After designing, developing and finally launching an app that is monetized by subscriptions, you may wonder, how to decide on your subscription pricing model to be both attractive to your app users and profitable for your app business.
As a matter of fact, you are not the only one concerning this issue. Most app owners, especially startups, don’t really have an idea how much should their apps price and how much money app users will be willing to pay for the service offered. But you don’t need to be too worried, there is always a solution. In this case, it would be testing, measuring and perfecting.
It is said that A/B testing is the most efficient way to help perfect your app’s subscription pricing model. Well, that is true. So first of all, let’s talk about what you should test in a subscription pricing model.
What Should You Test to Perfect the Subscription Pricing Model?
Testing subscription pricing is not easy, as there are a lot of details to be considered. Here we list the following elements that may impact your app subscription revenue.
- Subscription Prices: App users can be very sensitive to prices. You just have to test what is the price that will entice them to subscribe to your services. Before you begin your test, don’t forget to do some marketing research about your competitors and make a smart price-testing hypothesis. Your price can not be too high or too low. And also you may take existing users into consideration for they may react negatively if the price is lowered after they make a subscription.
- Subscription Duration: Offer different subscription durations (such as weekly, monthly, semi-annual or annually) to users in two controlled groups to see which one they prefer and which will drive better lifetime value.
- Subscription Plan Combinations: Make a list of the subscription plans you want to test and show users different combinations to find out whether they will choose the plan that you expect them to choose to boost subscription revenue, such as making a comparison between two different subscription groups.
- Free Trial Offering: Whether to offer a free trial or not will greatly impact the acquisition rate. After all, it is obvious that app users would like to try the service out without any cost.
- Time Frame of the Free Trial: If you decide to try on the free trial offer, you can also try on different free trial lengths. Whether it is 3-days or seven days that will attract more users to subscribe? Maybe you will be surprised to find out that when you double the trial period, the subscription rate will increase unexpectedly.
- Placement of the Free Trial: The placement of the free trial may also have an impact on the subscription rate. For that, it is worthwhile to do a test.
- Introductory Offers: Introductory offers are another acquisition strategy you can choose to nudge users to subscribe. Whether it is effective or not for my app? That is the question that can only be answered through testing.
- Promotional Codes: Offer promotional codes to your potential users to see if they can increase the retention rate and lifetime value in the long run.
- Tailored Subscription Offerings Based on User Segments: Providing tailored subscription offerings/benefits for different user segments, to maximize the conversions of your users.
If you want to find out how you can perfect your app subscription model to boost app revenue, consider the above factors and do A/B testing on the elements that are likely to have more impact on your revenue growth. And while you are doing A/b testing, remember to measure the result and changes of your key metrics, especially the conversion rate, retention rate and LTV. Comparing these data can help determine the most profitable subscription model.
However, doing subscription testing can be tricky because developers have to spend a lot of time creating a testing framework. Luckily, tools can always make things easy. Appflow.ai’s A/B testing feature makes things easier.
Doing Subscription Model A/B Testing Faster with Appflow.ai
Appflow.ai is an in-app subscription toolkit for mobile Apps. It serves as the subscription backend around Apple’s StoreKit and Google Play Billing to deal with the in-app subscription infrastructure and subscription management.
Appflow.ai’s A/B testing feature allows you to test subscription models easier and faster. You don’t have to deal with code or wait for the app store to approve your change. The experiment dashboard makes it possible for you to create paywalls with different SKUs by yourself.
When you finish customizing the paywalls that you want to test, you can just select two different paywalls and choose the segment of users you want to test on. And then you can just click on the start button to begin the experiments. Appflow.ai will measure the related metrics and show the final result for you when the test is done.
Conclusion
To ensure you have got the most revenue out of your subscribers, it is imperative to find out the most profitable subscription model and perfect it. The only way to do this is to do A/B testing. And there are many factors to consider. However, you should always test and evaluate what makes the most sense for your specific app and services. And remember: there is no best subscription model, but always a better one. So keep exploring and perfecting your app’s subscription model.
How to Perfect Your App's Subscription Pricing Model?
