Our recent Superwall Growth Session on transaction abandon campaigns was packed full of great tips, questions, and paywall advice. If you weren't able to make it, no worries, I've got it all recapped for you here.
Also, be sure not to miss our next Superwall Growth Session too, you can see all of our events coming up right here.
What is a transaction abandon campaign
When a user exits the platform native payment sheet after it appears to purchase a product — that's a transaction abandoned event in Superwall. By using our built-in placement for this, you can trigger a different paywall to appear when that occurs to show a discounted product (most commonly, anyway). This is what we call a transaction abandoned campaign.
Quick resources
If you're new to transaction abandon campaigns, here are some links to get started:
Q&A recap
Attendees had some great questions—here are a few that offered insights you can use for your own campaigns:
What percent typically convert with an abandonment offer in first use?
It typically ranges from 5–22% of users who enter that campaign. As always, be sure to test different transaction abandon setups.
Wondering whether (tactically) people abandon because the pricing wasn’t clear on the paywall in the first place. Have you found that to be the case? I.e., if the pricing were clearer, would you have a lower transaction abandon rate?
I would say so! I think a big portion is price uncertainty, where the user just wants to see what the total actually comes out to. This is actually a high-intent indicator, though, because they are interested enough to see pricing but then decide against purchasing.
Any advice on where in the user’s journey is good? E.g., after they abandon a second paywall vs. risking cannibalizing the first paywall (which is before they’ve even seen the app)?
Start by looking at your abandonment rate. You can segment it by your placements, too, so you can see right where people are falling off. This helps you discover where a transaction abandon would help convert.
How would you measure the results to ensure that you’re not accidentally giving cheaper offers to those who were actually prepared to pay the higher amount to start with?
Create a campaign where you show a discount offer (or some other offer) versus a paywall with the same price but different messaging and design. Compare the two—then you can figure out if pricing is the sticking point. You can also segment it, for example, using user seeds. Then you can associate those cohorts with revenue.
Do transaction abandon campaigns typically show right after a user dismisses the payment sheet/paywall? Or does it show right after the next app open after abandonment?
It occurs when they tap on the X on the platform’s native payment sheets.
If we have a weekly price right now of $2.99/week (we are early in our paywall journey), would you recommend a cheaper annual price for the transaction abandon? Or just a cheaper weekly price?
At this price point, it could be harder to discount lower than $3.00—the barrier to entry is already fairly low. The yearly plan might be a better fit. Here, you might show both weekly and annual together. But it brings up a great point—what do you price your product at? There’s, of course, a lot that goes into it, but the easiest way to do it is to test your messaging, compare against your competitors, run pricing experiments, etc. Find an LTV number that would make sense to use for transaction abandon campaign after experimenting.
How do you think about transaction abandonment in the context of a freemium app?
Well, one way to start thinking about it is by looking at how many conversions come from post-onboarding flows. For example, if most conversions come from regular placements, maybe a transaction abandon campaign doesn’t make sense in onboarding—they are converting anyway. But think about why people abandon transactions: it’s usually price uncertainty, unclear messaging, etc. And freemium already offers a lot for free. Perhaps try a hard paywall—your biggest risk in the early days is that you built something people may not want. This will tell you extremely fast. And if the answer is yes, then you can move on to freemium.
I wonder if you have any insights as to how different age groups react to these practices—what would be good advice for an older user base?
Older users typically have more disposable income. Consider not showing a transaction abandon immediately. For a younger demographic, check out longer trials first—they are more comfortable starting trials. Older users have more subscription fatigue, so they may be more skeptical of starting a trial, which means a quick discount could work well.
Wrapping up
A transaction abandon campaign can bring in extra revenue. But, like anything, you have to test it. There are always product questions when using techniques like this, and many of them were brought up in the session. That’s why it’s critical that you have the data to know what works, and no other platform makes it easier to do that than Superwall.
And remember, Superwall will hold several more Growth Sessions, so be sure to attend the next one so we can answer your questions live!
