This is our quest to add 1000 new monthly subscriptions a day by running 1000 payment experiments on our product Crowdfire.
Before we begin, there are a few things that you should know:
- We have 15 Million registered users
- We have recurring monthly subscription plans on the web starting from $9.99. On Android and iOS, the users had to opt for the same subscription but without a recurring payment commitment.
- Until now we’ve been focusing on our product development and user acquisition. Now we’ve put together a team that focuses on the business side of the product. It’s time for us to look at monetisation and crack it!
- We are currently adding approximately 300 new monthly subscriptions a day, up from 100 a day before we started running these experiments.
June 2016: Laying the groundwork for our payment experiments. We’ve started tracking all the metrics that we can. A few metrics are still not tracked, we’ll get them done in the next two weeks.
We had a small meeting — our first ever payment meeting where we opened up Google Analytics and looked at the web’s payment page. We realised that during a month :
- 60,000 users landed on the payment page
- 12% of these clicked on the Subscribe button and were presented the payment pop up
- 40% of these entered their credit card details or clicked the ‘Pay with Paypal’ link
- 70% of these successfully paid us = 2000 paying subscribers
We had been tracking the transaction success metrics for Stripe and Paypal, the two payment processors we have on our website. We noticed the following:
- 90% of those who entered their credit card details completed their transaction successfully
- Only 50% of those who clicked ‘Pay with Paypal’ completed their transaction successfully
Based on the above findings we decided to run Experiment number 1.
Experiment 1: Drop the ‘Pay with Paypal’ link
Platform: Web
We ran the experiment for a week. It was driven by the idea that if we don’t offer users a bad choice (because the ‘Pay with Paypal’ option offered only 50% conversion), then they would go with the only available alternative (i.e., Stripe) and our payments would increase because Stripe offered 90% conversion.
Result: Failure
We did see an increase in the Stripe payment but it wasn’t near the total amount of successful payments we used to get from Paypal and Stripe combined. We concluded that it could be because users who pay via Paypal aren’t really comfortable entering their credit card details on a different website. It could also be the lethargy of opening your wallet and entering your credit card details as against entering your Paypal username and password.
Experiment 2: Drop the One time payment
Platform: iOS and Android
While we had monthly recurring subscription plans on our website, we had been offering non recurring plans on our iOS and Android apps. We knew that this would be one of the biggest movers for our 1000 subscriptions per day goal. We weren’t sure if the mobile users would opt for the subscription plans. But the positive part of the assumption (that they would) was that since we help them with their work/business, they wouldn’t shy away from paying us a monthly fee.
Result: Success
While we did see a small dip in the recurring monthly plan subscribers compared to our non recurring plan subscribers, the fact that these are recurring subscriptions far outweighs the dip.
Experiment 3: The 40% discount
Platform: iOS and Android
Our cheapest plan has been for $9.99 per month. We decided to offer a discount on our monthly plans in order to increase our paid subscribers. We offered a 40% discount to a small section of our users.
Result: Success
We saw a 33% increase in subscriptions.
Experiment 4: To strike or not to strike
Platform: iOS
We tested this by first offering a discount without showing the original price. Then we included the original price, struck it off, and showed the discounted price.
Result: 70% increase in new subscriptions!!! So it’s best to show the original price along with the discounted price, We’ll run this on the Web and Android soon.
Experiment 5: Let me pay yearly!
Platform: iOS and Android
We’ve never offered yearly payment options on our monthly subscriptions even though a few users had asked us before about it. We decided to experiment by offering a yearly payment option on our monthly plans on Android and iOS.
Result: Success
While we were a little apprehensive before, we’re seeing a healthy number of users signing up for our yearly payment plan. While getting in a larger revenue, the yearly payment option also helps us in increasing the lifetime value of a user.
That’s it for now, folks. We’re working crazy hours as a team to run these experiments quickly. It’s fun and involves a lot of hard work. We’re learning a lot too. I’ll be back next week with the next set of experiments.