5 Best Practices for Paywall Products

Your mobile app paywall is a key driver of revenue. Intelligently choosing and designing your paywall products will have a large impact on app revenue. Here are our 5 tips for paywall product best practices, from price display to number of products.

This post is part of our Paywall Best Practices blog series. Read part 1: Best Practices for Paywall Design. And part 3: Best Practices for Paywall Placement.

Calculate for your users how much their plan will cost them monthly or compared to other products

If you have more than 1 product on a paywall, your users will be comparing the products. A key comparison factor will be the price. Being able to easily show your users how much a product would cost them monthly, for example, is helpful.

You can also show users who much an annual plan would save them over paying by month. While they may not initially want to commit to a longer term plan, seeing clear savings can be compelling.

While [users] may not initially want to commit to a longer term plan, seeing clear savings can be compelling.

Nami paywalls have Smart Text variables built in that allow you to show price saved in comparison to another SKU, automatically! No math required, and no need to update your paywall if prices change.

Paywall Product Best Practice: Don’t hide billing terms

While it can be tempting to just provide the price broken down by month, for an annual product users will be billed once every year, not monthly. So when the user is billed once for a larger amount than was advertised on the product (the monthly price), they will be surprised and upset. Being misleading about billing frequency can lead to support issues and refunds that are avoidable.

Clearly Indicate Trial Length

Users like to test out services before committing to purchase. Clearly indicating how much time they get in a free trial will help overcome buyer concerns and convert more users.

Try putting the trial length inside the Purchase Button as a clear call to action like ‘Start your 1 week trial’. This makes it clear to the user that they don’t have to pay yet.

Paywall product best practices dictate that if your products have different trial lengths, you should make that clear so that the user isn’t surprised. Unclear trial length is an easy way to get an unhappy customer or a refund request.

Use a Badge to Draw Attention to 1 Product

If your paywall has more than 1 product, try adding a small badge with color and text that helps draw attention to 1 particular product.

Badges can highlight how much the user is saving on a particular product, as shown in the paywalls below.

You can also include other text in a badge, such as highlighting ‘POPULAR’ or ‘BEST VALUE’ products or calling out free trials.

Looking for examples of paywalls with product badges? The Nami paywall gallery has hundreds of paywalls from top apps to explore.

Don’t show more than 3 Products on a Paywall

Users are viewing your paywall from their mobile device and trying to decide if they want to pay for your service, and if so how much and how often. While it is tempting to display all your product options in 1 view so that users have flexibility, rarely is this a good idea in practice.

Even if you do offer weekly, 1 month, 3 month, 6 month, and 12 month products, displaying them all on 1 small screen can give a user decision paralysis. They have to compare 5 different products and prices and try to decide how long they will want to use the service and whether they will remember to cancel.

Try setting up a paywall featuring just the annual product and track the conversion rate. Then test it against a paywall with both 1 month and 12 month options. How many users are buying the 1 month product versus the 12 month? How long do you retain the 1 month users?

Intelligently choosing a few products to test on your paywall is often a better choice than displaying lots and lots of options to the user.

Looking for more tips on paywalls? Submit your paywall for personalized advice from our team.