paying subscriber list.

To know where your subscription business is heading, you also need leading indicators. Here are just a few examples of metrics you can measure over time to help you understand where things are headed now:

• The free-to-paid conversion rate. Is it improving?
• How % of users have auto-renew turned off? Is this trending up?
• What is the mix of monthly vs. annual plans? Is the trend changing?
• Are customer satisfaction surveys or app store reviews trending a different direction?

These are just come of the clues you can track to detect that change may be coming to your core subscription business metrics.

Subscription Marketing & Nami

Subscription marketing is a new specialization for marketers looking to drive marketing breakthroughs in the massive and growing subscription economy. With subscriptions on track to be a trillion dollar market in the next few years, it’s a great time to hone new strategies.

If you’re a mobile app publisher, Nami provides the premier solution for marketing your in-app subscriptions. We’re focused on delivering powerful tools to help you improve your app’s subscription marketing. Here’s just a few ways we help:

• Our platform gives you the subscription data layer you need to enrich your CRM and other important marketing systems.
• We also give you the right infrastructure to turn your paywalls into your most essential subscription marketing asset. This is made possible by a no-code paywall CMS and paywall A/B testing suite.
• We’re providing innovative capabilities to help you align your advertising and subscription monetization efforts
• Plus, we’re advancing your growth opportunities through subscription viral loops

If you’re interested in learning more, reach out and we’d be happy to show you a demo.

Google I/O 2022 wrapped up this week and we've got you covered on the key announcements relating to monetization on Google Play:

• Subscription Offers
• Custom Store Listings
• LiveOps Events
• Play Billing 5.0

🔥 Subscription Offers

Perhaps the most exciting announcement is the introduction of Subscription Offers.  App publishers no longer have to create different subscription products for each  promotional or test variation.

Now, each of your subscription products have a base plan which represents your standard pricing.  Then, you can create offers for your subscription products with different eligibility rules:

New customer acquisition

The offer is for users who have either never had this subscription or any of your subscriptions.

Upgrade

The offer is for users who currently have a specific subscription. For instance, this is for cross-grading to a longer bill term or upgrading to a different tier of service.

Developer

The offer type allows you to determine a user's eligibility. Google suggests using this for use cases like a second-chance free trial or a winback offer.

Subscription Offers can also be limited to certain countries or regions and support up to 2 pricing phases.

🏪 Custom Store Listings

Custom store listings have been a useful way to target users with an alternative store list by country or region. This year, there are three major changes to custom store listings:

Deep links

Now users can reach your custom store listing through a deep link. This is a powerful way to tie these variations to other marketing campaigns.

10X more custom store listings

Deep links will make custom store listings much more valuable. So, you can now have up to 50 custom listings.

Store listing experiments

Your store listing A/B tests now offer fine grain control such as setting a confidence level. Play also gives you estimates for when your experiment will complete or flag when your experiment has been running too long.

🎟 LiveOps Events

Similar to the App Store's in-app events, LiveOps now includes an Events feature. Events are surfaced throughout the Play Store giving you more exposure.

Offers

Now, LiveOps events can now have offers attached such as a discount or special Subscription Trials.

Deep Links

LiveOps events can now deep link to shorten the path to the related content in your app, improving conversion.

Reports

Now you can view reports for all your events. Measure conversion rate by different outcomes such as acquisition, open, or update.

While LiveOps is still in beta, Google is expanding access. If you're interested, you can express interest at: g.co/play/LiveOpsbeta

🤖 Play Billing 5.0

Google has released new client and server APIs with the release of Play Billing Library 5.0. This release rolls out some of the features announced last year, Subscription Offers, and some other nice improvements including:

In-App Messaging

Users at risk for involuntary churn due to a declined payment can now receive an in-app message from Play promoting them to correct their payment method.

Prepaid Subscriptions

In markets where pay-as-you-go is standard, Play Billing now supports prepaid subscriptions. Prepaid subscriptions can be extended through a top-up by the user. In Google's early tests, this can result in 2X better subscription recovery rates.

Nami SDK for Android

As always, Nami helps you adopt the latest from Google without worrying about the implementation details. Our current stable Android SDK supports Play Billing 4.0, which will continue to operate until May 2024. We plan to roll out an SDK update with support for Play Billing 5.0 in the second half of this year.

Final Thoughts

Google I/O 2022 brought a lot great new monetization announcements for app publishers. From Subscription Offers, to Custom Store Listings with Deep Links, Play apps have never had such a robust solution for commerce.  

Combining Google’s latest with Nami’s entitlement engine, native paywall manager, and paywall A/B testing, it’s never been easier to grow and optimize your app revenue. If you’re interested in giving Nami a spin for your own app, you can create a free account here.

       

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The primary monetization goal of subscription apps is to convert users into paying subscribers. Of course, not every user who installs will convert. That’s where Rewarded Video comes in.

Rewarded Video for subscription apps is great new opportunity to monetize non-subscribers, while nudging them one step closer to subscribing.

In this article, we’re going to discuss:

• What is Rewarded Video?
• How Rewarded ads can be used in subscriptions apps
• How to get started with Rewarded access

What is Rewarded Video

Rewarded Video is a type of mobile ad unit where the user watches a full-screen video advertisement in exchange for a reward. Commonly the ads are promoting other apps and providing the user a simple call-to-action to download that app.

Rewarded Video ad units are non-skippable, so users need to stay engaged for the duration to receive the reward. According to Business of Apps, this ad format often commands higher eCPMs. The format is compelling for publishers and advertisers, but also for users who receive a tangible value exchange.

For example, many games use Rewarded ad units. Users are rewarded extra lives, points, and other virtual goods.

Using Rewarded Video in a Subscription App

Rewarded Video can be a useful compliment to your subscription app, especially if you offer a freemium experience. Here are a few ways you can integrate Rewarded Video into your conversion funnel:

1. Offer time limited premium access to users who decline your onboarding paywall. This is a great opportunity to expose them to your premium experience while they are most interested in your app.
2. Offer time limited premium access to users who encounter & decline a paywall when trying to access premium content. This is a great opportunity to give users who want to see what a premium content or feature is about a taste even if they aren’t ready to pay.
3. Prompt or surface the Rewarded opportunity to (certain) non-subscribers. If a user is using your freemium app a lot, but continues to decline your premium offers maybe it’s time to offer them a different route to (limited) premium access.
4. Send an Email or Push campaign to deep link target users to the Rewarded offer. This use case is a bit aspirational. The Email or Push marketing system would need to know that the Rewarded ad inventory will exist for the user if they engage with the message and deep-link into the app.

Rewarded Access for your Subscription App

Adding Rewarded Video to your subscription app requires some product decisions as well as the right infrastructure.

For product, consider the following:

• Which users should get a Rewarded offer? For example non-subscribers who don’t convert from a subscription paywall.
• When and how should those users receive the offer? For example, do you prompt them or surface the rewarded opportunity contextually in the app? reminder, even if you want to offer a Rewarded Video to a user, there has to be inventory via the ad partner. You experience needs to only offer the Reward if one is truly available from the ad SDK.
• How much premium access (duration) should a reward be worth? For example, is the successful completion of a 15-30 Rewarded Video an hour of access? 3 minutes of access? 1 day of access? Think about how much is enough to give them some exposure but not too much that they will never become a paying subscriber.

For infrastructure, you need two components to deliver this experience:

• An Ad Partner with Rewarded Video ad unit. All the large mobile ad players including AppLovin and ironSource support the Rewarded Video ad unit via their mobile SDKs. Additionally, if you’re using either for mediation, you can improve the ad unit fill rate and eCPM.
• An Entitlement Engine. Premium access is granted based upon a successful subscription in-app purchase. To unlock premium access using another mechanism, such as watching a Rewarded Video, your app needs to abstract access control beyond the IAP product.

Rewarded Access Made Easy with Nami

This sounds like a lot, but fortunately we provide an out-of-the-box solution to make this super easy. Nami provides the Entitlement Engine. Nami also provides integrations with Rewarded Video ad solutions.

Integrations with AppLovin and ironSource offer a Rewarded premium access experience that is easy. It requires minimal setup, limited client-side implementation steps, and no additional backend server-side. You even control how many minutes of premium access a reward is worth from the Nami Control Center.

Final Thoughts

Monetization in the app economy is not easy. Rewarded Video offers app publishers another opportunity to monetize users. For subscription apps in particular, this is a powerful way to nurture freemium users towards your premium experience while also generating some incremental revenue.

To experience Rewarded access in a subscription app, check out Serenity Sounds. To be offered Rewarded access, first try to access a premium sound (anything but the first row). You will be prompted to subscribe via the paywall sheet.

If you dismiss the paywall without subscribing, you may be prompted if a Rewarded Video is available. Alternatively, navigate to Settings (the gear icon) to see if a Rewarded promotional unit shows up. In either case, watch the reward to completion to receive 1 hour of access to the premium sounds.

Do you have a subscription app and are interested in adding a Rewarded experience? If so, we’d be happy to show you how it works and talk about how Nami can help.

We decided it was time to build and ship a brand new app using SwiftUI to experience first hand the latest from Apple.

The app, now available on the App Store, is called Serenity Now.

It’s a simple audio player with a SwiftUI interface and AVFoundation under the hood. The app is filled with a collection of sounds for focus, relaxation, and better sleep.

App Monetization Goals

We’re in the monetization business, so we set out to implement our own Nami SDK to offer IAPs and subscriptions.

Here are the three products we want to offer:

• Lifetime Access - $49.99 for life (only available as a launch exclusive)
• Monthly Subscription - 3 day free trial, then $3.99 / month
• Yearly Subscription - 1 month free trial, then $39.99 / year

Users who buy one of these products gets access to our Serenity Now Premium features. Those features include:

• Premium-only sound collections - Nature, Uplifting, Water & Sleep
• Premium controls - Repeat & AirPlay
• Ad-free experience

We want users to encounter our paywall during the app experience in three different places:

• First Launch - The first time the user launch the app
• Gated Content - Upon tapping a content tile that requires premium access
• Marketing Tile - Tapping the premium access marketing tile in Settings

Now that our goals are clear, let’s see what it takes to accomplish.

The SwiftUI Lifecycle & SDK Initialization

SwiftUI apps don’t use the the AppDelegate we have all come to know from years of building iOS apps. Instead, the entry point for SwiftUI apps is a struct conforming to the App protocol.

That protocol has one requirement, which is the implementation of a property called body. Digging into the specifics of body is outside the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that is where you’ll kick off your app’s user interface.

For our purposes, we need a place to configure the Nami SDK. It turns out, we can provide a custom init() method on our App struct for this purpose.

Here we setup our NamiConfiguration object with our app’s unique appPlatformID (found in the Nami Control Center > Integrations > [your Apple App Store integration]

Setting up an ObservableObject to Track Purchase State

We will need to monitor changes to the the entitlements a user has access to. A change may occur if they buy one of our IAP products, or if they have a subscription that expires.

In Serenity Now, if a user buys any one of the three IAP products, we grant them access to an entitlement called premium_access.

In SwiftUI, we can monitor for user entitlement changes by setting up an ObservableObject. Specifically, we need to register with the Nami SDK’s registerEntitlementsChangedHandler callback to update our ObservableObject’s premium var.

Since premium has a @Published property wrapper, any SwiftUI view’s body will be re-invoked any time the value changes.

This is exactly what we want. If a user buys one of our products, we want any of the SwiftUI views that rely on the value of premium, to be updated. Concretely, this means any view that gates access based upon the premium_access entitlement will update if the value changes.

Paywall Use Case: Initial App Launch

Next, we want to show our paywall the first time the user launches the app.

In our main SwiftUI view, SerenityNowHome, we run some code in .onAppear that checks UserDefaults for the value of a key didLaunchBefore. If the value is false, it’s the first launch of our app so we tell the Nami SDK to show a paywall if NamiDataSource’s premium var is False.

Paywall Use Case: Gating Premium Content

Next, we want to gate access to certain premium content in our app.

If the user does not have access to the premium content (e.g. NamiDataSource’s premium var is False), we want to present the paywall. Otherwise, we want to show the SwiftUI with the relevant content.

Paywall Use Case: Premium Marketing Tile

Finally, we want to give users a way to access our paywall from a marketing tile in the Settings section of our app.

In our Settings view, if the user does not have premium access (via our NamiDataSource), we show our NamiUpsellBannerView. If the user taps on it, we show our paywall.

If the user does have premium access, we instead show a link to Manage subscription which takes the user to the system Settings.

Final Thoughts

There is much more we want to do with our SwiftUI app and some advanced use cases we want to discuss in future blog posts. For now, we hope this article shows how is it is to get up and running with some very common use cases for selling IAPs and subscriptions.

You may be wondering about the paywall view itself. The paywall was created via Nami’s no-code paywall designer. The Nami SDK provides a native Swift that is configurable from the Nami Control Center so you can make changes instantly.

The SDK provided paywall integrates seamlessly with our SwiftUI app from both a user interface and usability perspective. If you’re interested in giving Nami a spin for your own SwiftUI app, you can create a free account here.

Paywall AB testing is a necessary strategy for any app publisher wanting to optimize revenue. In this article we’ll provide an introduction to paywall testing by covering the following topics:

• The paywall as an engine for growth & retention
• Why you should be testing your paywall
• How to conduct a paywall AB test

The Paywall as an Engine for Growth & Retention

The paywall screen is how apps make money through IAPs and subscriptions. In fact, most app publishers spend very little time updating their paywall let alone optimizing it.

The paywall can be one of the essential elements contributing to your success in growth and retention this year. Let’s take look:

The Paywall and Growth

Focusing on app growth usually means a combination of efforts including:

• Converting existing audience to your mobile app via tactics such as smart app banners and email marketing
• Improving discoverability via keyword tuning and other App Store Optimization (ASO) techniques
• Paid acquisition through channels such as Apple Search Ads or other cost-per-install placements

It’s important that new users see your paywall during their first session. In fact, 70-80% of subscription starts occur on the day of install (D0) according to data from AppsFlyer and Redbox Mobile.

Considering this, it’s important to think of your paywall as not one monolithic object that all users flow through regardless of origin. That would be like having a single landing page on your web site regardless of traffic source.

Conceptually, you want different paywall instances aligned to each acquisition source:

• Organic Discovery -> App Install -> Paywall A
• Email Campaign -> App Install -> Paywall B
• Apple Search Ad -> App Install -> Paywall C

To optimize in-app revenue, your paywall needs to be operated like a growth marketing asset, not a static coded screen.

The Paywall and Retention

Most app publishers use push notifications for app engagement. Push can be a helpful way to improve D7 retention, but you should also consider what happens once the user is in the app.

It may not be obvious, but the paywall isn’t just important for growth. It’s important for retention as well especially for subscription apps. Consider that most app subscriptions are auto-renewable. The desired state for app publishers is for a user to be a paying subscriber on an annual plan with auto-renew turned on.

However, subscription customers can end up in other states as well. The paywall can help you message users in context of those other states to nudge them to that desired place.

Here are a few example of retention paywall instances tied to user context:

• Monthly Plan Subscriber -> Upgrade Candidate -> Annual Offer Paywall
• Active sub w/ Auto-Renew off -> Voluntary Churn Risk -> Stay Offer Paywall
• User is a Former Sub -> Winback Opportunity -> Winback Offer Paywall

The key to effective retention paywalls is to power your experience with individual-level subscriber data. This means your external marketing channels, the in-app experience, and everything in-between should all have the same context about a user’s subscription journey. This way, the experience including marketing assets will be personalized and relevant.

Why you should conduct paywall AB testing

Yes, you should be conducting paywall AB testing. The exception to the rule is if your app doesn’t have much usage. If this is you, focus on top-of-the-funnel activities such as ASO keyword tuning.

If you do have steady app traffic, you almost certainly will be able to improve in-app revenue via one or more of the following:

• Generating more one time purchases
• Improving subscription trial starts
• Improving free-to-paid conversion
• Reducing subscription churn
• Boosting customer LTV (lifetime value)

Testing a Single Paywall

If your app has only one paywall, you can benefit from paywall AB testing. Most apps convert at low enough rates that much upside exists. Here are a few guidelines:

Sadly, it’s not uncommon to see freemium app with free-to-paid conversion rates of less than 1%. With testing, you can boost conversion to 5-15% or more.

For apps with a hard paywall, conversion rates depend on whether you offer a free trial or not. It’s not uncommon to see trial conversions of 5% or more. With testing, you can boost free trial conversion rates to 30-50% or more.

No matter what your conversion rate is, your paywall can be improved. The only question is by how much.

Just realize that the one-size-fits-all paywall won’t be perfectly aligned with each and every user. For fully optimized revenue, you’ll need to move to multiple, segmented paywalls.

Testing with Multiple, Segmented Paywalls

As we’ve explained, to optimize in-app revenue it’s important to have different paywalls focused on different acquisition channels and user context. To say this another way, you should have a paywall segmentation strategy.

With paywall segmentation, you and an opportunity to conduct paywall AB testing that is focused on improving the specific metric that a certain paywall is responsible for.

For instance, you could run a test of the paywall presented to users acquired via Apple Search Ads to tightly focus on improvement to that channel. For instance, you could focus on improving your ROAS (Return on Advertiser Spend - defined as the total revenue generated divided by total ad spend).

Similarly, you can test variants of your Annual Offer to see which does a better job of converting existing monthly subs to your annual plan.

To prioritize your testing strategy, focus on the key metrics you’re trying to improve first. Also look for the opportunities that have a lot of room for improvement so you can get some quick wins.

How to Conduct Paywall AB Testing

If you’re convinced your app is a good candidate for paywall AB testing, let’s take a look at how you actually run a test. We’ll cover the three key elements to help you get started with your first test:

• Choosing an AB testing tool
• Selecting variants & allocating traffic
• Determining the winning paywall

Choosing an AB Testing Tool

There are different tools and techniques for running an AB test. For the purpose of this article, which pertains to mobile app paywall AB testing, you have the following options:

1. Use a tool designed for mobile paywall testing (e.g. Nami)
2. Use a mobile backend to feed different data to your app (e.g. Firebase)
3. Adapt a general purpose testing tool (e.g. Optimizely)

There are pros and cons to each of these approaches. If you’re already using a general purpose tool, something like Optimizely might make sense. The downside, is it’s not particularly mobile-first and certainly wasn’t built to focus on testing paywalls.

A solution like Firebase is closer to mobile-first, but is not as friendly for the marketing folks on your team that are used to great campaign management systems.

In our humble opinion, Nami is the easiest way to ship a mobile paywall and yes, conduct paywall AB tests. In fact, no code is needed to design the paywall or run the test. Our powerful campaign engine helps you with paywall segmentation so can focus the right test on the right outcome.

Determining which paywall elements to test

Now that you’ve chosen a tool, it’s time to figure out what you want to test. As we’ve discussed you may have multiple paywalls each playing a different role in your growth and retention strategy.

This means the elements you will want to test really depends on the paywall and it’s purpose. Here are just a few things you might test based upon common mobile app paywall designs:

• Free trial duration on subscription plans
• Impact of including a lifetime in-app purchase
• Marketing copy for describing app’s benefits
• Call-to-action button text
• Which plans and how many to choose from
• Paywall layout and design asthetics

Remember, the element you want to change needs to align with the metric you want to influence. For example, if you want to drive more users into choosing the annual plan the possible elements to test may narrow to:

• Providing a more attract free trial
• Including a featured product badge to call out the annual plan
• Paywall layout and design asthetics, as relating to plans

Your test can include multiple changes to the paywall or a single change. There are pros and cons to each. Multiple changes may help you make progress faster while a single change may help you gain better intuition from each test.

Selecting Variants & Allocating Traffic

Now that you’ve chosen what you want to test, it’s time to create your variant. If you're using a no code tool like Nami, it’s easy to create the variant for paywall ab testing.

As a best practice, variant A should be the paywall that is already active in your app so you have a baseline to start with. Variant B contains the changes you want to test.

Next, you need to decide how to allocate traffic to to your variants. It could be as simple as a 50%/50% split or 80%/20% split. The specific granularity of traffic allocation will depend on the tool you’re using. Nami allows any whole number so long as the total equals 100%.

Some considerations when deciding how to allocate traffic:

• If you have a data baseline with variant A, you may want to push more traffic to variant B to get an answer to your test more quickly.
• If you are at scale you may be able to determine a winner with less traffic going to variant B. That’s great, since if it performs poorly you’ll be glad you didn’t send more traffic than necessary to find that out.

Determining the Winner

Your test is running and results are coming in. You’re probably eager to find out the winner. However, just because Paywall B is converting better, doesn’t mean it’s the winner. It might be, but to be sure you need to reach statistical significance.

A statistical significant result is one that has not occurred by random chance. This is why it’s important not to look at those early results which may appear like a conclusion when in fact there’s not yet enough yet to reach such a conclusion.

You might be wondering how long the test will take to reach statistical significance. The answer is somewhat frustrating: it depends. It depends how much traffic each variant is receiving as well as how many conversions you’ve received against that traffic.

You’re looking to exceed a 90% or higher confidence level before taking comfort that the results of the test are known. If you’re interested in the statistics, check out this guide.

Amongst all this statistics talk, there is good news! Most AB testing tools will do the math for you and crown a winner once statistical significance is reached with high confidence.

A Quick Note on Multi-Variate Testing (MVT)

In this article we’ve talked all about paywall AB testing. The AB naturally means we’re testing one thing against another. This limits the test to just two paywalls.

Marketers who have performed testing in other contexts will likely be familiar with multi-variant testing (MVT). While it may sound appealing to test more things at once (in this case, more paywall variations), it’s not for everyone.

MVT requires much more traffic to deliver a statistically significant result. Given how anemic most mobile app conversion rates are, it’s our recommendation that you stick to AB testing even with a lot of traffic.

There’s so much opportunity to improve without the complexity of MVT. Once you’re chasing single percentage points of optimization, you can consider introducing MVT into your testing arsenal.

Final Thoughts

Paywall AB testing is an essential for any app publisher wanting to optimize in-app revenue. In fact, paywall AB testing can boost conversion rates by 2-3X or more through straightforward changes.

At Nami, we’re focused on helping app publishers thrive in the app economy. We’re doing this by turning the paywall into a full-fledged marketing asset. Paywall AB testing is just one of the capabilities available as part of our solution. If you’re interested in getting a demo or learning more, we’re happy to help.

An Apple Search Ad is the App Store’s native ad format that Apple makes available to app publishers. Search Ad advertising units show up as part of the App Store search experience. Search Ads are a great opportunity for users to discover your app while they are already in the mindset of seeking out a new app.

Types of Apple Search Ads Solutions

Apple Search Ads come in two flavors: Apple Search Ads Basic and Apple Search Ads Advanced.

As the names suggest, Basic is designed for app publishers who want something more set and forget. Advanced accounts offer much more granular control so they are better suited for large publishers, agencies, or developers who want maximum control.

You can use either solution using the relevant sign-in link.

Search Ads Basic

For Apple Search Ads Basic, Apple uses Search Match which automatically match your ad to search terms. This dramatically simplifies setup time.

There are four steps to get started with Basic search ads:

1. Pick the app you want to promote
2. Select which countries and regions you want to promote in
3. Set a monthly budget (up to $10,000 per app)
4. Specify the maximum price you’re willing to pay for an install (max CPI)

Basic accounts don’t have any complex campaign management. There are no keywords to define, no audience targeting to manage. It’s a simple as setting a budget and max CPI.

To get started with Search Ads Basic sign-in here.

Search Ads Advanced

For Apple Search Ads Advanced, you are responsible for campaign management. In fact, Apple recommends Advanced accounts start with four campaigns reflecting different strategies:

1. Brand campaign - Search terms for your app or company
2. Category campaign - Search terms related to your app’s category
3. Competitor campaign - Exact keyword match of app’s like yours
4. Discovery campaign - Broad keyword match to attract a wider audience

The steps to create an Apple Search Ad Advanced campaign are more involved:

1. Pick the app you want to promote
2. Choose the ad unit type (Search results or Search tab)
3. Set a campaign budget (total, time period, daily cap)
4. Create an ad group
5. Whether to use Search Match (Search results ad type only)
6. Select keywords
7. Refine your audience (by device, customer type, demographics, location)
8. Set the campaign start and end date
9. Specify the times and days to run the ads
10. Choose an ad variation (Search results ad type only)

Within each of these steps is a whole lot of additional steps and configurability that we will cover in an article all about Apple Search Ads Advanced usage. Until then, let’s look at the possible ad units.

To access Search Ads Advanced sign-in here.

Types of Search Ad Units

There are two types of Apple Search Ads: Search tab and Search results.

Ad Unit: Search Tab

The Search tab ad unit, if available, shows up as the top item under the Suggested apps list. This is an extremely prominent placement since millions of users visit the App Store’s Search tab every day.

A user may see this Apple Search Ad format before they type a search term into the search bar.

Ad pricing for the Search tab unit is based upon a CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) model where you specify the maximum amount you’re willing to pay. The actual cost is the result of a second price auction. This means you pay based upon what the next closest bidder is willing to pay.

Since this is such a prominent placement, it is attractive to apps with wide appeal. App publishers must be willing to spend real dollars to see impressions.

Search tab units are created using assets also provided to the App Store for your product page. The ad unit looks just like the other Suggested apps in the list, except the row has a light blue background with a small ad badge.

Since Search tab ads show up before the user has typed in the search bar, no keywords are needed to setup this ad type. In addition, you cannot create an Apple Search ad variation since this ad type is automatically build by the App Store using your app icon, app name, and app subtitle.

Search tab ads are only available to Apple Search Ads Advanced accounts.

Ad Unit: Search Results

The Search results ad unit is based upon what a user actually searches for. For example, if a user searches for recipes, the first app in the list is a Search result ad. Like the Search tab unit, the item looks just like a normal search result except for the light blue background and ad badge.

After a user searches for a term, the App Store may surface related search terms. If a user taps on the refined keyword, a different Search Result ad may appear.

A Results ad is priced based upon a CPI (cost per install) model. For Apple Search Ads Basic accounts, Apple will automatically figure out which users to put your ad in front of based upon your app metadata. For Apple Search Ads Advanced accounts, you have more control over which keywords your ad can be shown for.

Final Thoughts

Creating your first Apple Search Ad is just the start. Once you start promoting your app, it’s important to tracking your ad performance so you can tune and improve your ROAS (return on ad spend). That’s where we will pick up in the next post in these series.

Until then, happy app building!