The Black Friday & Beyond Playbook for Subscription Apps

Once November hits, install costs climb about 35%.

And while you pay more to win a new cohort, last year's Black Friday subscribers come up for renewal at full price, right as your new discount goes live. Two cohorts, one campaign window, and very little room for guesswork.

This Playbook gathers what we've learned across subscription apps using Purchasely, including Headspace, Wattpad, Le Monde, The Times, TomTom and L'Équipe, plus anonymized results from campaigns our customers have run. It covers the decisions underneath the countdown: which offer to show, to whom, and what happens to those users twelve months later. When we have numbers, we give them, and when we don't, we say so.

It's written for Product and Growth teams at mobile subscription apps, and for the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and Marketing teams working alongside them, who want to protect the subscribers they already have while winning the ones Black Friday brings in.

What's inside

1. Part One, protect last year's cohort: why your Black Friday 2025 subscribers are this year's biggest churn risk, and four configuration changes that keep them from leaving for your new discount.
2. Part Two, win a new cohort: eight secrets from our benchmark, in the order you'll build your campaign, from who sees your offer to how you measure it.
3. Part Three, one finding to keep in mind: our best-evidenced result, and why the cohort you recruit this November becomes next year's renewal challenge.
4. Part Four, your ready-for-use toolkit: a step-by-step checklist to prep your season, from sorting your audiences to reading your test results.

Why download this Playbook?

This Playbook is for you if you're looking to:

• Protect your renewals: keep last year's discounted subscribers from churning when their full-price renewal lands in the middle of your new campaign
• Pick the right offer structure: know which trial, plan and default choices move paid conversion, backed by median results from our benchmark
• Show the right screen to the right user: from Lara, who cancelled in March and is ready to come back, to the active free users who've never paid
• Know what your discount actually earned: set up your campaign so next November starts with an answer instead of a guess
• Move fast without waiting on developers: leave with a chronological checklist built around configuration changes, no coding required