Freemium mistakes, brand wins, and trusting your gut – lessons from Deezer’s Sherina Khalidi

Marketing is a crucial part of monetizing any subscription app — at the end of the day, you need to make consumers aware of your app and convince them that it’s worth paying for. But there are different schools of thought on the best way to do this, and it can be tough to find the right combination of investment, methods, and measurement to stand out from the crowd and make a profit (especially if you’re competing with big, established brands).

Perhaps no one understands this better than Sherina Khalidi, VP of Performance Marketing at the popular French music streaming app Deezer. Sherina has been at Deezer for nearly 10 years, shaping the team’s approach to performance marketing and growth. This week on the Sub Club Podcast, we chatted with Sherina about her decade of experience as a performance marketer and how subscription apps can succeed in today’s crowded app stores. 

Getting the most out of freemium

In the early days at Deezer, Sherina’s team pushed hard to get free users to convert to paid subscriptions. So hard, in fact, that many users became frustrated with the free experience and simply stopped using the app. As Sherina puts it, “Freemium only works if it’s actually free. Take away too much, and users won’t upgrade—they’ll just leave. The best freemium models build habit and trust before making the upsell.” After learning this, the Deezer team re-worked their free user experience to be enjoyable so that users would stick around for the long haul. That way, some users may eventually be convinced to convert, while non-paying free users still generate revenue by viewing ads from Deezer’s strategic brand partners.

Brand or performance marketing… why not both?

These days, subscription apps can’t rely purely on performance marketing. Sure, you might see some short-term benefits when you activate two or three new acquisition channels, but according to Sherina, “you’ll very quickly hit a ceiling beyond which you can’t scale again.” The best results come from a blend of both brand marketing and performance marketing. Case in point: Deezer recently launched a TV ad campaign that doesn’t mention free trials or pricing or even encourage people to download the app — it just shows what it’s like to be a Deezer user. This kind of brand marketing effort helps build up a positive brand image at the top of Deezer’s funnel so that bottom-of-the-funnel performance marketing efforts (like special offers) are more effective later.

Creative measurement strategies

With today’s user privacy rules, it’s harder than ever to determine which of your marketing efforts are having a demonstrable effect on your bottom line, and traditional attribution models don’t always capture the impact of brand marketing. At Deezer, Sherina and her team use a blend of media mix modeling, incrementality testing, and brand lift studies to get a more nuanced picture of what is and isn’t working so they can make data-backed decisions. But what happens when the story the data is telling you doesn’t feel right? According to Sherina, sometimes you just have to go with your gut. She and her team recently ran an A/B test of several new Deezer homepages, none of which outperformed the control version. Sherina and her team felt confident that the control version wasn’t the best option, so they implemented a different one. The result? After several weeks, they noticed a clear uptick in performance from the previous version of the page. It just goes to show that even with the best data, you still need to trust your instincts.

Conclusion

Want to learn more about performance and brand marketing strategies? Check out our full conversation with Sherina in this week’s episode of the Sub Club Podcast.