Hi, everyone. I’m David Bernard, your host today. And here to chat with us about holiday promotions and discounts are Alice Myer and Annika Rubinstein from feature. They are both senior consultants on the retention team at future. And I did want to give them both just a second to talk about their role at feature and even what feature is so. Alice, why don’t you take it away and tell us a bit about yourself? Sure hi, everybody. I’m Alex. I’m a senior growth consultant on the retention feature, obviously, and I’ve helped many weaving apps with their CRM and retention strategies. In doing so, I have witnessed some really awesome holiday discounts and for campaigns. I’m really excited to talk to you all about those today. I’ll pass over to Annika. Yeah hi, everyone. Nice to meet you. Basically, my name’s Annika. I’m also working a feature. I’m doing the same job as others. I’m also senior growth consultant. Rather focus on technical stuff but also have worked in the past in many startups with promotions. And additionally, I’m also the product owner for Blair. You can also tell me what Blair is because I actually didn’t even realize this was something featured did. And then I think in the prep for this webinar that came up and I was like, wait, what is this? So what is this? I should be more clear on that one. Yeah so Blair is an in-app message builder studio, basically. So we saw that many people struggle with in that message campaigns finding developer resources basically on their teams. So in this one, what we do is without SDK integration or any coding knowledge, people just create in-app messages, download them, drag and drop them into their tool they’re using. And you just go with that and it works. So is it is it open source or sas? Can other people use it or is it only for feature customers? It’s Sas. So we actually launched a new website yesterday. Oh, cool. And also the new tool. So I’m pretty proud of that. And I’m happy for people to try that out. Awesome well, extra little pitch in. There were two minutes in. Everybody should hopefully have joined by. Now, if you’re just joining us, we were doing quick intros. Oh, I forgot to introduce myself. I have developer advocate at revenue cat. You’ve probably read my bio when you were signing up for the page or know me from the podcast or the sub club community. So revenue we are subscription app platform provide the base layer infrastructure and open source SDK is pretty much everything you need to get your subscription and app monetization going. We’ve got some great dashboards, integrations, all sorts of stuff and we’re a team of 60 people now, maybe more. It’s hard to keep track, just focused on building great tools for subscription apps and helping developers make more money. It’s a really fun place to work. And I actually came to revenue as an indie developer, so I’ve run and built apps for 15 years now since the very beginning of the App Store. And one of the things I actually wanted to talk about today is that holiday discounts and promotions, we’re like my Christmas bonus personally. For years, you know, I actually created this whole thing called app Santa where a bunch of indie developers got together and we would drop our prices all together and get a bunch of press. And for several years. That was my holiday bonus. And then other years, Apple’s done promotions and all sorts of things like that. So I’m actually really excited to talk about this today because it’s something I’ve benefited tremendously from over the years. Just a couple of nodes as we’re getting going. If you have any questions, there should be a Q&A button or a questions button down below the videos and pop your questions in there. And then upvote any questions you see that you want to make sure and get ask because we are going to leave plenty of time for questions. And so if you have a question, I’m terrible as a host of trying to read the chat and talk to Alex and Annika. So drop your questions there. And then at the end of us chatting will answer a bunch of questions. Other thing is this will be recorded and it will be shared to everyone who signed up, and we probably will, and then also posted to YouTube and things like that. So so if you’re wondering if it’s going to be recorded, it will be and you’ll get the email. So without further ado, let’s get talking. So the first topic I wanted to bring up is when to do promotions and this kind of a multifaceted question. So, I mean, you have Easter and Christmas and Black Friday and 4th of July and Super Bowl and like all these different potential times to do discounts. And so, Alyssa, I wanted to know from your perspective, you know, what are the best times to do promotions and then kind of how do think about it generally and do people get promotion fatigue? You know, we do. Is there a benefit of doing every single holiday or maybe only ever doing a Black Friday promotion? So, Yeah. Alice, what are your thoughts on that? That’s a great question. I think really understanding your user base and kind of getting to the bottom of that where your user base are also based around the world as well. I think a big part of personalization is also, you know, localizing your content and that extends. Trouble as well. So understand them. What are the kind of key holidays that your user base, your following, will be paying attention to. And then kind of adapting your promotional strategy around that? And just so your question, David, on fatigue, I think this is really interesting. I don’t know if people are like me, but if I know the sales season is coming up, particularly like kind of Black Friday, which I know, you know, especially in the world of like fashion and things, there’s a bit of a more morality question here as well by, you know, fast fashion and kind of, you know, all the drama that happens are in these deals. But I’m a kind of I’m a spatial pair, so I, I make a point of chicken. And with, like, the products and brands that I’m most engaged with is where we just behave of those periods. And I’m quite sort of targeted and specific about it. So I want to understand, like of, of the, the products and, and then that seems to kind of take products, but also other brands and things that I follow. What, what, which of them will be getting involved in these types of promotions? And then something that I’m really interested in, I will actually mark my calendar. And I think that what could be quite an interesting thing for people to consider is, is that a way to engage early on with like your power users and the people that are kind of extra engaged with, with or extra connected with your brands and maybe something to taste this to kind of, you know, communicate ahead of time that that’s what you plan to do so that, you know, you’re targeting these people that are lately, going to plan around this. And that’s a great point. One of the things that we talked about before, too, is, you know, I listed off a bunch of American holidays because I’m American and very US focused. But there other specific holidays that people should be thinking of globally? And then I guess it would depend a lot on just under and you kind of alluded to it a little bit, is understanding your user base. So if your app is huge in the u.s., then maybe you do focus your promotions on the major US holidays. But if your app is huge in Spain or China is a great example, you wouldn’t want to run your New Year’s promotion on January one of the Gregorian calendar. If you’re running an years promotion in an app this huge in China because they celebrate the new year, I don’t even know all the details, but as like a whole month and it’s like in February, I don’t I don’t understand all of that, but I understand enough to know that it’s probably a bad idea to use your normal New Year’s promotion. So hanukkah, is there anything else you wanted to speak to there? And then also, I know that what Alice was kind of alluding to as well about the timing, do you have any thoughts on getting ahead of the events and how to kind of strategically think about those promotions? Yeah, absolutely. So I fully agree with everything that Ella said, and there’s not too much to add. But I think when it comes to timing, if everyone who has observed their inboxes this week because everyone knows Black Friday is coming, you see that many companies actually spread out the communication. Now, if it’s not sent on Friday morning anymore, but it’s sent across the week. And I think that’s where you also want to go to not be one of 1,000 on Friday morning where you don’t go into your inbox anymore and, you know, and you just don’t find what you’re looking for. And then it also depends on what kind of business you’re in if you’re a B2B or a B2C person, right? Like, well, who with your user you’re talking to? So you might want to send B2B clients rather emails in the morning. So it’s on top of the inbox when they get into the office or why they’re commuting while other people, B2C clients rather look check their emails, especially for shopping also is a great example, especially for shopping in the evenings like 8 to 10 p.m., interestingly. So I think it always comes down to that as well. And with the holidays, I, I remember when I lived in Spain, I had, I lived in the South of Spain for a while. And I wanted to celebrate Christmas. And they said, oh, no, we don’t do Christmas gifts on the 24th. And I said, why not? And then they said, well, we do it on the 6th of January, so and then that’s when also the sale is happening. Like most of the Christmas sale is happening then. And you can get cheaper gifts actually for that date. So it’s really interesting. So every country has their own habits, I guess, even in Spain where there’s different regions as well. So yeah, if you pay more attention to that, I think that’s really important. And as you said, Asia is a really interesting market as well. We had a client in Asia as well covering a lot of the market there, Korea, where they celebrate Mother’s Day a lot. So, you know, you would go for that instead of the conventional. Holidays so it’s really interesting. There’s definitely a lot for localization to be done. Yes so many great points. Alice, you are the follow up. Yeah, just on the mother’s day, I’ve also seen some interesting discussion around in these types of topics, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and things as well. And I’ve seen some really effective campaigns, particularly over the last year as well, where it’s kind of people are actually asking, you know, is this the type of thing that you want to receive? And I think that’s also been very an interesting discussion in this our marketing world. But I also think it’s been know, it’s kind of opening up that extra layer of being able to engage with customers and sort personalize their preferences as well. So I think that’s a really interesting example, too. Yeah and the next thing I wanted to talk about follows up on that is that in some ways discounts aren’t just about a discount, but there’s also the kind of re-engagement. So I wanted to talk about the kind of psychology and goal, the intention of, you know, how developers should think about these discounts. And just curious to think, to hear what you think about balancing the is it just the psychology thing? Like people love a good sale and so you put it on sale. Is there kind of a re-engagement with your audience kind of perspective? And then, you know, I’ve also thought a lot about I mean, especially in the subscription app space, you know, there’s a lot of people who are kind of on the fence about a subscription where, you know, Strava is great, but it’s not really I don’t remember with the prices these days, $20 a month or whatever it is. And so, you know, maybe that discount also helps kind of pull in those people who are on the fence. So let’s kick it off with Annika this time. How do you think kind of broadly about the kind of intentionality behind how you plan these promotions? I think when it comes to the amount of promotion, like how much discount do you want to give the person? It heavily depends on your user segment because I mean, you would not spend an enormous amount of money on users who are engaged with your app and constantly, you know, open your app and chop or do something whatever your app does. Why people you want to re-engage, you will see an increasing discount. Like you have free activation emails that maybe start from 20%, but then after five weeks they have not engaged. So you go up to 30%, you try to get them back and see maybe that there are changes on your app that might re-engage the user that you have lost before. So I think it’s heavily, heavily dependent on the segment and the user lifecycle stage where the other user is actually in. And I think Ellis had also a really good example from a client as well on the segmentation point. Yeah, exactly. I think it’s really good to sort of segment and understand who are the people that maybe were a bit hesitant to subscribe? They had sort of more intention to subscribe. And how can we kind use this as a body or as a way to lower the barrier to entry because ultimately, like the goal with well, it depends what your goal is. It might be publicity or it might be to get people over the door with the aim of retaining them at full price further down the line. But it’s kind of a way to introduce them to the premium versions of the product, the premium features of the products at a lower price point. So I think, you know, there’s no point in trying to price in so, so low that realistically you’re just going to end up generating a hold of churn. Right we want to segment understand the different levels of intent and there’s lots of ways of doing that by looking at, you know, things like have people interacted with certain features that might be behind a paywall have be demonstrated some similar patterns of behaviors that are similar to people that do subscribe and really kind of understands and like those, those different user segments and then targeting those that you think just need that extra, extra boost if that makes sense. Yeah, that’s great. And then, huh? You know, one of the things I think a lot about, too, is, is, you know, a lot of apps will do these Black Friday promotions and say, you know, do a crazy 60% off or 50% off or whatever. And then you end up with this cohort that may stay subscribed for a decade, and they’re on a 50% off plan. So, Annika, how do you how do you think about balancing the LTV considerations? And you kind of alluded to it already of, you know, maybe your most engaged users, you give them only give them 20% off. But there are other considerations. And have you seen promotions where you are just doing, you know, 50% off for one year and then it kicks back up or. Or do you find a way to kind of get those folks back on to a more premium tier over time? Yeah, I think we did that in the past, especially. I think fitness apps are really good examples that you see that a lot that they give away a life plan for, I don’t know, 50, 50 or 60 and that’s it. And then you will never make money off that again, right? I think that is a tricky one. It also depends on what state is the company in. I guess that actually does it make any sense? And it might be pretty interesting for companies in a really early stage that really want the users and want some money in a few months. Probably when you really have high user acquisition and you really want to get users in. But then I don’t think it’s like a long term plan of, of keeping this like long life plan for everyone who comes to your app. So I see this usually when it happens, it happens not for too long, it will be removed because it’s not generating money anymore. Over time. But less is more the subscription optimization a queen in this call. So it also lets her say something about that. Well, I would Thank you. And I Yeah. I mean, I think it depends on the percentage, this kind and whether that makes sense profitability wise. I mean, maybe you do over this. This is kind of like as more of a lifetime offer. But the per se, you know, the discount is priced in such a way that actually you just have to accept that you have this segment that maybe come in at a lower price point. And maybe that is going back to their intention conversation. Maybe that is because this is a segment that has either a lawyer intentions is subscribers is just a segment of users who wouldn’t have been able to afford like the higher sort of premium price point. So again, it’s all about just really segmenting your user base and really not kind of taking like a one size fits all or a blanket approach, but really understanding your users on a, on a deeper level. Yeah you know, one thing that came to mind as you all were talking through that is that there are ways to upgrade people over time as well. So, you know, with my launched in a pro app, it used to be a paid upfront app for $5. And so when we transitioned to subscription, one of the things we did was we offered this kind of legacy discount. And, you know, it can get to be a bit of management work for your engineering team to get all this sorted out revenue that actually makes us a lot easier with our entitlement system. But you could potentially set it up to where the, you know, Black Friday promotion subscription becomes a kind of legacy subscription. And then when you release a big new feature that features not available on the discounted tier, and then they would need to upgrade to the premium tier, now you need to be really careful with those kind of things because, you know, you don’t want to, you know, frustrate your user base and be kind of a penalized nation kind of thing. But I think there are ways to think carefully about how you approach those things and potentially upgrade those folks over time who are on those kind of if you kind of frame it that way, you think kind of legacy discount plan and find ways to kind of get them back onto a normal plan or even create these. And I mean something I’ve been thinking a lot about even more broadly of having multiple tiers of having a kind of base subscription tier, and then a premium subscription tier. So that could be a way to do it as well as in the future, releasing a more kind of premium tier with a bunch of new features. And then that’s a great opportunity to upsell your whole user base, including the people who might be on a legacy discount plan. And then of course, you know, the whole thing with being able to use promo. Codes where it is a 50% discount for a year and then they get back on the regular plan. You know, all these things have to be balanced in, you know, conversion rates may be different. And, you know, you always want to be thinking about the user perspective, but it’s a lot of ideas there of how to run these things and think about it. So I’ve been monologuing a bit. Let’s move on to the next topic. So the next most important thing after you’ve kind of, you know, considered, you know, why you’re doing the promotion, how you’re going to segment out how much of a promotion to give. And figuring out all that out is how do you actually tell people? And I think this this, you know, in some ways is obvious. But I think requires, as with everything we’re talking about, a bit more consideration to really be super effective. So, Annika, why don’t we kick off with email being kind of the most obvious one, but how do you think about that mix between email push and in-app messaging of how to create an effective campaign to promote this discount? Right so I think cross-channel is always a good, good idea. So really leveraging the channels that you already have, right, that you all have basically or to use usually. I know that last year. It’s actually a side effect, but the 20% of holiday sales came through email marketing. So it’s still even though people say email is that, I think for some occasions that might be the case. But I think for sales is still where you reach most of the people because you will not have everyone opted into your Push notifications. It’s also with the new iOS versions, also with Android. Way harder to reach the people because people are in focus mode. People are having their own mode set up where you might end up in a whole list of notifications being gone. So I think it’s a good idea to leverage all channels for the users that are active in your app. You want to go for an in-app message, most likely because the message is definitely visible to them once they open the app, right? You can have the coupon in there or you just say, look, we applied this discount already to your checkout. That’s the easiest way and probably the nicest for the user because you don’t have to copy paste anything for the email. The same like when the emails are sent out using like you can reactivate. Obviously users that are not using your app anymore have uninstalled reactivate them like this also used blinks and the landing page just for fallback but you keep things into the app so you have the app launches, right? So there’s a lot of opportunity with all the channels that you have to really leverage them. And I know that people think maybe it’s too much to send everything, but again, not everyone will really reach like will see all of the stuff that you were actually sending. That is really the case, I think. Yeah Alison, anything to follow up on that? Yeah and I think Annika made some great points there. I think another thing that can be quite useful if you do have weight payments is to also have kind of weight discount codes, because quite often these web discount codes can get picked up by other websites that want to mention these sort of big holiday deals and promotions. Right so it can be quite a nice way of also increasing the presence and the sort of exposure through the deal, but also to the brands, too. Yeah, that’s a great point. That’s something I say to bring up is part of how I did so well with the holiday promotions with my indie apps was that by collectively forming this app Santa promotion, we actually got a ton of press. And I think, you know, with all the especially around Black Friday and times like that, people like to talk about sales discounts and stuff. And so, you know, if you are doing a discount, you know, pitch it. And pretty much every major tech site has a pitch, email or a form that you can fill out. And, you know, odds may be relatively low, but it’s not a lot of work to just go ahead and do that extra step of pitched pitch, a pitch, all the websites you can think of off the top of your head. So it’s just another way to get a little extra extra boost from these promotions. So we are running a little short on time, so let’s speedrun the next couple and maybe combine them both. But designing effective creatives and writing compelling promotional copy, I think they kind of bundle. Well, anyway, but Alice, why don’t you tell us your thoughts about how to effectively message this? And, you know, creatives are such a huge deal for user acquisition. I think sometimes retention gets short shrift where, you know, the design team just throw something together and like, Oh yeah, that’ll work versus you know, with user acquisition, you’re doing hundreds of different creatives and you know, ab testing, all different kind of promotional messages in the ad copy and things like that. So how do you think about approaching promoting these promotions? I think you need to be designing for conversion, which is something that people can sometimes get lost in, in making something look really fancy and kind of complex that we need to be designing for a conversion. And I think that same clients from what I’ve seen working with Sinclair included feature, they are particularly good at some of their holiday promos. I think some of the Black Friday promos that they’ve had and one of the reasons why I really like them is, is that they talk about the benefits of the promo to the user. So all of the copy is things like unlimited uploads, like, you know, this kind of messaging where it’s like benefits to the user as opposed to talking in sort of problematic products or feature specific terms. And I think that’s something that can quite often be overlooked, where a lot of people, you know, they’ll make sure you show up and, you know, subscribe in order to or subscribe at the spacial price in order to access x-y-z ads. But ultimately they’re not really speaking and like the users and the users kind of terms, if that makes sense, I think that’s something that’s really important. And definitely, if you’re looking for inspiration, check out some of second place examples because they’re really great. Yeah one of the things you had brought up previously when we were chatting about this is how localizing creatives can be so important as well. You know, we’re kind of talking about localizing the holidays themselves, but even things like Christmas are represented differently in different cultures. And so I thought that was really insightful when, when you shared that with me earlier this week, is that, you know, again, I’m just so US centric and and I appreciate chatting with folks like you who work with apps that are more successful internationally and you live in Europe yourself. So you have a more sensitivity to that. So, you know, Santa Claus is not the universal Christmas image. And so, you know, if your app is big in countries that celebrate Christmas but don’t use the same kind of US centric imagery, that’s a great opportunity to do something that kind of acknowledges the culture that you’re speaking to. Hanukkah anything else you wanted to share on effective creatives and copy? No, I think you just pointed it out. I think there’s many examples here in Europe where you would adjust or you would adjust the design or at least the creatives a little. So it fits what the text for Christmas is, even though I think everyone has adapted to the universal Santa Claus, most likely in Europe at least. But there is still extra nice red we have in Germany on the 6th of November, December we have Nicholas, which looks really close to the Santa Claus, but he’s not. So it’s a special day that is celebrated also with little gifts. So it’s another opportunity. Same with Spain, Spanish, Santa Claus. He looks also different. So if you go for that and really localized images, I think it’s some more content, better converting than actually the universal thing that everyone knows. Yeah, Yeah. That’s such a great point. So the last thing before we take questions is, how do you think about measuring impact? And Alice, I’ll go with you first. You know, we could get super technical about, you know, the tools and data warehouse and, you know, measuring everything and following up and all that. But let’s you know, for the sake of brevity, let’s just take a little bit of a higher level. And when you think and this doesn’t apply just to holiday promotions either, but, you know, when you’re doing A/B test with a customer or doing a discount promotion or a win back campaign, how do you think about measuring the results to really understand how effective it was and then inform future promotions? Yeah, I think this is a great question and I think there’s lots of layers to it, to be honest. I mean, it really depends obviously, on what the original goal of the campaign was. If it was to get more subscribers over the door, for example, it wasn’t purely for kind of like brand promotion. Then you would really want to be making sure that your chart like your that you were not bringing in a whole load of people are going to turn right. Because even though you’ve got that initial what looks like revenue, you know, for me, I think that ultimately we should be bringing in long term gains. And so I think that’s something that you want to be really mindful of. It’s kind of similar to when we’re consulting with clients, we want to be really careful not to over optimize for child starts because ultimately child start so so bring revenue, right? So we want to be kind of thinking long term. It’s not it’s not really different in this case. And I think is why you want to be really careful about the type of traffic that the profile brings to your product, to your app as well. Because sometimes what ends up happening is you bring a bunch of people, or you bring an audience that have very, very low intention to be kind of long term subscribers. And that can obviously bring down ultimately your IT can kind of lower your conversion rates. And I saw that happen with an app that I worked on last year where it wasn’t it wasn’t necessarily a promo, but a similar type of scenario where the whole load of traffic gets come to the app for something that was being sort of spotlighted or highlighted. And ultimately, it wasn’t really the right audience that should have been targeted, and it was quite difficult to recover from that. So I think, you know, continuing to think long term and thinking about, you know, long term impacts and what the ultimate goal of the campaign is. This is really important and not to get caught up in sort of short term metrics. Yeah, that’s a great point. And again, anything else to add? Not really. No, I agree on that. I mean, with experiments, running experiments. Maybe also having a baseline from last year. Right will be great. So, you know, am I going with the same discount? Do I reduce it a little? How many people actually turned off after I read like they came with a discounted price? How many turned? And again, I think it’s really interesting to then adjust to this year’s campaigns and users and yeah, use what you have already and what you have learned from the past and not do the same mistakes again. Yeah you know, I think that’s something that’s actually overlooked broadly in subscription apps because it’s just so hard to do. And this is actually something we’re working on at revenue cut to make it easier and easier to do this. But doing a lookback analysis on prior promotions, prior ab test, you know, because there’s so many times when, yeah, you know, you change the paywall and you get a 15% lift in trial starts and, and a 10% lift in, in total subscribers. And then exactly what Alex was saying, you’re, you’re bringing in the wrong audience or you’re kind of funneling the wrong audience to become subscribers, and your churn actually ends up going up. And if you’re not looking back at it, at those earlier experiments with long term retention data and long term user activity data, then you’re really missing out on the full learning. It’s like you can do a quick Abe test and understand, OK, how does this impact me right now? But with a subscription out, the goal is, you know, a decade of continuous subscription ultimately. I mean, that’s kind of the ultimate ideal. And so if that’s your ultimate ideal, you need to orient your learnings around that ultimate goal and not ignore those past experiments when you’re planning your feature experiment. So really great points there. So with that, we’ll go ahead and wrap up. And take some questions. It looks like we’ve got a few. If you have a lingering question that hasn’t been answered yet, go ahead and drop it in now. But we’ll take this first. One question is, what is the best way to apply promo discounts on your app? Is it by applying a 40% discount for a week on all users buy promo code, promo ad viewers. So unless you want to talk to that and we didn’t talk broadly and then maybe I’ll get a little more technical. Yeah, this is an interesting question. So what is the best way to apply for discounts on our app and. I think it all really depends. I’m not sure that it would be easy to kind of answer that as like a one size fits all. I think you really have to understand a bit about what you were trying to achieve with the discount and what kind of products you had and then understand and like what the kind of strategy was around that. So yeah, I mean, a 40% discount for a week. If you think that was going to be optimal for bringing people over the door in order to get them to sort have a chance to play around with the premium features and then that this current price you think was enabled you to sort of have people then subscribe further down the line and it’s not going to massively hurt your profit margin then I think why not? But it really depends. You know, it would have to kind of understand what initially what your profit margin was in order to understand what sort of percentage you should be aiming for. And as I said earlier, as we talked about, you know, understanding what the kind of ultimate goal was that you were trying to achieve as well. Yeah any follow up there? No, it’s true. Like, I think with all those questions that are really specific to an app, it’s hard to reply to like, yeah, the one size fits all approach is not a thing, as Ellis said, so it’s hard. I think what would be good is also to be a little more creative with promotions. Does it need to be a 40% off or can it also be a 14 day trial instead of the usual seven days? Try it right. Like what is the plan for your users? Maybe they just need a little more time. They haven’t seen all the features. Maybe that is already enough to engage them. Instead of spending all that money to engage them with a 40% discount. And then they turn. I think that. Go ahead, David. I think that’s a good time. A good point. And just on the 40% as well is really kind of understanding what she users with that 40% work for but actually if that are users that we could get and and I think you mentioned this earlier even 5% that’s code for 10% painting you know so that you’re not in your potential basically to get more people in over the door. And then I do want to follow up and I don’t have a super deep technical answer for you on this, but there are kind of benefits and drawbacks to all the different ways to do a discount. So, you know, if your plan is to do what I was talking about earlier, where you consider this discount kind of legacy subscription and you want to eventually upgrade people to a more premium tier or something. In that case, doing a separate discounted SKU might actually be a better way to run the discount as if you were doing a price test where you create a separate SKU for the lower price. So that’s an option. Now then, you have to manage multiple SKUs and it’s all the same kind of challenges that you have with price testing. But it does set you up for being able to move people from that SKU to a different SKU versus just being on the lower price of the SKU. That’s already there. Um, you know, I actually hadn’t even considered this and so I don’t know my own answer, but I’ll ask a question and it’s something, you know, maybe we can follow up on in the sub club community or somewhere like that. But with Apple’s ability to increase prices, I actually have not looked into whether or not you can, you know, discount your subscription price, temporarily, raise it back to normal, and then segment the users who are on that lower price and only raise the price for them. Because with Apple’s new price raising thing, you can raise the price on existing subscribers. And so if that’s possible, that might be another way. Now you risk churn, of course, because they’re going to get an email that says your subscription price is going up, but that’s one way to do it. Promo codes are a pain to use or the promo codes, but promotional offers are paying to use. You have do revenue cut. We help a little bit with this, but there’s still some heavy lifting on the engineering team to get it all implemented. But with promotional offers, you can do what I was talking about where, you know, the 40% discount is what you think is going to be most effective. You can set that discount to those specific time periods. So a week seems pretty short to me from a kind of, you know, user perspective. But again, it does depend on your app. You know, if you are using weekly subscriptions and your average subscriber only subscribes to the app for two months because you’re like a test prep app or something, and they’re just going to use it for a month or two and then churn anyway. Then maybe a week or two of a discount is super attractive because then they’re like, well, I’m going to cram this test prep in the next week while it’s 40% off, and then I’ll turn after that and then, you know, maybe it takes them two or three weeks. And so that could potentially for your specific app, if it’s that kind of scenario, be very attractive. Generally, you know, 40% off for a week doesn’t feel like a huge kind of incentive to the user. But again, if from a technical standpoint, if you’re doing that, the best way to do it would be with the either a discount code or a promotional offer. And so, you know, you can play with all those things to figure out implementation wise what makes sense. And new SKU promo code promotional offers, there’s so many different ways to do it. Actually, we have a post up on the revenue catalog about referrals and it talks through some of this. About how those different promo codes versus promotional offers in Canada, the benefits and drawbacks of those. So it was very long through. It’s not super technical, but I hope we kind of got you what you needed there. So let’s answer a few more here. Which tools should you start at the beginning, starting first time discounts with the new app. Any thoughts there, Annika or alice? We switched to such a start at the beginning. I guess I would need to better contact the context. What what tools are we trying to take it? Because I want to see revenue cap because revenue cut always. But I mean, I think I can take this one. You know, if you’re just getting started with doing these kind of things, something like Firebase is free and cheap and easy to get started where you can do multichannel, one signal is another great kind of entry point into this multi-channel CRM and you know, and then there’s a ton of great tools and revenue that integrates with, with most of them, all of them iterable praise. You know, there’s so many great tools now for multichannel communications. So if you’re just getting started and you have collected email, if you have gotten push notification access, and if you want to do in-app messaging, you know, pretty much any of those tools will kind of offer you the full suite. And then as we found out today, Blair might actually be a nice I don’t know that any of those other tools do it, especially good job. And that’s probably why you created the layer of doing those in-app messages. So, so yeah, I would look at which of those kind of CRM tools and Firebase isn’t really CRM, but Firebase tries to be kind of the bucket that does everything, not everything incredibly well, but everything good enough. So they kind of have CRM like tools. It’s not going to be as sophisticated as a one signal or an iterable or phrase or any of those, but just need to analyze, you know, which tool is not only going to serve this particular discount and promotion, but what might actually be a great CRM tool to use long term to do other re-engagement campaigns and to engage with your users over the long haul. So pick a tool based on that long term thinking, since you’re going to have to spend the time implementing it anyway. But those would be the kind of tools that you would use to communicate about these promotions. Just one thing on that, David, before we move on to Israel is we’re actually here and my team is writing an article just now about the limitations of that kind of takes in through Syria versus doing it more taking a more invasive approach to it. So one thing just to be very aware of it as well is obviously like if you’re wanting to have a discussion that’s kind of part of your aim upsell or and your paywall screen is, is just to understand what the limitations are of serving that natively through CRM, where you might be relying on things like servers and stuff like that too. So just something to be, to be mindful of. Yeah, great point. Sounds like it’s going to be a great article. All right. Next question. And so there’s not going to be an answer to this. So but it’ll actually be fun to theorize. What kind of conversion rate should we anticipate for a 40% to 50% off Cyber Monday Black Friday style promotion? We’re sending two canceled subs. So the answer is we don’t know. But Alison annica, I know you all have both run all sorts of different promotions across all sorts of different apps. Can you give us the kind of top quartile, low quartile, you know, have you seen some like crazy engagement rates? And then have you seen some crazy low engagement rates and maybe even some nuance as to why you think maybe some were more successful and some less successful. So without answering specifically, because I don’t think there is an answer. What are your general thoughts on how you should expect performance to be for these kind of promotions? And yeah, so I, I think if I may take this one. So I think it’s heavily depends on when did the user cancel the subscription and how active was this user in the time before they cancelled? Because if you have an app that requires a daily or I don’t know, couple of times weekly interaction and you have a core retention metric of, I don’t know, workout started or whatever, you know, I love fitness apps, apparently so. So if that’s the case, then and the user has not been active for like three months and the cancellation rent or then they canceled because they figured they don’t need it anymore. If they have been that active, I would think that the offer is a good one. And they the conversion rate on that segment will be higher. But if it’s someone who has trained really early on because they I don’t know, they did a trial and they haven’t been active in like six months or more. They the conversion rate will be really low. That’s the overall all thing I can say. So you might want to target those people who have canceled recently who were engaged with your app to actually get them back, engage them with the offer, but also with new features that you have added to the app since. So they actually have a reason to come back and use your app. Great answer. Alice anything to follow up? Yeah Alexander because it kind of ties into the theme that we’ve, we’ve been talking about throughout, which is really like segmenting, right? And not having this one size fits all. I love the fact that you’re highlighting that. You know, it depends on churn reasons. And actually, if you want a really effective campaign, get to the bottom of those churn reasons and then sort of and align your follow up or when that campaign’s based around that. And I think that’s something that, for example, with the shameless plug but with be clear, it’s one of the things that we can do is we can kind of create these surveys that you can then serve through like an app messages in order to capture churn reasons as, as responses and attach them as kind of user attributes as well. So yeah, I really like that. Yeah now I said it’s unanswerable. And that was a great answer. And Annika. I mean, ballpark, what are some of the re-engagement sets you’ve seen? Because I think some people over estimate how these things are going to perform. So, you know, off the cuff, you know, I would personally be expecting single to low double digit engagement rates, not like a 50% of everybody who sees this message. And then you also have to think about the whole funnel of this, too, is that, you know, if you send it to 100,000 users, how many actually see the promotion? You know, as we talked about, the push notifications are getting lost because of redesigns with Google and Apple’s notification systems. It’s a push, you know, how many are actually going in to see the push in? That messaging is probably one of the higher converting because people are actually in the app engaging with the app. But again, how many of your churn users are still in the app engaging with the app? Probably very few. So then your email, you send 100,000 emails out. How many of those people actually see the email, open the email, engage with the email? And so it really is a numbers game where you’re going to start with what seems like a really big number. Wow, I’m sending 100,000 emails, you know, surely, you know, 10% are going to take me up on this offer. But then you realize, well, geez, only, you know, 40,000 actually saw the email and then only 20,000 actually clicked on the button. And that may even be generous. And then once they get to the checkout screen, only 10% of those people have actually got to the checkout screen actually do. So my overall kind of general take would be that you should, you know, have fairly low and realistic expectations and think about that whole funnel. So yeah, any kind of additional thoughts from the two of you on, you know, where to set those expectations for these kind of promotions? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think that’s actually one of the reasons why we see that and that messages are, you know, one of the base one of the base channels in terms of conversion is because of that funnel that you just mentioned. But what I would like to see, though, as well is, is that with email and conversion as well, I think one thing that you can. One thing that you should be thinking about is also understanding the different segments that your email might be go into as well and really analyze in those different segments. I worked on a project last week where I was working with one of their principal data analysts from feature, and they found out that actually women were more than twice as likely to convert from email than men. So I thought that was a really interesting insight. And a reminder to not be complacent about, you know, your kind of segmentation and really understanding who these campaigns are going to be and then sort of figuring out what channels and what channels are based for delivery, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, that’s great. We’ve got time for one, maybe two questions. So take a second to upvote. Any questions you really want to see answered in the next 9 minutes? Usually we I’ve gone up to two hours on these webinars before, but I really wanted to keep this one at an hour. So give you a couple of more seconds to upload anything. You really want to see. And then I just realized I’m not filtering by effects. OK I’ve got a question from the revenue CAT team. Have you found that users that purchase a holiday discounted subscription are more likely to churn if the renewal is at full price? That’s a great question. Either of you have experience specifically and now, you know, maybe not with holiday promotions, but other kind of wind back campaigns or other promotions. Yeah, if you don’t have specific experience with the holiday promotions. I think it’s a great question. And I, I always like to look at myself first. And if you all look at yourselves for a second and really think about like, how often does this happen to you that you get a great discount and you’re like, Oh yeah, I sign up for this. It’s a, it’s a six month discount on your discount, right? And then you cancel right away, because you don’t want to miss out on the cancellation. You know, that comes in a year. I think many people do that. And I think I can imagine I don’t have real numbers, but I can imagine that on especially holiday discounts, this is a typical thing that people really take it like, Oh yeah, I get this really cheap for a year, but I’m not ready to pay double the price after a year and I also don’t want to forget about it. So I think that’s a normal behavior. I would think, like most of us think that way. I think the only one that I renewed recently was actually the New York Times subscription, because I really enjoy reading the articles in the morning, but it’s a useful one, you know. But any other ones, other industry, it’s hard to really. That’s funny about the New York Times because that’s exactly what I was thinking when you were saying that kind of mentality and the New York Times specifically, because it’s very expensive. So I actually just signed up again and I was on their promotion of one year for 60 bucks or something. So but then if I stay subscribed, it’s like $300 or something and yeah, it’s very expensive. And so, you know, that’s a great example of I am probably one of those people who, you know, and this is kind of gets at what we were talking about earlier is that in some ways this holiday promotions are an off ramp for people who find your app valuable, but not that valuable. So to me, this the New York Times is a $60 a year subscription, but not a 300. I just don’t I don’t read it enough. I don’t, you know, go browse it every morning. It’s more that I like to have paywall access for when I see a story I want to read. And so it really is for me $60 a year value and I’m just not going to pay $300 a year. So it’s a great point to kind of get in the user mindset and try to understand the value that people see in your subscription. And that kind of helps balance it where maybe, maybe not raising the price on them is a way to actually improve churn over the long haul by keeping that segment who just doesn’t value your app as much, paying less money for it. And that’s where, you know, again, I love talking about tiers and like multiple pricing tiers and things like that because I do think as the subscription app industry matures and we’ve seen this in Sas and web subscriptions, Netflix, Disney plus, you know, all of these kind of more sophisticated, larger companies are starting to get into tearing the subscription so that your kind of best, most loyal, most dedicated users who get the most value have can pay you more. And then the people who love your products but just don’t find that much value or have different, you know, economic scenario and coming into recession. I think it’s another kind of an important thing to be thinking about, too, is that we probably will see churn for some of these high return for some of these higher priced subscriptions. And, you know, when you’re just $3 a month versus 20 bucks a month, kind of lower hanging fruit for people to churn out. So there’s a ton of considerations there. Unless anything you wanted to add before we move on. Yeah, I think the New York Times is a fantastic example. I mean, I am I use the New York Times for like their chicken and recipes. And so I wouldn’t necessarily want to be, you know, signed up to the full package, for example. I wouldn’t necessarily be interested in any kind of like sport content and content, and I’d probably get the majority of menus elsewhere. So I think that’s a really good point that you make. And yeah, absolutely. We to expect that some of these higher tier subscriptions will take or premium and subscriptions both take a bit of a hit over the recession periods. I’ve certainly done it myself where I’ve kind of clear had a heads up. If I look through my bank statements and to understand what’s coming out every month, and I expect that, you know, there will be a lot of people asking those questions as well. So they fully agree with all of that. Yeah actually, it may be a great opportunity and it’s something we’re actually revenue carrier releasing a price testing feature coming up here in the next two or three weeks. Right after the holiday, the Thanksgiving holiday, us holiday. Not something either of you will be celebrating. But you know, that’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about is that, you know, with the, you know, recessionary pressures, it might actually be a good time for a lot of subscription apps to test to lower price and to maybe even offer. And this is kind of on the topic of today of maybe offer a kind of recession discount even to some of your existing users who are likely to churn or as a win back of of, you know, somebody turns out and say, hey, we know times are tough. You know, here’s a 50% discount for the next year or the next two years or indefinite, you know, as we’ve discussed and again, there’s something to be thinking about. But I hadn’t even thought about that. The kind of recession as a win back campaign actually might be a really smart strategy over the next six months, because it’s true, we all feel it, right? I mean, I, I did the same thing. I went and canceled a few subscriptions. But you know what I canceled? I cancel the things that I don’t use that often, that I don’t find that much value. And so, you know, I talk about this a ton on the podcast and in the webinars and, you know, the blog posts I do. And it so much of it really just comes back down to value. And so, you know, when you’re thinking a holiday promotion is going to solve all your problems or, you know, generate enough revenue or whatever, you know, there aren’t these kind of magic bullets that are just going to turn your business around. But what over time turns your business around is just delivering more and more value. And then you’re less likely to have people churn. You’re more likely to have people willing to pay full price. The people who get the discount are going to cherish that discount and stick around. So, so much of it just comes down to delivering value. You were kind of that was a huge tangent off of the original question. Let’s get one more before we go. Our mobile app is normally has a $40 annual subscription. What promo do you think would work best in terms of maximizing revenue for Black Friday and Cyber monday? I’ll leave that to either of you to kick off. Yeah, I think this is a good question. But another one that unfortunately wouldn’t be able to give you a specific answer, one, I wouldn’t want to give you a specific answer on and states. I think I’d want to encourage you to think about, well, and what is your cost of acquiring these users? What makes sense in terms of and profitability? And also what makes sense in terms of traffic quality? Right so what makes sense in terms of getting people over the door, but it’s not so low that it’s kind of unrealistic in terms of keeping those subscribers on, I think as well. David, going back to your point, just they’re about value. And I think one thing that Robey Coleman Baxter actually had saves in one of the revenue cap podcasts which really kind of ran truth for me was that people if, if, if there’s a, if, if there’s a product that you kind of fits within your life and, you know, this is kind of very, very valuable within your life and that becomes a part of your lifestyle. And then there’s, you know, within, within limits, there’s that you’re probably going to pay. You’re probably going to still be a user of it if there is a slight increase in price as well. Right so within limits, obviously, if products start kind of pain, you know, charging like 3,000 or something like $30,000 a month overnight, you would notice. Right but you know, with it within limits, I think I think pricing, you know, as you’re so continuing to add value and to users, I think that people will still kind of maintain their subscriptions over time. And I think that yeah, going back to the question about what is the base price in terms of maximizing revenue for these types of deals? I think, you know, we just need to be thinking about what percentage actually makes sense in terms of the strategy. What are we actually offering as part of that deal. And how does that add value to the user and go and sort of get them to experience something that they can use more long term? I think that’s a great way to wrap up. Just back to the fundamentals, just thinking about the value you’re delivering and the perception of users of the price that you’re charging for the value you’re delivering. So great way to wrap up. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. And for those of you watching this on YouTube, six months, a year later and keep an eye out for if you believe you’re signed up for the notification of the recording. And then a couple of quick plugs as we wrap up, too. We’ve talked about a couple of times here, but these podcasts, we have conversations like this every two weeks with subscription app experts. So check it out. It’s up club ecom. We also run a community or I read a community, the sub club community, it’s chat dot sub club bcom you’ll find a link to sign up for the waitlist there where 500 plus super sharp subscription folks talk about all sorts of stuff from price testing to creatives and user acquisition and all that kind of stuff. It’s a great place to talk about this. And then the last thing I want to wrap up with is feature. Thank you so much for joining us and features fantastic company. They work with all sorts of different apps and one of the things I love about companies like feature is that they work with so many different apps over so many. I mean, what almost a decade now or more since Andy and Moritz founded feature. And so the team collectively just has so much depth of experience. And so you’ll see that reflected not just in being their customer, which is great if you’re looking for a mobile growth consultant and you’ll do so consulting. And it features kind of a full, what do you call it, a full spectrum agency. So but then also they do a ton of great webinars, blog posts, a ton of great content. They’re really honestly one of the best content generation teams in the kind of subscription app space. So if you haven’t signed up for their newsletter or subscribe to their blog, definitely check that out. So any parting thoughts from the two of you as we wrap up? You know, Thank you so much for having us and for all the compliments just now. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you very much. That was a lot of fun. And I loved hearing both of your thoughts around this, too. So thank you. Awesome thanks, everyone.
