How to Boost Retention with Subscription Lifecycle Messaging — Alice Muir, Phiture

David Barnard (00:01.086)
Welcome to the SubClub Podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. SubClub is brought to you by Revenue Cat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust Revenue Cat to power in-app purchases, manage customers,

and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at revenuecat.com. Let's get into the show.

Hello, I'm your host David Barnard, and my guest today is Alice Muir, Senior Growth Consultant at Feature. Alice works across a number of product and service verticals from health and fitness to fintech, helping apps improve their retention and CRM strategies. On the podcast, I talk with Alice about premium user onboarding, the tactics of lifecycle optimization, and why you shouldn't default to discounting for win-back campaigns.

Hey, Alice, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. Thanks for having me, David. And we've been talking about this for such a long time. One of the things I've said on the podcast many times before, but wanted to reiterate for those who maybe haven't heard, is that I really enjoy talking to folks like you who work with a lot of different apps and have worked with a lot of different apps over a longer period of time. I think there's a ton to learn from founders and people who worked at one company for 10 years or whatever. But they're really.

is a lot of learnings you get from working with so many different apps, where you try one strategy and it works incredibly well for one app, and then it like fails miserably for the next app. And it really makes you think deeper about why this is working, why it's not. I'm especially excited to have you, since you do and have worked with so many different apps there at Feature, what are some of the apps that you're currently working with or have recently worked with that you're able to share?

David Barnard (02:03.534)
Currently, I'm working with a couple of the Adobe apps. So I'm working with Adobe Reader and Adobe Express. I am also working with an interesting plant health care app. And in the past, I've worked with a wide range of different industries. For example, SoundCloud, the music industry. I've also worked with Keecker, which was a French-based rap music pocket studio.

And I guess in the same sort of industry I've worked with the local and Headspace, I worked with Headspace for a really long time working in the sort of health and wellness industry as well. Yeah, very cool. That's, I mean, that's quite a list there. Lots of great learnings, I'm sure. So there was a million different things that we could talk about. I mean, you've learned so much, you know, working with all those different apps, but today I did want to focus on a subscription life cycle strategy. I know that that's something you've been really focused on the last few years.

working with so many different subscription apps. What would you say is kind of an MVP setup? You've got an app, it's starting to grow, there's team bandwidth, there's resources to kind of put behind starting to think about subscription lifecycle and user journeys. Where would you suggest starting? Like where's the low-hanging fruit to get this set up and start actually having some wins in customer lifecycle marketing and just understanding user journeys?

So I think an important MVP setup would be something like a product analytics tool to start because obviously we want to understand where the opportunity area is. So we want to understand where the drop-offs are happening in the funnel. And that could be things like in the onboarding activation or specifically for subscription, it could be drop-offs in the purchase funnel or people that are just not activating on the premium experience.

So that would be my number one. In my experience, the low hanging fruit is the strategy, the strategic life cycle targeting, because you would be surprised at how many apps that we work with who are top apps on the App Store. But then when you look at the strategy and the life cycle stages that they're targeting, they might have absolutely nothing in place for people that have started a trial or are already subscribers, where they've got loads in place for...

David Barnard (04:22.114)
conversion, onboarding, free user activation, that kind of thing. And what I always say is that if you spend all this time converting people to a subscription, you need to make sure that you're also engaging with the people who have subscribed. And that could look like having another onboarding for premium users. It could look like making sure that premium users know where to go to actually...

use their premium features. A case, something that we had at Feature was for an app that basically allowed people to look into sort of investment resources and to provide financial advice. And there was reports, specialized reports that were available as part of the premium experience. And they came to us and they said, you know, we just don't really understand. We've got a lot of people interested in the premium experience, but we don't have...

people that are sticking around, they might convert and then they just cancel straight away. And we looked into their data and we realized it was because the feedback that we were getting from users was around, you know, we don't actually know where to go to get these reports that we've been promised. And so that's why the cancellations were high. And it was a really easy fix because we just needed a simple in-app message that said, hi and welcome to the premium experience.

here's where you go and check out your first report or whatever and just deep link people to those reports. So it was actually quite a straightforward fix, but they just needed somebody to point that out to them that you can't just ignore people that have subscribed. You need to kind of carry on communicating and engaging with people. Right. I hadn't really heard of that concept before of subscription onboarding. So you always think of like onboarding to the app, but tell me about

Yeah, some of the strategies you've seen. So once they actually start the free trial, would you add free trial start? Is that when you would potentially start this subscription onboarding and messaging cycle or once it fully converts? Yeah, I mean, it really depends because we've worked with apps that obviously don't have a free trial, in which case we would just say, right, let's scope out the premium user onboarding. Obviously if a user successfully completes the free trial, you probably don't want to resurface.

David Barnard (06:43.354)
know, the same messaging again to kind of guide them through the premium experience. I would hope at that point that you would have had scoped out and say, for example, it was a seven-day free trial, that we would scope out seven days worth of comms or at least a strategy for those seven days. And usually what I say to my team as well is it's not enough just to scope out certain messaging types or a strategy, but you also need to make sure that there's a specified goal for that.

free user or free trial onboarding as well. So as an example with the Plant Healthcare apps that we're working with just now, for the free trial, we want to make sure that users have actually had a chance to try the premium experience as part of that free trial goal. And there's a couple of key sort of conversion events within that we want to track, but the main purpose is that at the end of their free trial, we can say that...

the users have successfully completed XYZ event, which means that they really understand the value of premium. Yeah. And then, I mean, I guess the general approach there is kind of a feature education, but not necessarily like just teaching people how to use the app, but also kind of making sure they're experiencing the value that they're paying for, right? When you're looking for how to build out this premium onboarding, how do you think about

which features to highlight, how to highlight them, how to message them? Yeah, that's a really good question. In most cases with the apps that we work with, there's usually features that are part of the free experience. And then there's usually additional features that are part of the paid experience. So what I usually try and achieve or try to explain to our clients is that we want to make sure that the guided onboarding for the premium experience is really focused on.

those additional features. So the users might still perform events that they would have performed as part of the free experience, but really you want to make sure that the additional value that is offered is discovered by the user as part of that premium user onboarding or free trial onboarding experience. So with Headspace back in the days when before Headspace locked their content, there was a few things that you could do in the app. One of the main things was the basics pack. So

David Barnard (09:08.342)
You could go through the basics meditation pack and that would teach you key methods for mindfulness and meditation. But then if you upgraded to premium, you could actually choose certain packs based on issues that you were having in your life or key areas that you wanted to focus. So you could choose, for example, a stress pack or there was things like mindful eating, I think was one of them. There was also sleep as well.

And so what I would recommend is that if a user had become premium at that point, that you surface perhaps an in-app message survey that says, welcome to the premium experience. Can you let us know what features you were interested in? What brought you to premium? And then kind of guiding users and adding that extra bit of personalization to make sure that they activate on the thing that they're paid for, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, totally. And then how do you think about the blend

channels. So you've been talking a lot about in-app messaging. How do you think about also kind of following up with email and push notifications? And is that something where these tools like Brace are going to push the message when somebody's in the app, but if they haven't opened the app in a certain number of days, then it would go via push or via email? And is that kind of part of the flow of creating these if and statements of, you know, if they don't open or, you know, sequencing that way? Or how do you think about that blend of channels?

Yeah, we get asked this quite a lot. It's a really good question. I think from my experience, email is really good for running things like drip campaigns. So what we mean by drip campaigns is maybe offering one discount at the beginning. So if you have tracked in the data, the average time that it takes for a technical user to upgrade to premium, say it's seven days from downloading the app and you've got a segment of users who are not.

upgrading to premium within that seven days. Then what you could do is send an email campaign that said, you know, I'm gonna give you, for example, a 10% discount, we start off small. And then if that user still hasn't upgraded within two days later, five days later, maybe a week later, then you can start to slowly increase the discount percentage. And that's what we would call a drip campaign. That's something that Headspace did back in the early days.

David Barnard (11:34.442)
of me working with them. So we're talking maybe like two, three years ago. That's what they did and they saw some good results from that. I don't know if they're still doing that to date, but that's where email is really good. And I think email is really good for long form content as well. So keeping premium users engaged, if you've got an app that sort of fits into your lifestyle, I think Headspace again is a good contender for that because you can also save long form content about how to use

mindfulness or meditation within your daily life, for example, and just keeping people engaged with the concept of mindfulness. I think push has its limitations because as we all know, Apple has certain rules around what you can actually send in a push notification. And also on top of that, you don't want to be really spammy and try to kind of push sales on people's home screens because I think that's probably a recipe for it.

somebody unsubscribing from your push notifications. So I would say push is better for, as you alluded to earlier, win back scenarios and kind of reminding people that they're there or that they need to complete an action or just reminding people to come back and try something. Yeah, and then in addition to that, push notifications are becoming a harder and harder channel with iOS 16 where I'm missing more and more even just text messages now because of the way Apple changed up the...

You have to go into settings to revert it back to the old way of showing all your notifications on screen. And I doubt many users have done that. I don't know if you've seen this in the data at all, but it sure feels like it's less and less reliable as a way to reach people. In complement to that, what strategies do you think work better with in-app messaging? And then what styles of in-app messages are you working with? Like dropping down from above or like in a feed or like, yeah, tell me about how you think about in-app messaging.

I love that question because it ties into what we talked about before around the flexibility with in-app messages. We typically want to choose a tool that enables us to create custom in-app messages so that we can play around with the formats and stuff. We've had situations where we've created full screen in-app messages so that they look like native paywalls.

David Barnard (13:53.366)
And I think this is a really interesting topic because people talk a lot about, you know, paywall testing tools and how to go about paywall eb testing. But I haven't personally, I haven't seen a lot of information in the industry around using in-app messages as a kind of proxy for testing paywalls. It is possible, but it does have a lot of drawbacks as well. For example, the fact that depending on your setup, in-app messages are

the server was loading. And so sometimes there's glitches here and there where not everybody receives the in-app message, in which case if it was a crucial paywall that was early in your onboarding, for example, you're probably gonna want to have that as a native solution, just to ensure visibility. So that is one thing, having the full screen versions. But we've also, and I think we might have talked about this in a previous webinar as well, but we've also tested banner formats,

that have had really surprising conversion results. And then interstitial formats. We've tested things as well, like having Annika, who works on B-layer feature. B-layers are in-app messaging tool. She has created things like scratch cards functionality. So you could always like gamification within the in-app messages and also being able to kind of include like videos, things like that. I think it was...

Jake from Superwall as well, who said that video paywalls and video tutorials in paywalls perform really, really well. So that's something that we've wanted to test in-house as well. Those are some examples of different types of formats and ways of approaching in-app messages. It just dawned on me while you were talking, I've been seeing that a lot in my fitness pal specifically.

So I subscribe, I've been subscribed off and on to my fitness pal probably for like six or eight years. And you know, I'll track my diet really hardcore for a few weeks or a month. And then I kind of have a good sense of what I'm doing. And so I was on the annual plan for a little while. And then now I was on the monthly plan for a couple of months. So now I'm a free user, but there's still like a lot of freemium functionality that I can still use. So I still use it every once in a while. And I've been getting these like full screen.

David Barnard (16:12.062)
interstitials that like either lead to a paywall. And then I thought it was really interesting the other day, one came up that was just like a, did you know having an accountability partner, yada, yada. And it was kind of a call to action to kind of take you to a part of the app that I had never been to before. So I think that's a really good example of what you were talking about of kind of combining this feature education with a full screen. In this particular case, it was actually more like a pop-up.

where it took over just like a quarter of the screen and looked like a notification with the rest of the app darkened behind it. Seems like it can be a really effective way to kind of drive engagement to the parts of the app that maybe somebody hasn't used before that you know is a really valuable part of the app. Are there other specific examples that you can think of features that you've used this for or specific scenarios where it's been very successful in driving adoption or retention?

First of all, I absolutely love my fitness pal. I feel like it's a feature that I'm obsessed. I think I've been retained on that app for about three years or something. But what's interesting before I answer about the in-app messages, what's interesting about my fitness pal is that I get so much value out of the free experience that I am surprised.

that they get anybody to convert to premium because I just think honestly, with re-experience does everything that I needed to do and more. So a great example of an app that has a broad retention strategy. For in terms of in-app messages and innovative things that we can do. We did a project recently where we worked with a dating app that targeted, or at least had pricing that was split by locale. So that was an interesting challenge for us because this dating app didn't have.

an A-B testing tool to work with, right? So in terms of an A-B testing paywall tool, they had a CRM tool. So we had to work with in-app messages. And it was an interesting challenge because we wanted to run a bunch of tests on paywall and conversion messaging, but we had to work with the fact that there was different prices based on region. So my colleague, Alejandra, she actually did a lot of research on how can we pull

David Barnard (18:29.59)
dynamic links or dynamic price points into in-app messages. She's written an article that I think is on the feature blog about this. Her name is Alejandra Escobal, if anybody wants to Google that. And what we were able to do is create one in-app message. So one in-app message design and sort of template or structure or whatever. And then we would set that up as one individual campaign.

And based on the attribute that the user had, so based on their region, the price would dynamically change. So it's quite funny because I think in-app messages can sometimes be overlooked as paywall testing tools, but actually they're really, really powerful and quite flexible. And we had pretty good success with that. I think one limitation is that if you run a campaign like that, you cannot split the results by region. You would just get aggregate results and that's obviously not.

ideal in all scenarios. So there are limitations of it too. Yeah. So that's a really cool way to take a tool intended for one thing and kind of hack it into achieving the results and being able to test what you want to test. We've kind of already delved into some much more sophisticated strategies, but I did want to get a sense for when a client comes to you and they have the basics covered, what are those kind of next steps to really find and uncover the opportunities as an app?

grows to get more and more sophisticated about lifecycle messaging and these sorts of things. Yeah. So for apps that are really advanced in their strategy, they run hundreds of A-B tests a year. I think the biggest thing that we can do is usually apps that are at that stage have a lot of data. And so it means that we can kind of go into the data and pull correlation analysis.

So we can look at specific features or a specific path that users take that correlates with becoming a converted user or a premium user. And that kind of analysis or that type of work is really difficult for early stage startups or early stage apps because there's just not the data there to be certain about correlation, if that makes sense. So I think that that's probably one of the best or one of the biggest areas of opportunity is really, you know, how can we create segments of high converting users?

David Barnard (20:51.342)
find segments of people that replicate aspects of that behavior and we can kind of push them more towards the specific journey that does eventually correlate with conversion. So that would be one thing. And I think as well, oftentimes people that are starting out or apps that are quite new, they tend to have, maybe even if they have one paywall onboarding, they tend to sort of bury their paywalls and kind of bury the premium.

messaging or conversion messaging and deep into the journey. So that's also something that usually for clients that come to us and they're looking for us to pick holes in their strategy, I usually say to people, if the user doesn't see the opportunity to convert, they don't see a paywall, they don't receive any messaging about that, then there's a hundred percent chance that they're not going to convert. So sometimes it is more obvious things like that. And other times it's more about, well, we've got...

huge amount of data now we can actually leverage that data. What is that correlation analysis actually look like? Are you doing that in amplitude or is that a data warehouse situation where you're writing custom queries or how do you actually uncover those kind of optimal journeys? So amplitudes or mixed panel are great tools for being able to access that type of data. Not all clients have a setup like that. So sometimes we do have to

write a data brief or write some queenies or things like that. But basically what we would do is we would analyze key events that are part of the core functionality. And we would basically then kind of pull together what is essentially called a correlation analysis. So we would, I think in amplitudes, there's a score that's assigned to certain events to see how likely they are to correlate with another event. So in that case, you would say, right, how likely is it?

that completing X meditation pack, for example, correlates with somebody becoming a premium subscriber. And you would get amplitude would actually be able to show you a score that shows you that likelihood, if that makes sense. As growth marketers, it's much easier to have a tool like amplitude, for example, because you can sell serve, but that correlation analysis does get a bit complex if you have to have your analysts use the data warehouse or something like that. Yeah.

David Barnard (23:17.234)
I mean, what do you typically look at for endpoints that you're trying to correlate to? So you specifically setting like the subscription conversion event or a certain number of renewals as like your primary metric, and then you're looking kind of back down the funnel for correlation, or do you even do that with like onboarding completion and then look at correlation to just events that lead up earlier in the onboarding? Usually, I mean, onboarding completion could be one potentially.

With stuff like that though, what I struggle with people that are new to growth marketing or people that are new to the team is sometimes we pull analysis like that and it's kind of a bit stately. Obviously, we know that if somebody, but it's a funny thing because it's, if you're not an analyst or you're not trained in that way, you take somebody to point that out to you, but things like, you know, if somebody registers, then they're already showing a high intention with the product, right?

So we know that if somebody registers, that their intention is already high, and we've put time, especially if the app has a non-mandatory registration. So we could already make a guess that segment of users that have chosen to register are good candidates for an upsell. When we're doing the correlation analysis, it's usually things like, if we use the Pocket Studio example, people who have entered the Core Inters studio, and they've used a particular filter, for example,

like particular advanced editing feature, those users are more likely to convert to subscription. And usually the reason around that is that, they have a needs or a high intention to use professional editing features. And then once you kind of have those correlations, what are the practical steps? So you specifically build an in-app message pointing people to use that or...

an email campaign about the value of editing and how it's going to improve your business or make you an influencer star or something like that. Once you've done the correlation analysis, what's the practical steps to actually get value and drive those outcomes? That's a really fun part because when we run an audit for a client that we're just new with, or if I was to dive into an app that had been approached by, I would...

David Barnard (25:38.594)
First of all, spend time building the business case and the audit and the storyline of what, or the timeline of what the next six months to 12 months look like. And that's when you would have things like your correlation analysis, you'd have funnel analysis, so you're looking at different screens to understand where people drop off. At that point, once you've kind of finished building out the timeline and the scope, then you move into, right, okay, so we know we've got these drop-offs, how can we kind of...

fill those gaps or bring people back in. And exactly as you said, you know, with an email campaign work, if you know, we see that there's a segment of users that look like they have a certain amount of conversion potential, would it just take, you know, a 10% discount here just to kind of nudge them in the right direction? And I think that's what CRM is all about really. It's just about giving people that extra nudge or the extra push in the right direction of the behavior that you want them to take, keeping in mind natural.

behaviors and natural frequency and things like that as well. So a good example is a period tracking app, right? You might work in the CRM department or work for a client like that. There's no way that you're gonna get users to use the app from a monthly to a daily frequency because it depends on the site. So.

It's all about nudging people in the right direction, the behaviors you want them to take, but making sure that it's actually a realistic strategy with the natural frequency of usage, if that makes sense. Well, we've already started to touch on it, but the next thing I did want to talk about is churn prevention strategies. I think when a lot of people think CRM, the very first thing they think is winbacks. And of course we've already kind of explored so many different

ways that a CRM tool can provide so much more value than just win-backs. But win-backs are a really important thing. So I'd love to kind of hear some of your success stories and tactics behind how you think about win-backs and what kind of results you're able to see in optimizing those strategies. I agree with you. I think that a lot of people talk about, you know, quick wins and win-backs, but actually the way that I would describe the approach that I take is more holistic and kind of long-term, looking at long-term success.

David Barnard (27:53.994)
I think somebody that you've had on the podcast previously, you talked about this a lot as well is Robbie Killen-Baxter. I've noticed that, I thought the podcast episode with Robbie Killen-Baxter was brilliant. And I've kind of listened to or read other things that she's written. And she always makes a great point about the fact that you need to be constantly creating value for the user. It's not just about a user that's thinking of churning and at that point you kind of step in and say, hey, come back.

It's more about making sure that throughout the subscription, that you're continuing to add value to people's lives. And the way that I do that through CRM is, I would say, you know, similar to as we talked about before, I would look at the different journeys that are in place. And if a publisher that I'm working with is spending a lot of time converting people to a subscription, but then completely ignoring them for the entirety of their subscription, then I would kind of...

Which is really common. I would kind of say, maybe we could add some quick wins and win back strategies at the, at the end of the funnel. Sure. But I think it's kind of slapping a bandaid on the problem. And I think this is really topical at the moment because obviously we're in the middle of a recession or a cost of living crisis in some places and people are, they're looking at what's coming out of their bank account and people are scrutinizing.

products more than they would have been in the past. I always use the example of Netflix. I think that, I mean, I live in Germany, so maybe it's just the German content, but for me, I think Netflix has really slowed down in terms of the content that is available that I want to watch. And so I'm not the only person that I've spoken to recently that's considering even canceling a Netflix subscription for that reason. It's kind of a mixture of

making sure that you're engaging with people throughout this description, but also making sure that you're continuing to provide new content, you know, adds a new value. I think Headspace is a great example of an app that has been quite creative in how it deals with this because with Headspace, once somebody knows how to meditate, all they really need is.

David Barnard (30:10.034)
stopwatch or a clock on their phone that they can then say, right, I need three minutes of silence. And that's what they're competing with. But Headspace have been really smart and, you know, over the years in that they've then said, right, well, how can we bring mindfulness to exercise? Or how can we bring mindfulness to sleep? And it's adding new use cases and continuing to add value so that people are not getting bored of the core experience of core value proposition.

Yeah, that's great. Pointing people back to the value of making sure that you continue delivering on the value and, you know, you alluded to Robbie Kellman Baxter, the subscription is the start of your relationship with them, not the end of your relationship, the end goal is not for them to subscribe, that's the start of the long-term retention and with the revenue cat annual report that we put out earlier this year.

You know, consumer subscriptions, it's tough. The median retention at one year for an annual subscription is somewhere around 25%. And so finding wins in retention can start to compound long-term and really build a much better business. You know, if you're churning out 75% of your users at the end of one year, it's really tough to build a solid business. You're just constantly having to bring in new users. So...

these strategies in applying them and thinking in this way, I think can have a huge impact long term, but even in the short term, just continuing to get that revenue in. I think that's why my fitness pal has such a good retention strategy because it really taps into the user psychology. I think at the end of every day, when you log your vid diary, it says, if every day was like today, here's where you would be in five weeks.

And so it really kind of keeps people, again, that's part of the free experience. It's not part of the paid experience, but it really keeps people engaged in the taps into the psychology of like goal setting and future and planning and things like that. And I think the fact that it's so personalized as well, makes it a really, really good strategy. But I think the other good thing that we do in relation to this topic is, is that they also have really good blog content that's constantly updated.

David Barnard (32:20.586)
I think I've seen things like recipes on there as well, different kind of exercises to try and all of that kind of stuff. So you're constantly engaged not only with your own progress, but also with the content that's in the app. And I think that's really important. Yeah. We already started to answer it, I guess. But then the next question I was going to ask you was around spotting and then re-engaging users before they actually churn, both kind of engagement churn as we've been discussing, but then also like fully churning, canceling the subscription. So in addition to what we've already discussed...

Are there specific ways to spot that churn before it happens? And then like, how do you think about spotting the churn and then finding ways to re-engage those users? Yep. So we would normally segment users that we considered to have started to disengage. So in order to do that, you need to understand what your expected frequency of usage is to begin with. Say that's weekly, right? And then you've got a segment of users that are maybe...

using the app every two weeks or every three weeks, then you're kind of thinking they're still using the app. They obviously still have a need for it, but they're kind of starting to drift. They're starting to disengage. And there can be a number of different reasons. It doesn't always mean that the person doesn't want to use your products anymore. There can be a mix of external and internal factors that can influence that. For example, if we go back to an app that

a period tracking app, we ran a survey with them with their disengaging users. That sounds really obvious, but we figured out that there was a segment of users that actually were pregnant and so they didn't need to use the app. I mean, it sounds so obvious when you think about it, but, and lo and behold, we still, you know, we still had to go and uncover that. But there was a segment of users that obviously didn't need to use the app in the same way. And so.

The product that we were working with had to find a way to keep those people engaged. Now, luckily it had a strong brand and was well known for women's health research. And so a lot of people would still stick around and just know her name as frequently because they liked the content. It was like medical research and things like that. But that would have been a prime example of an app that needed to also be quite creative in adding new use cases. There can also be other things that.

David Barnard (34:43.602)
Unfortunately, we're just out with the publishers control things like competition with other apps, but also with native competition as well. For example, the Apple Health app has evolved really nicely over the last few years, which means that apps like period trackers and even, you know, sort of running and calorie trackers. There is more competition because people are like, why would I pay for that when I get it for free or a version of it for free on my phone?

So, you know, these are things, external factors that we have to be creative and work alongside. Yeah. So then how, as an example, with the period tracking app, once you uncovered that thing, you know, okay, while they're pregnant and then even into breastfeeding, I mean, my wife and I've had four kids, so I'm pretty aware of how all that goes. Yeah. It can be months before they start having a period again if they're breastfeeding. And so did you actually build a specific campaign around...

pregnancy health and then target a re-engagement in the future. And then how would those kind of strategies maybe play out in different apps where you find specific cohorts and specific reasons behind potential churn or engagement churn? So for this particular project, it was more about doing a bit of opportunity scoping and building out a business case study or a timeline for the next few months. So that was something that we kind of said to the week to make sure that you're still leveraging content for those specific users.

Unfortunately, I've not had the chance to actually try and win those types of users back. I think it would be really difficult, you know, and even in the space of time, just because obviously we do now have the Apple health. I'm on iOS, which is why I always say Apple, but I'm sure Android has an equivalent as well. That's the tricky thing, isn't it? Because then you're talking nine, 10 months plus out of usage. And as we all know about habits, it's, you know, it takes 30 days at least to kind of build a habit again. So.

then my suggestion there would be, you need to think about the users that are stuck around, but maybe at the beginning of being able to come back and really thinking about habit reinforcement. And that could even look like re-onboarding users. It could look like bringing people back, reminding them why they signed up in the first place. Those types of things are good. I think it was Headspace, for example, at some point we tested a commitment campaign where we said to people, here are the reasons why you've joined Headspace.

David Barnard (37:05.418)
And then we would kind of resurface that later to say like, remember you wanted to reduce stress, you wanted to do this, that next thing. And that was quite an effective way to remind people and sort of reinforce the habit as well, which can be very challenging. And then lastly, as we're wrapping up, I mean, we both kind of talked about it not being the end all be all of CRM, but are there specific win-back strategies that you have seen work well? You know, when somebody does actually.

turn off the free trial or they've been subscribed for a year on an annual plan or a few months on a monthly plan. And then they hit that turn off auto renew button. What's some of the low hanging fruit there or interesting experiments you've seen be successful in winning back some of those users who've turned? So some really cool campaigns I've seen at feature are things like reminding people of the features that they're going to lose. I worked with

a couple of years ago and that was something that we were able to do was to sort of remind people of the benefits that they lose when they don't have membership anymore. Reminds in people as well, or creating a sense of urgency around that. So saying, you've got seven days left of this particular filter, this kind of thing. And another one as well that worked both in terms of conversion and for people that had cancelled was

Something really cool that we had done for our creative app was we implemented screenshot capture functionality. So if somebody had tried to screenshot something creative, that was actually a premium feature that they could test out, we would sort of say to them, like, this is actually better in high resolution or if you want to be able to download this, you know, and it was almost like a bit of a guilt trip. It was kind of tapping into psychology. That worked really nicely as well. But I think.

You know, reminding people of what they're going to mess out on, reminding people of their usage and features that they have enjoyed, or I think was another photography app that we worked with, we were able to resurface images that they'd created in the past as a kind of celebration of their membership. So we did that. Yeah. So you get really creative with these things, but the basic principles remain the same, just reinforcing the value proposition, I would say.

David Barnard (39:24.694)
So the one thing you didn't mention was discounting, which I think is really interesting, but kind of speaks to your mindset. It's that discounts are kind of the obvious, like everybody try like, yeah, hey, 40% off. I mean, even Headspace, I've been a subscriber to Headspace and just in the last week, I got an email like, come back 40% off, you know, seven days only if you resubscribe or whatever.

I imagine you still use discounts, but how have you seen that blend? Or do you even use both at the same time of like reminding people of the value and offering them a discount? But what's kind of the blend you see of like things really performing well, just discounting or just value or both? Discount works well. I think my only concern about discount, well, two concerns. Obviously there's a limit to how much you can discount before you're actually kind of losing money or not really making money on those subscribers.

I think as well, depends on the size of the discount, you know, you might end up having a whole lot of low intent subscribers in your app, which is also not a great long-term strategy. Of course, discounts do tend to work, but these are things that we do need to think about. The other thing that I think works quite nicely, other than just reminding people of their usage and features, it's also kind of things like reminding people what might be coming up.

If, for example, you've got a new release coming out and you feature release, reminding people that that's there and that that's coming up and that they're not going to have access to that too, can be quite effective. But I would say that just being careful to balance discounts with making sure that you're actually bringing high intent people back into the app, because obviously that's a longer term strategy. And also you could segment it by, if you've got enough data, you could segment it by people.

If you understand how many times on average a user renews, and you could see somebody who's at the end of that average time, you might be a bit more inclined to offer a discount at that stage. Whereas if you know that on average people renew three to four times and somebody's at their second time renewal, maybe that's something to consider as well as like not to be so fast on the discount and maybe wait until after the average renewal time has passed.

David Barnard (41:38.194)
I love that too, the little insights of like remind people what's coming. Like I can imagine for like a photo app, if it's the spring, a fun campaign, win back campaign would be, Hey, you know, you just canceled, but summer vacations coming up, this filter would look great on your beach pics or something like that. Yeah. That's a really cool idea. Well, Hey, it's been so fun chatting with you. There's a lot of, I don't often get to go so nitty gritty into the tactics and how you actually do things. And.

Again, that's part of why I was so excited to talk to you, having worked with so many different apps and actually being in the thick of things, doing the actual work. So yeah, it was so fun and there's so much value in what you shared. As we wrap up, was there anything you wanted to share? I know Feature is accepting clients and hiring or anything like that. Yeah. I think the one thing that's stuck in mind for me is the subscription stack. So I have published a new framework on behalf of Feature and it's called the subscription stack.

And it's basically a strategic framework for operating a mobile subscription business. So the stack itself has many different layers that cover things like tech and infrastructure that you might need if you have a subscription business, activation and engagement retention strategies, things to consider for term prevention, all of that good stuff. And part of the subscription stack is also a series of articles that are on our blog.

that sort of dive deeper into each of those areas of the stack as well. So we've got that on the website at the moment. I think it's feature.com slash subscription stack, or at least if you type in feature.com, there's a banner at the top that you can access that. And I'm also looking for guest writers and things as well. If anybody wants to contribute to any of those topics, please do reach out to me as well. Awesome. Well, thanks again so much, Al. So it was so fun talking to you today. That was great fun.

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