How to structure your Black Friday offer
Why the structure of your Black Friday offer matters more than the discount, and the four offer decisions to make before your paywall goes live.
TL;DR
On Black Friday, how your offer is built moves conversion more than the size of the discount. Four decisions shape it: the free trial, the pre-selected plan, the number of plans and how the price is explained. The Black Friday & Beyond Playbook covers the answer to each one.
One of our clients lifted trial-to-paid by +102.5% on Black Friday, with the same discount.
Most teams spend their Black Friday prep picking between 30% and 40% off. But the biggest wins come from how the offer is built.
In this guide, we'll help you build a Black Friday offer that turns more free users into paying subscribers this November, starting with four key decisions.
Why does offer structure matter more than the discount?
On Black Friday, every app has a discount, so a bigger one rarely stands out. What makes the difference is the plan users land on, the steps before they pay and how clearly the price reads. In our benchmark, explaining the offer more clearly lifted trial-to-paid by +102.5%, with the same discount.
Which offer decisions should you make before Black Friday?
Four decisions shape your offer:
- Keep or skip the free trial
- Which plan is pre-selected
- How many plans to show
- How to explain the price
Most teams keep last year's paywall and just change the number. Our data says each of these deserves a second look, and some answers go against what most apps do.
To get the answer to each one, read our Black Friday playbook for subscription apps. It's built on 300M+ paywall views from apps like Headspace, Wattpad and Le Monde.
Tip: before building your offer, take last year's Black Friday subscribers out of your acquisition audiences. Here's why last year's cohort is your biggest risk.
How to promote your Black Friday offer in your app
Once your offer is built, the next question is who sees it and where. Your churned users and your free users each need a different screen, and the message matters as much as the price.
The Black Friday & Beyond Playbook for subscription apps covers three more topics: which users to target first, which paywall message converts best during Black Friday and how to measure your offer with an A/B test.
Get the full Black Friday Playbook
Want help shipping your offer?
We're selecting 5 subscription apps to build and test their Black Friday campaigns on Purchasely, with free access through December 15. Applications close November 3.
App Stories by
Monthly interviews with the teams behind products like Wattpad, The BBC, Busuu about their app strategy, straight to your inbox
By subscribing, you agree to receive emails from Purchasely
Keep reading
Why some one-time purchases (OTP) work
The subscription boom did not kill the one-time purchase. Here is where a single upfront payment still wins, and how the best apps blend both models.
How to program your full-funnel user engagement
There's a critical shift happening in app growth: moving from just pulling in new users to actually keeping the ones you have. If you're not yet focused on the bottom of the funnel, acquisition alone won't sustain your app's growth for much longer.
Subscriptions: The Good, The Bad And The Overused
The creator of Ruby on Rails thinks subscriptions have gone too far. DHH on subscription fatigue, where recurring revenue genuinely fits, and where it is just overused.