Subscription monetization lessons: pricing, paywalls, & more. Vahe Baghdasaryan, Coin Stats App.
Coin Stats app is the leading crypto portfolio tracker with more than 1M monthly active users (MAU). In this podcast episode, we spoke with Vahe Baghdasaryan, Coin Stats’s growth manager. Vahe shared his views on subscription monetization, pricing, and how to run monetization A/B experiments. Here are some takeaways from the conversation:
- CoinStats primarily earns through subscriptions and utilizes surveys and A/B tests to develop effective pricing strategies.
- The team conducts A/B experiments with a wide price range to gauge user’s willingness to pay and improve conversion rates.
- Subscription apps, including CoinStats, are focusing on annual offerings as they provide upfront cash flow and better retention opportunities.
- CoinStats uses A/B testing to optimize both onboarding and paywalls separately.
- They test different paywall placements, display frequencies, and video types to enhance conversion rates and user interactions with the paywall.
- CoinStats also implements lifecycle campaigns, offering discounts to users who haven’t converted.
- To improve retention, they address real reasons for churn, respond to involuntary churn, and predict churn using product analytics.
- They build cohorts of churned users and analyze their behaviour to inform targeted campaigns. This enables them to offer alternative features or solutions to users at risk of churning.
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Full Transcript:
Michael:
Hi everyone, I’m Michael Stysin. This is App Revenue Growth podcast where we discuss how to grow apps, how to monetize them successfully. Today, our guest is Vahey Baghdasaryan. He’s a Senior Growth Marketing Manager at Coin Stats. And as a Growth Marketing Manager at Coin Stats, he’s responsible for life cycle marketing campaigns that aim to increase conversion. One of the things I think is increasing the conversion. of trials to paying customers. Another one is increasing retention. But I guess you can tell us about it yourself much better than I do. Let’s start with that. Tell us a little bit about your experience and what you’re currently doing.
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
Yeah. Hi Michael. Thanks for having me today. I’m a senior marketing manager at Coin Stats. One of the things that I’m doing in life cycle marketing that is focused on optimizing subscriptions, improving the retention and engagement of the platform and some other responsibilities includes monetization, pricing strategy, optimizing subscriptions, paywalls, and also the onboarding flows. everything that falls behind.
Michael:
Let’s start with a couple more questions about what is Coin Stats? Like what’s the product there? What kind of users use it?
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
Yeah, Coin Stats is a crypto portfolio manager app. Basically, we are the biggest in the market, and what we are doing, if you have crypto investment in many different places, like in different exchanges or wallets, it becomes hard to manage everything that it’s in different places. So basically what you do, you bring all these, your accounts, whatever you have, Coinbase, Binance…, you connect everything to coin stats and manage everything from one place. We have more than 1 million man-flipped users, and our users are managing more than a hundred billion in total access to our platform.
Michael:
Wow, that’s really impressive, and you can even make the trades just from the Coin Stats interface?
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
Yeah, we also have some additional functionalities that help our users to do also trades from one place, swap their cryptos to one another from the same place, and even do staking, like stake their cryptos to an interest ratio.
Michael:
I guess a lot of the FinTech apps monetize by charging some like fees on the transactions, on the volumes, and so on. But in this case, I guess you mentioned that you’re using a subscription. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
So basically subscriptions are the biggest revenue stream that we have at this moment because originally when our founders started the coin stats, we didn’t have the functionality to execute transactions through a platform. So the subscription was the first choice. And throughout the years, subscriptions became the prominent channel for revenue. the biggest chunk of the revenue comes to subscriptions. And then when we add these new additional functionalities, like buying crypto through our platform or swapping their tokens from one to another, transaction revenue also starts to be a part of the revenue. But at this moment, subscriptions are accounting for the larger sum of the revenue.
Michael:
Got it. I think the next question is, how do you come up with the subscription price then? I mean, like you can tell us about this in the context of your app or just in general how to approach the pricing of subscription.
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
Yeah, like for years, Coin Stats had some pricing model. Like there was a pro plan, a premium plan that just the founders felt that way. And decided we’re going to have a pro plan and a premium plan. And they’re just priced based on what was, you know, I guess the average price for that market at the time.
So I guess like two years ago already, we decided to, we need to take this very seriously, we got to do some pricing strategies.
Pricing study to understand how is the best way to price our product.
So we started to actually analyze our revenue and understand like what part of it comes through this pro plan that we had and what part of it comes through the premium plan, what part of users are subscribed to this monthly plan or the annual plan.
So we did all this, you know, studies to understand what is the current state of our revenue model.
And what we did next, we… decided to run some pricing tests and analysis to understand what is the willingness to pay off our customers.
So we adapted two mechanisms. And one of them is this one-way street drops pricing sensitivity matter, which is one of the famous. And most of the folks are using this. And what we did, we ran this analysis for, I mean, if you don’t know it, it’s this framework that helps companies to measure the willingness to pay off your customer, their customers by asking, you know, a few very simple questions. Uh, what is what, uh, at what price you think this product is overpriced, at what price you think this is fair price and what is too cheap, et cetera, et cetera.
So it’s just like, kind of like four questions and then it helps you to understand where the willingness of, to, uh, to pay off your customers are paying. So. We did it in a very interesting manner. What we did, we ran this analysis for our web users separately and the mobile users, because we also have a web product. And we also kind of run this among our power users. These are the users who have a lot of port volumes connected to Coin Stats. And we also run this among the users who didn’t have anything connected to coin stats. Like this were users who comparably has lower engagement rates. And also we did some, run it for some geos, like for the US, for the Europe, for Middle East, because we have users from almost all over the world.
So then we started the results of this analysis and come up with a price.
And what a lot of folks are doing, they’re just taking this for granted. And like if the analysis shows you that it’s 99.99 per year, just taking it and you know, moving forward with this price.
What I like to do, for me, the results of this test is not to come up with what’s going to be your price of the product. It’s to come up with an A-B test. So for example, if the analysis shows that the user’s willingness to pay of like $89.99, we’re not going to price our product as $89.99 and take it for a price. What we do, we take that now. And then we do A-B testing. We got A-B test this with 190.99 or 51.99, something like this, in a broad ranges to understand, this is the willingness to pay, but how is it in a live-action? Because sometimes the user says something, but they actually prefer very different things.
So my advice and what I like to do is just try to get some A-B test from your disk pricing analysis. And also it’s a good way to understand if your product has second time offer, first time offer, which usually is a bit discounted, you can draw some conclusions from this analysis to understand what is the price, what’s the price of the second offer can be and when the price of the third offer can be.
And the first time, I mean, after all of this, for the first time, we also introduced a localized pricing that actually helped us to improve our revenue regions where historically we didn’t have a lot of subscribers. That’s regions like particularly Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, so that part of the Europe when there were not, we didn’t have many subscribers from there, but when we introduced this localized pricing, we started to see the growth of subscriptions from these countries. And I mean the problem with localized pricing is At scale, it becomes very difficult to manage. So if you have proper infrastructure, I guess it’s worth to do it. Or if you don’t plan to run, you know, aggressive A-B tests on them or, you know, continuous A-B tests, I guess, you know, you can apply some localized pricing tests and see if it’s going to help you to increase your revenue. But yeah, basically that’s the process that we went through to decide the price of our product. Also as. We do still continuous A-B tests to try to optimize and see what is the best price that also brings a lot of revenue, but also converts better.
Michael:
Got it. So like to highlight several things that you said, like first you need to actually ask your users, but you can’t trust it just one data point. You can’t trust them completely because they might be saying one thing, but they might be not converting, not buying at this price, which they say is fine. Otherwise, maybe otherwise they can like prefer the lower price when you ask them, but they’re ready to pay a higher price. So you come up with some hypothesis and then you test them. And I think another important thing that you mentioned is that the range of the prices should be pretty high. You shouldn’t like change the price by 5% because it will be very hard to see the difference and understand, uh, like the sensitivity, uh, how it affects the conversion rates. So you should go with like wide, I think you mentioned like from 50 to 150, I would say for, for an annual subscription to really see, see the difference and understand how the conversion rate changes. Understood.
Michael:
And so what’s the current setup for the app in the sense of duration? I think another important aspect is the duration of the subscription. How do you think about like offering annual subscription versus monthly subscription versus other durations? Do you have any advice on that?
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
Yeah, I mean, that’s a really good question. As you can see, subscription companies are trying to sell their annual offerings more. And it’s actually like for two reasons. First of all, it brings cash flow upfront. And if you’re on paydance, it helps you to boost your paid UA activities because you’re receiving the full cash flow in advance.
Second thing is the retention. A lot of subscription apps are not retaining, are not able to retain better and good. So it’s better to try to sell your annual plans instead of monthly because it may be in a three months or four months. They might turn. So that’s why it’s better to monetize your annual subscriptions.
For our case, it was always annual. So most of our subscribers were mainly subscribed to annual packages. And we didn’t, I mean, we ran some initiatives to increase the levels of the users, the number of users who are subscribed to annual packages, but it’s mostly it was theirs.
And mostly our users are subscribing to the annual packages. industry specific thing maybe or a customer be everything that, you know, just this is my finest tool and I’m gonna use it every day or something. And it’s better to maybe subscribe to an annual plan and save some money. And we also have a good retention of subscribers because, you know, if we are fun. We take two and over time we become the tool that they go every day or every week to check their investments. So yeah, for our case, that setup was like that.
Michael:
Got it. Another question that I have regarding the paywall is how do you actually measure or set up the experiments for paywall and also include the onboarding flow into the story? So do you kind of do just separate paywall A/B testing or you want to test it with the whole onboarding flow and test the whole funnel from the first screen the user sees to the paywall?
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
Yeah, so we run this A-B test differently from each other. The first one, we do run A-B test in our onboarding to optimize our onboarding metrics, such as the conversion rate from onboarding to connecting portfolio to Coin Stats. And we also run this A-B test for paywalls to optimize the paywalls. We kind of do not connect the whole flow each other from the very first moment to the paywall view and taking a free trial or converting to the subscriber. We’re on this A-B test for onboarding and for the paywalls. Yeah, we have paywalls, for example, in the end of the onboarding. And we focus at this moment and we try to A-B test different paywalls in the end of the onboarding and try to optimize for free trials, free trial conversion from onboarding.
Michael:
Got it. What would you like maybe list as the key things to test to try to actually boost revenue growth, especially if you are maybe starting or you have a little bit of the revenue, like what would be the best levers to pull?
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
Yeah, there are some basic things that I guess everybody talked about already. And it’s really, because it’s really impactful and it’s very, very easy to set up. Right. First one is a lot of people don’t track these metrics that is installed to the paywall view, I guess, I mean, that’s very famous and a lot of folks are talking about it, but I guess it’s worth to talk about this metric very often because it’s really underrated. Very small percentage of our users were seeing our paywall because we didn’t have it in the end of the onboarding and it was only in the settings.
So user should specifically look at premium package in a settings to be able to see paywall or they are another way they could hit the paywall where they were reaching the limit of the transactions in the premium plan or the portfolio limit in the free plan. So there are like two cases when a user can reach to the paywall.
So what we did, we added the paywall to the, in the end of the onboarding and it, you know, it’s kind of the free trust that we’re seeing in a daily or like more weekly basis.
The other thing is this, a lot of people don’t like to do it’s showing the paywall at every app open or at least once per day to all their customers. There are some apps that they’re doing this, some other CEOs or some growth folks, they don’t like seeing this, showing this very often every day to all people because it can get on people’s nerves and they can just delete your app or it can result bad negative reviews on app stores, et cetera, et cetera. What you can do is just show it the number of people every day, or at least once a day, or once in two days. You take 5% of your daily active users, and you only show what you pay once every app open per day to only this 5%. And then you can shuffle. One month we work on this 5%, the other month this person. So do not get people’s nerves. But it can be very, very effective. And I guess it’s a good test to do. to be able to get new subscribers.
And other things that you can do that’s again, a lot of folks talk about, and we also tested it many times that can be very useful with the video paywalls. Actually, the funny thing is when we first introduced for video paywalls, it didn’t convert well compared to what we had at this format. And then a few months later we said, okay, let’s try this again. We tried it and this time it really converted better than we had.
Michael:
What changed? It’s super interesting to know. What have you changed? So it didn’t work the first time, but it worked the second time.
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
Yeah, for the first time, actually, the payphone had this promotional video that was this phone was opening in a very creative manner or, you know, and showing this highlights of the app, et cetera, et cetera. And it didn’t convert better. So the second time we were like, all right, we’re going to just, you know, do a screen recording, a little bit improved, you know, and put it there and just screen recording converted better. than this video that we worked on, spent time on creating and making sure it’s proper and it’s a good added material. And it didn’t convert, but this one that is not this promotional, more like explainer showing what the feature, how the app works, what is this premium feature, etc. that the video worked with.
Michael:
The video with just screen recording of the app, showing the features of the app, actually worked best because it kind of provided the onboarding experience. It showed what the app actually provides. And was it included specifically in the paywall? It was some of the onboarding steps, or it was directly in the paywall?
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
I mean, it was in the paywall, like not in the onboarding process, but in the paywall that explains how, what are the premium features, how they can get them, what are the benefits of these features. Like that was a screen recording that was showing how to access your cumulative profit and loss analysis. And it’s like, you know, we also have this and this is how you can generate these charts that can help you to get a sense of your investments.
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
Then actually the other is very important thing that also, and it’s working and not everyone is trying that this is the life cycle marketing campaigns, optimizing for life cycle marketing campaigns. And there are actually a few journeys that you can set up that can help you to optimize your subscriptions. For many of users, if you look at your data, you can see the many of users are just either just canceling your paywall or just tapping on the start my free trial button, wherever you call it. And then just exiting this native iOS popup, you know, for some reason, a lot of folks do this.What you can do. You can trigger cycle marketing campaigns from this events. When somebody exits your paywall or you can exit this native popup. And this kind of like abandoned cart notifications that you can send to your users through push notification email or whatever channel you have. For our case, it’s working. We started to experiment with it and it’s like really helping us to get these users back to the flow and getting them to subscribe for our own things.
Michael:
That’s an interesting question here. So you have these users who have some intent to buy but they didn’t subscribe. Do you offer any discounts maybe to this specific segment of users with your push notifications or email communication?
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
Yeah, we do. We do, but not at the first touch point. First, for example, you saw our paywall, and you exit the Paywall, we started to send you this card-dependent notifications, whatever it’s an email or push notifications. And we just try to get you back to the flow to continue to your subscription journey, let’s say. And we deep link this to the Paywall. And when you click on the button, the email, or push notification, we open the Paywall in the app. And after like two or three notifications, if we see you are not converting for the free trial, we start to offer you discount. In your first or fourth notification, you might get, it’s now like 30% off or something. We try to engage you with the discounts. And it’s also a good strategy. But I guess you can just start not to offer discounts at the beginning. the first, just try to convince them that there is a lot of value in the product and you actually get a benefit from subscribing, given for free trial. And you see if there is a low intention to pay the full price. I mean, somebody can be really interested in your product, but they’re just, you know, they can’t afford to pay the full price and just offering them like 20 or 30% discount can get them to subscribe for your offerings.
Michael:
Yeah, that makes sense. And do you have maybe any benchmarks, or at least what people should expect to see from these additional campaigns, maybe in terms of how much incremental revenue, maybe
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
Yeah.
Michael:
10% of incremental revenue can be driven by these campaigns?
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
I never tried this outside of coin stats. I’m not sure what’s going to be for our industries. For our case, we get more than 1% conversion rate from these push notifications. I’m not talking about additional revenue. I’m just talking about users, the results of these campaigns.
Michael:
A trial, like conversion to trial, conversion to subscription?
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
Yes, yes, yes. It’s a more, it’s a between one or two percent. We get this conversion from this push notifications campaigns.
Michael:
Mm-hmm. Got it. And maybe you have some tips on the retention side then. Let’s say users have subscribed already. What do you do to retain them?
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
Yeah, that’s a very tough point. And I guess a lot of, maybe all, I guess, subscriptions apps are struggling with retention. And in our case, we have, as I said, two products. It’s web and mobile. Usually on web, you have retention compared to mobile. And also, I guess, web offers you a lot more opportunities to try to keep the subscriber than mobile. And there are a few, for example, when we set up this subscription onboarding flows that, you know, don’t let users to immediately cancel their subscriptions, we offer them discounts and we offer them to talk to support or for them free extra benefits, et cetera, et cetera. We just try to, and it’s sort of like two point two, you know, things, right?
The first one is we get to know why our users are canceling their subscriptions because there’s a survey in it and also there is an option to talk about the support agent and also it helps you to convince some of users to keep their subscription. What we do, we say, you know, let’s give you like two months off on your next subscription or let’s switch you from annual to monthly to save some plan, to save some money and also pause your subscription. for two months or three months. A lot of people actually are, you know, choosing this option, they’re pausing their subscriptions. They are maybe, you know, the market conditions are not good. I don’t, I’m investing actively at this moment, so I’m not gonna get the full value of your product. Let’s just, you know, pause my subscription for a few months to see how market is doing, and then we can resume our subscription.
Michael:
I think with the pausing of subscription, I guess if you allow the user to save some settings, so he doesn’t have to reconnect stuff.
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
We don’t require them to change anything. They just button the sales portfolio subscription for two or three months and they pause, nothing change, their portfolios are there, everything is there and after three months, we continue to charge them if they don’t, change their preferences.
Or the other thing is if customer churn, I mean churn as you know, like two type of churn, the voluntary and involuntary churn. In the case of involuntary churn, there’s a lot of things you can do. You can show them these pop-up messages that worked our case very well. That says, you know, update your credit card details because we couldn’t charge you or there we get this also, this is for web mainly because on mobile you can’t do it, but you know, anyways, the other one is that we see that your card is going to expire in like two weeks. If you don’t want to. experience some service interruptions, update your credit card details, we’ll be able to chart you in your renewal date. There are a lot of things you can do there.
Another thing that we can do is like, and we are doing is for mobile and for all your subscribers overall, is to understand this churn patterns. What do we do? We use amplitude for product analytics. And. We try to build a cohorts of these users who churned to try to run some correlations, the basic correlation analysis to understand how why the subscribers are churning and what patterns are there. What, for example, a basic thing can be the users who cancel their subscription basically churn started to do not use X feature like two weeks before the churn. Yeah. So what we do, we create this cohort of users, the dynamic cohorts, and we then link them with our CRM system. We use it for CRM. And then when this dynamic cohort starts to behave like users who churned, we start to send them some engagement materials, try to get them to increase their engagement with the platform. make them to use the platform more and it’s gonna maybe change their minds about canceling and we also constantly start to remind this folks about the benefits that they’re receiving from Chrome coinstants.
Michael:
Yeah, I got it. So you kind of try to identify first through the analytics, through the product analytics, you identify the patterns that predict the churn. And then you try
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
Mm-hmm.
Michael:
to actually change the pattern of the user, make him use this feature, which you know, if he uses, then the churn is less likely and by this reducing the churn.
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
Yes, yes, yes. And we see, for example, if we see, I mean, every product has different use cases, does as coin stats, and we see the users are churning because they’re satisfied with their current use case. For example, if you are a trader, now the market conditions are not good. And you say, well, I’m not going to trade at this environment. the use case is done for you. Right. And we try to onboard this user to other use cases. Like. Or if we do, you don’t trade, but we have these newsletters, we have these research materials, so we have these NFT features. Maybe you’re interested in this. Maybe NFTs can be interesting for you. So we try to onboard them also from one use cases to another use cases to prevent you.
Michael:
Got it. Got it. I think that was super, super interesting. And I think I asked most of the questions. I just have a random question not connected to subscriptions, like how NFT are doing? Do you see like the volume dropping there or they’re still doing fine?
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
Yeah, it’s crazy down if you compare like two years ago. I guess if I’m not sure about the number, but I believe it’s down like more than 90%. The volume of NFTs are down more than
Michael:
90 percent.
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
90%. Compared to two years ago.
Michael:
Yeah.
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
And there’s a collection that’s worth millions two years ago. Now they’re like a couple thousand dollars. It’s really crazy what’s happening in the NFT market this long. I’m optimistic and I hope so many of these and I believe you know, yeah it’s gonna
Michael:
Do you expect the crypto market to rebound in general like Bitcoin to the moon?
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
Definitely. Yeah. We’re all the best at waiting to the… We believe and we also believe to NFTs. That’s why we are trading in new cool features for NFTs. We recently launched this new feature that’s called Coin Stats Midas. It’s an NFT trading tool that helps you to identify the promising… collections earlier in the market and they are the lowest price, but there is a probability that the price gonna increase so we have you know, pretty much good progress there and NFT traders are interested in it and they are very interested in this feature
We’re all the best at waiting to the… We believe and we also believe to NFTs. That’s why we are trading in new cool features for NFTs. We recently launched this new feature that’s called Coin Stats Midas. It’s an NFT trading tool that helps you to identify the promising… collections earlier in the market and they are the lowest price, but there is a probability that the price gonna increase so we have you know, pretty much good progress there and NFT traders are interested in it and they are very interested in this feature
Michael:
Got it. Got it. So the message to all our listeners, if you trade crypto, so just check out the Coin Stats app. Maybe it will help you to become a better trader or just stay on top of your crypto trading game. I guess that’s it for today. Maybe Vahe, just tell us how our listeners can find you, what’s the best way to connect with you.
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
Sure, I’m on LinkedIn and I’m also on Twitter. So it’s on my name, Vahe Baghdasaryan. So feel free to reach me out on LinkedIn and Twitter. I also run a subscription optimization course on Maven. We did two cohorts already. And I’m not sure when the third cohort will start. We’ll see. But if you’re just interested, you can just sign up in waitlist.
Michael:
I think that this can be super interesting. We’ll attach the links to that, including to the course, to the notes of this episode. All right then, have a great day. Thank you, bye!
Vahe Baghdasaryan:
Thank you for having me. Yeah. Bye bye.