Black Friday is a critical moment for mobile apps. While the holiday has long been associated with brick and mortar stores, lately the app economy has become a significant part of the holiday. In fact, there's even an adjacent day just for digital offerings — Cyber Monday.
With millions of users searching for deals around the same date, it's a golden opportunity to capture their attention and turn them into paying customers. To help with that mission, here are four ideas to try during Black Friday.
Product setup
Before getting started, you should think about the products you'll offer. When setting them up for Black Friday, the type of discount you offer can significantly impact your app’s long-term revenue. Offering products that are discounted indefinitely might seem appealing, but it can create challenges down the road.
Our advice? Lean towards creating a product that offers a discounted rate for the initial subscription duration, and then renews at the standard rate. For example:
Standard annual plan: $39.99
Black Friday annual plan: $29.99/1st year, renews at $39.99
While the products and price points you go with will be driven by your app's business goals, at Superwall we like this setup because it can activate new, or churned, users while still remaining healthy for your revenue down the line.
However you set up your products, it's a good idea to get them into App Store Connect or Google Play so they're ready to go for Black Friday. Once you add them, you'll want to test them before release. For that, a Storekit configuration file is the way to go:
Idea 1: Limited-time introductory pricing
A Black Friday staple — promoting a limited time offer is a persuasive approach to activate customers. If you think about it, this is the primary mechanism that drives Black Friday revenue across all segments (digital products or physical, membership products, etc). If you're not sure which approach to try of the four listed here, pick this one.
In Superwall, we could create a campaign to show an offer on the app's launch. We could even set it up ahead of Black Friday and leave it paused until we want it live. Here's what that campaign would look like:
With this setup, when users open the app and they aren't on a "pro" plan already — they'll be presented with this offer:
Here, we're doing the Black Friday industry standard — trying to convert free users to a paid plan by offering a discount. One critical part here? This should be a new, unique paywall design. That's key to maximize sales during Black Friday (or, any promotional period) — you have to catch the user's attention.
Also, this paywall was created from our template library, and you can find it right here.
Idea 2: Use a time-sensitive design
In a similar manner, you could use a design that clearly emphasizes the time someone has to claim the offer. In Superwall, this is trivial since countdown timer components are built right into the editor. Another idea to try, then, is to include a countdown timer in your Black Friday paywall (or make another one altogether).
Here's our previous paywall, with a countdown timer component added in:
A countdown timer can add a sense of urgency to the offer.
Idea 3: Reactivate churned users with another trial offer
Churned users represent another revenue driver for you during Black Friday. Our next idea isn't so much an "experiment" — it's more about using a timely seasonal event to reactivate customers. So here, we'd take two specific actions:
Create a customized paywall: For these users, we could appeal more to them by calling out the features they are missing out on from a paid plan. To that end, we'd create a paywall specifically for this cohort.
Push a discounted offer: While not a requirement by any means, it's also a good idea to entice them with a sale. If they'eve already churned, a new paywall with the same deal won't have the same punch as a new paywall paired with a "winback" offer.
While some larger companies might have easy access to users who have specifically churned, you can also do this client side if you don't have that data readily available using frameworks like StoreKit 2:
func hasChurned() async -> Bool {
guard !purchasedSubs.isEmpty else {
// Never had a subscription
return false
}
let subIDs: [String] = subs.compactMap { $0.id }
var hasExpiredOrRevokedSubscription = false
// Check current entitlements first
for await transaction in Transaction.currentEntitlements {
let verifiedTransaction = try verifyPurchase(transaction)
guard verifiedTransaction.productType == .autoRenewable else { continue }
if subIDs.contains(verifiedTransaction.productID) &&
verifiedTransaction.revocationDate == nil &&
(verifiedTransaction.expirationDate ?? Date()) > Date() {
return false
}
}
// If we get here and had subs before, but no active ones now, they've churned
for await transaction in Transaction.all {
let verifiedTransaction = try verifyPurchase(transaction)
guard verifiedTransaction.productType == .autoRenewable else { continue }
// Churned user here
if subIDs.contains(verifiedTransaction.productID) &&
(verifiedTransaction.revocationDate != nil ||
(verifiedTransaction.expirationDate ?? Date()) < Date()) {
hasExpiredOrRevokedSubscription = true
break
}
}
return hasExpiredOrRevokedSubscription
}
swift
Once we know if a user is churned, we could use Superwall to present the offer. Using a new campaign with one placement, perhaps churnedUsersBlackFriday, we'd simply register that placement once we've matched a churned user. Then, any paywall and products we want to offer would be shown. Our code could work like this...
let hasChurned = await products.hasChurned()
if hasChurned {
Superwall.shared.register(event: "churnedUsersBlackFriday") {
showWelcomeBackView()
}
}
swift
One thing I love about this idea? It fits perfectly alongside any other experiment you might be running since it's isolated to a particular cohort. Who doesn't want to reactive churned users? Going even further, you might consider running a campaign like this regularly.
Idea 4: Go outside of the box
For our final idea — why not take a swing? Think outside of the box, and perhaps consider trying something on the unconventional side. Maybe there's a price point you've always wanted to experiment with, or product packaging changes you've wanted to make.
To gauge whether or not those things could work, typically a healthy amount of data is required. Well, what better time than now? Try it out on Black Friday! Here are some ideas to get your creative juices flowing:
One-time purchase products: One-time purchases are a phenomenal way to boost immediate revenue. These tend to work well when your app's overhead is minimal, and you're looking to boost your working capital in the short term to work towards longer term goals. Be careful, though, one-time products can set a precedent for other users, and the ones that do activate can carry a maintenance cost a few years down the road.
Bundling tweaks: Different tiers of service means you have much more freedom and creativity when it comes to explaining value proposition. Instead of just being "paid" versus "free", you can pivot to "free" versus "standard/pro/premium" to offer different levels of service. Multi-tiered paywalls are a fantastic way to sell these products.
Digital Giveaways: Play the long game by building up a mailing list if you haven't yet. Mailing lists can be a powerful way to promote other offers in the future, and people tend to be more engaged, and more likely to activate, when they are on one. So, think about offering something in return for joining yours. Specifically for indie apps, I've seen custom app icons, free access to a feature for a few days, or something else in that realm work well.
If you need help deciding on a direction, just remember this: make the choice that correlates to the immediate goals that you have now. Whatever K.P.I. you're looking to boost should be a driving factor in these decisions, and your Black Friday strategy as a whole.
Remember to stand out
No matter what idea you end up trying, remember to stand out when it comes to your paywall. If you simply show the same paywall users have seen already with new products, odds are that most people won't even notice them. Even if you add new copy, it'll be too easy to miss. For example, do you really notice that the paywall on the right has a better deal?
Probably not. And, that's even more true for users who've already seen that paywall design — they are likely to just skip it out of muscle memory, not even knowing that a much better offer was available.
Now is the time to pop — make sure your paywall design is different and distinctive from what you've done before. That, alongside a compelling offer, will give you the best chance at conversion.
Wrapping up
One of the most powerful things in sales is intent. And on Black Friday? Well, the entire world is magically a high intent consumer! It pays to take advantage, so whether you go for a high-risk, high-reward experiment or something a bit more vanilla, as always — our advice is to do something.
Historically, setting up these types of tests, offers, or experiments was hard to get right. With Superwall, you can run them all and see clear, actionable results. Get started today here and make sure you're all set for a succesful Black Friday!
