Gratitude’s monthly returning users increase by 50%, thanks to grace period and improvements to app quality
Gratitude is a mental wellness and self-care app designed to encourage the daily practice of gratitude and mindfulness. Since 2018, the app has helped more than 3.5 million people develop a gratitude practice through guided journaling, positive affirmations, and vision boards.
While Gratitude was offered as a free app for 18 months post launch, it decided to monetize in 2019 to become sustainable. But they had a few challenges -
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They wanted to experiment with subscription trials, but were apprehensive about the revenue impact due to churn.
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They also worried that measuring conversions and handling cancellations would be too complex to manage with a small team.
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They were unsure how to monetize their Indian users. Previous subscription trials and conversions hadn’t performed very well in this region, in part because of the popularity of payment methods that weren’t supported at the time.
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They had also noticed how their occasional special events had affected engagement, but had never developed a comprehensive marketing strategy around them. Similarly, they noticed a significant impact on conversions due to strong visual elements in their store listing, but hadn’t developed a strategy to optimize them, either.
Exploring new monetization opportunities with Play Commerce
Gratitude began using Play Console years ago to manage their app releases, but as the app grew, the team began exploring more monetization features offered by Google Play’s commerce platform.
Recently, after updating to Play Billing Library 5, the team decided to try the new subscription capabilities after hearing success stories from other apps. Here’s what they did:
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To celebrate World Gratitude Day, they launched a heavily discounted subscription offer.
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They used the Real Time Developer Notification API and Google Play Developer APIs to run and analyze pricing experiments to find the right price point.
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After deployment, they used the acquisition and retention reports in Play Console to understand their subscription performance and make data-driven adjustments.
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They also enabled the grace period and account hold features to help retain users who may have encountered temporary payment issues. User cancel surveys also offered insights to help improve their retention strategy.
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To reach more users in India, they also enabled the new UPI payment option in Google Play Billing.
Maximizing their reach with promotional content
In addition to the subscription offer, they also launched a 30-Day Gratitude Challenge and a major app update with bullet lists and voice journaling, all of which were featured with high and very high-priority promotional content.
The team also ran screenshot experiments within their store listing experiments to help them find the most effective images.
They also revamped the app design to follow Material 3 design guidelines for its simplicity and consistency with the Android platform. Until then, the app didn’t have a consistent design language, which was creating inconsistency in the user experience.
Gratitude’s integrated marketing strategy leads to major improvements
To overcome the hurdles and hesitations listed above, Gratitude took on an integrated marketing approach. They experimented with a platter of Google Play’s tools as well as their own initiatives.
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App quality improvements: Pritesh Sankhe, CEO and founder of Gratitude, says the improvements to the Gratitude app offer a better user experience, with more personalization, better accessibility, more content updates, and fewer bug fixes. Some specifics include:
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Introducing a “What’s new” section to the app that has increased awareness of major updates.
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Seeing fewer complaints and refund requests as a direct result of quality improvements. And combined with other efforts, Gratitude’s monthly returning users increased by 50%.
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Witnessing a 50% increase in installed devices, a 20% increase in daily and monthly active users, and a 100% boost in revenue.
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Short-term offers: The 30-day Gratitude challenge along with a week-long subscription offer for World Gratitude Day had a huge impact: Revenue grew by 2x in July-Sep (when the event took place) compared to the previous quarter.
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Grace period: By giving users a grace period to fix their payment method, they were able to reduce involuntary churn and improve their subscription retention rates.
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Multiple subscription plans: The ability to configure multiple base plans and offers under one subscription SKU enabled them to create offers for different occasions without significant changes, which allowed them to be more responsive to events and celebrations.
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Promo content: As a result of their promotional content, the team saw a 5x increase in paid trials, a 2-3x surge in free trials, a 2x increase in returning users, and a 2x increase in new user acquisitions.
Google Play Console is the most important tool to help us achieve our business goals, says Sankhe. It’s a go-to tool for almost the entire lifecycle of our app. We use custom store listings and experiments for acquisition, subscription management for monetization, and Android vitals and reviews/ratings management for referrals and retention.
As a result of these experiments, the Gratitude team now takes a new approach to their marketing plan. All scheduled app updates are now combined with store listing experiments, promotional content, custom store listings, and paid campaigns. While they had experimented with a few of these features in the past, they have realized that they can achieve much bigger results by deploying them all at once.
Based on their success, the team is planning to continue to roll out targeted subscription offers for events such as Diwali, Thanksgiving, and New Year’s.