5 Best Practices for Boosting Subscription App Monetization 

You’ve built a fantastic app that delivers tremendous value to your users (yay!).  But, to stay afloat in the subscription app industry, you’ll need to be able to monetize it effectively.

As subscription app engagement is one of the core focuses of our platform, we’ve put together some strategies to consider when trying to maximize your app’s monetization.

Test your pricing and discounts

Testing need not only apply to events, messaging, and campaigns.  Given how central pricing is to monetization, it’s essential to test your pricing for better optimization.  You can even test your annual subscription prices and see how it performs with your target users to make data-driven decisions around your pricing structure.

When you use automatically applied discounts, you want to first run quality checks on them.  This is critical to making sure your promotions provide a user-friendly and intuitive experience.  You don’t want to have frustrated and confused customers at check out!

This type of testing is possible using remote configuration tools like Leanplum Variables and sending coupons to your customers through push, email, and in-app messaging.

Track your conversion data 

Knowing your premium conversion rates will help with understanding how successful your current approach and campaigns are.  

Using a free trial and having a lower conversion rate could indicate friction within the app experience or communication preventing users from purchasing.

Similarly, when taking a freemium approach, understanding the ratio between freemium and premium users lets you know whether your premium features and messaging need to be reevaluated to improve how they appeal to users. 

Use freemium to impact ad revenue 

Are you using in-app advertising for monetization?  You can adopt a freemium strategy to elevate user engagement.  Making updates and improvements to freemium app features draws users in and enhances engagement and monetization even more.  

You can gain valuable feedback from analyzing data to see which new features lead to more daily active users and result in more ad revenue. 

You can also track custom events like ad impressions and use attribution to determine which campaigns work best to increase impressions, while keeping an eye on uninstall and churn rates.

Identify the best premium subscription paywall

If you’re monetizing your app with a premium subscription model, you want to start by ensuring your freemium offers provide enough benefits to your users.

Then, as you release new features, make these available exclusively to premium subscribers behind paywalls, advertising these new capabilities at just the right moment when users need them.

Using audience segmentation and in-app messages or push notifications outside of the app ensures your messages get to the right people at the right moment.

You can further optimize your premium strategy by running tests to see which paywalls are the most successful.

Testing and data to improve your monetization approach

Understanding how users engage with your subscription app brings important clues to improving how you monetize.  Specifically, you want to see which elements compel users to subscribe.  These insights help you find ways to improve your app experience or even the campaigns and messaging that advertise your offerings and capabilities.

Using the comprehensive Leanplum platform, you’re able to easily customize and change aspects of your in-app messaging, email, and push notifications, including audience segmentation for precise targeting.  You can also track and analyze engagement data with A/B testing and Leanplum variables all in one place.

This way, more users get to experience all the advantages of using your app while expanding your revenue and success.

Want to learn more?

  • Check out our Subscription App Data Science Report for more ideas to increase user engagement through personalization.
  • Take our Product Tour to get a sneak peek at how you can leverage the Leanplum platform for your app’s use cases.
  • Schedule a complimentary personalized Product Demo to see Leanplum in action.