Moving free users from web to app
App usage is strongly correlated with increased engagement and conversion. One of my team’s primary KRs was to increase the percentage of free users in the app. We’ve tested many approaches to this over the years. Here are a few things I’ve learned:
The best web-to-app interventions are contextual and related to the user’s current need.
While app usage is tied to subscription, frustrating users with too much friction can still backfire, even if it increases app download rates.
Role
UX Design, Visual Design
Collaborators
Product, Engineering, Data, UX Writing
Outcomes
77% lift in app download rates
$18MM lift in LTV from subscription test
Finding new moments to move users to the app
I was asked to come up with new moments in the customer journey when the user might want to try the app. To start I spent some time thinking about what triggers could push someone to the app. I outlined content triggers as well as actions that might indicate to us that the user is primed for the app. I did some very simple user flows and quick visual explorations to flesh out the concepts first.
Creating a login interstitial
The login interstitial stood out to us as having potential for high impact, and was also more straightforward for us technically and politically. It addresses a common user issue (being logged out in mobile web) at the moment of frustration and presents the app as a solution.
Results
77% lift in app download rates
This experience currently only runs to subscribers as we pivoted to showing a subscription offer here for free users
Additional uses for this new surface
During a period when improving immediate starts was important, we pivoted to using this surface to show a subscription offer. It has remained a very effective conversion touchpoint, with a higher CVR than our paywall. This change resulted in an additional $18MM in LTV.
The flip side of web-to-app interventions
Not every test produces the desired results, but we can still learn a lot from them! Our team was asked to explore an app download overlay on the homepage. Leadership wanted to take a very aggressive approach. However, our previous testing had taught us that (1) more aggressive approaches often negatively impact our other important metrics, and (2) maintenance of a new overlay like this is often not worth the engineering cost.
I designed a multivariate test with low, medium, and high friction approaches to see if we could find the right balance. The low and medium variants used as much of our existing messaging units as possible.
results
Users who take the less intrusive app download are more likely to have positive outcomes (CVR, return rate) in the app, but conversion declined overall in all variants.
High friction variant increased app download, but at an untenable cost to return rate, page views, fast bounce and halo conversion.