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Paywall Strategy: How 2 Paywalls Tripled Trial Starts

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“The DTC platform trusted by the world's leading mobile game publishers like triple.and sigh play. For a long time, game studios selling in-game items had only one option, iOS or Android building systems at a 30% fee.”From the transcript

Join the App Founders Community:

https://appfounders.co/

What happens when you show users 2 paywalls instead of 1?

In this video, I break down a real-world paywall test that helped triple trial starts, from roughly 3% to 7.7%, without a major increase in downloads.

You’ll see how the strategy works, why different users respond to different offers, and how adding a second paywall can give both ready-to-pay users and trial-driven users a path to subscribe.

I’ll also break down the pricing strategy, social proof, weekly vs. yearly plans, and the number of paywall views you should aim for before diminishing returns set in.

You’ll learn:

✅ Why 2 paywalls can outperform 1

✅ How the first and second paywalls were structured

✅ Why social proof matters on your paywall

✅ How paywall views can impact revenue

✅ The 8 paywall views benchmark for diminishing returns

✅ How to think about paywall strategy and user psychology

If you're working on app monetization, subscriptions, onboarding, or paywall optimization, this test is worth understanding.

🚀 Need help growing your app?

App Masters:

https://www.appmasters.com

You can also watch this video here:

https://youtu.be/hs_hZS__hvA

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Paywall Strategy: How 2 Paywalls Tripled Trial Starts

App Marketing by App Masters

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App Marketing by App Masters — Paywall Strategy: How 2 Paywalls Tripled Trial Starts. Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.

This episode is sponsored by App Charge. The DTC platform trusted by the world's leading mobile game publishers like triple.and sigh play. For a long time, game studios selling in-game items had only one option, iOS or Android building systems at a 30% fee. DTC is the alternative and today, its table stakes across the industry. App Charge makes it simple, a branded web store, payment links, and a full merchant of record service that handles taxes, compliance, and global payments end to end. The result? Studios keep up to 95% of every sale. Learn more at appcharge.com. That once again is appcharge.com. Here's a number that completely stopped me. 92% of all iOS e-commerce ads spend now goes to

remarketing. Yes, remarketing, not acquisition, but re-engagement. The playbook has completely flipped. Apps flyer just released their state of e-commerce app marketing report for 2016 and its full of data like this. Platform trends, conversion benchmarks, fraud signals, market by market breakdowns. If you're planning your Q4 budgets, this is required reading. It's free. Grab it at the link in the description. Coming up, I'm going to share with you a crazy paywall test that proves that your paywall views equal more money. Stay tuned. What is up app nation? It is your favorite app marketer in all of YouTube. Stay tuned. I'm going to share with you an interesting paywall strategy that you may want to

copy and stay towards the end because I'm going to share with you the exact number of paywall views before you start seeing diminishing returns. Let's get started. All right. Spoiler alert, it is having two paywalls, not one, but two paywalls on your onboarding experience. Here it is. We saw stronger sales and we're going to share with you all the data with these two paywalls. Here's the first paywall. It's without a trial by the way and it's a soft paywall. The X is delayed by three seconds and then we have the plans right here. I'll break this all down to you. Give you a better visual. Here's a second paywall. Normal paywall. I've talked about this. These three paywall screens as well. They do perform pretty well. Here's the second paywall after these three screens. Here is where we have the trial. Here's the complete onboarding.

Choose your language. First paywall. Go on to the onboarding. Then those three screen reminders, those paywalls screens, where we just say, hey, we want you to try for free. We'll send you a reminder. Here's how your free trial works and here's the second paywall. Notice that it has some social proof down here. We have seen this perform better than not having any social proof. So you definitely want some social proof on your paywall. Let's compare those two paywalls right here. You got this initial paywall and then you got this secondary. You can see the weekly plan is a little bit cheaper with the first paywall and they have no trials. The yearly plan is the same. Okay. Because of the nature of this app, weekly tends to perform better. So you definitely want to try weekly and if you're going to put a trial on anything, put it on the weekly and not the yearly. And I like this type of payment structure because as you can see, some people are just going to pick the yearly because it's cheap enough, whereas some people will try it for a week and then

you know, probably cancel after two or three cycles. So here is what happened when we did this. You can see it was added at the end of May. In May, we're only converting the start trial rate because they only have the trial. That secondary paywall only had this paywall. Only converting about 3% of the traffic. Okay. Crazy. In June, 4.4 in July, 7.7. Now we've had this case study since probably late June, but I really wanted the July numbers before I created the video. So you can see the insane start rate, what it's done for this and the conversion rate has held steady despite those two paywalls. So we're keeping an eye on this, but we've seen that do well, but this start rate is going really well and that start rate counts for those with trial and without trial. So you can see the trial, the paid rate hasn't changed much despite the two paywalls. Here's what happened to the actual purchases. Now bear in mind, this three day trial,

it is the three day trial. It used to be nothing. This green light used to have the trial and that's why there was traction here. But as you can see in June, so people are still buying the one without the trial, but now that they've seen both, they're really buying the one with that trial. So this green line is that first paywall in June. And you can see in June, it's pretty equal, but in July, there's been some separation now with that secondary paywall that has the trial. Now here are the sales. Okay. So this again, this was the trial, the blue line right here, the developer messed it up. Okay. But as you can see, so it was getting some things now that in June, when we moved to no trial, you can see there were good number of sales happening that first month. You're still seeing good number of sales happen the second month with renewals and all, but now you're starting to see that the trial one is starting to really pick up. The thing I want you to take away from this actual screen is both plans on the first paywall and the second paywall are

generating money. Right. So the more paywall views you get, the more money you're going to make. Because there's going to be a certain part of the audience that is ready to pay and there's going to be a secondary part of the audience that needs that trial. So cater to both cater to both. Right. And lastly, you can see the sales are starting to really climb. It went from just about a thousand in May to all the way to almost 3000 in July. So it's been a big impact on sales alone, just having those multiple paywalls. You can see the downloads hasn't been changed too much. Right. Maybe you've got an influx in downloads. No, we actually had more in April. We only had one paywall and more in May when we had more in paywall. But as you can see, July less downloads, more money. Now, for you nerds out there who want to understand the psychology of it, there's a great medium post that my friend John sent over in our app founders community and they really talk about

how, why the free toggle works. And part of it is they say the toggle was our way of acknowledging that bull type of users is this at the same time. Those that are willing to pay right out and those that need a trial. And so you can understand why those two paywall strategies work because those that don't need that trial and they're willing to pay, they're going to get that initial paywall. Right. But those that do need it, hey, they got that secondary paywall as well. And lastly, eight paywall views. That's what you got to hit before you start seeing diminishing returns. This is a number that Jake from Superwall gave me years ago during our podcast episode. He said, eight paywall views is what you got to hit before you start seeing diminishing returns. So that's why just showing two paywalls during the onboarding is working well for this developer.

One more thing I want to thank Aman from our team. This is his app. He's testing paywall strategies with his own app. That's the advantage that you get when you work with our team is we've got our own apps, whether it's my own app, whether it's our teammates own apps that we're testing a lot of different strategies before we bring it to you, the client or to you, the YouTube audience. So if you're interested in working with us, go to appmasters.com. And if you want to join an amazing community of over a hundred six, seven figure app entrepreneurs app founders will go to appfounders.co. Appfounders.co. You do it on your own, but learn from us at masters.com. Well, we'll do everything for you in. You can still learn from us. All right. Until next time, I'll see you on the next video. By the way, don't forget to hit that like button and subscribe. Leave a comment below, all right? It helps the algorithm. All right. I'll catch you.

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