Grow your app with RevenueCat: An intro for app marketers

No matter what type of app marketer you are, your results (and, quite possibly, your life!) could be made much better if your app uses RevenueCat. 

Take social content app, Mojo, for instance. By leveraging RevenueCat, their growth team managed to 2x their average revenue per user (ARPU) in the space of a year. Running app Runna, meanwhile, grew subscriptions by 30x.  

This was made possible because RevenueCat fuels your entire funnel with accurate, centralized revenue data that connect effortlessly to your existing marketing stack.

Whether you’re currently trying to convince your leadership to implement RevenueCat, just getting started or you’re a long-time customer looking to accelerate growth, this guide is here to walk you through a few of the most high-impact use cases for app marketers.

1. Acquisition

RevenueCat helps growth teams drive efficient, data-informed acquisition campaigns. Improve your return on ad spend (ROAS) by connecting granular customer and campaign attributes with reliable cross-platform purchase data. Track the impact of your campaigns beyond just initial conversions.

Get more out of Apple Search Ads

Apple’s Search Ad reporting alone doesn’t offer enough insight to make decisions about long-term campaign effectiveness. It lacks cohort-tracking over time and only provides you with a static table-format Excel spreadsheet. RevenueCat’s Apple Search Ads integration fills these gaps and surfaces insights you can’t get with Apple’s reporting alone. This allows you to follow the subscription lifecycle of your campaigns’ cohorts over time across key metrics with clean visualizations.

Where to start:

• Raise bids on more profitable ad groups: Analyze ASA profitability by segmenting almost any chart in the RevenueCat dashboard by Campaign or Ad Group. By understanding which campaigns are driving higher realized LTV or better retention, for example, you can have more confidence with your bidding.
• Translate ASA learnings to app store optimization to attract more profitable users: Find key attributes of the Campaigns and Ad Groups that are driving the most profitable users and feed that back into your app store optimization (ASO) strategy. For example, if specific keywords are driving more profitable users, highlight those keywords or associated use-cases prominently in screenshots, title, or description.

📚 Check out our “Ultimate guide to Apple Search Ads best practices”

Connect purchase data to your attribution tools

By connecting RevenueCat to mobile measurement partners (MMPs) and other attribution platforms, you can get more reliable revenue data to use in optimizing user acquisition spend and strategies.

Where to start:

• Eliminate wasteful spend: Using RevenueCat’s AppsFlyer integration to automatically sync subscription events like trial starts, subscriptions, and cancellations, top fitness app Runna identified markets that were unprofitably driving up customer acquisition costs (CAC). Eliminating spending in these regions decreased CAC by 8%.
• Optimize your ad campaigns with subscriber lifecycle data: Critical subscriber events often occur outside your app, such as turning off auto-renew, free-trial conversion, subscription renewals, etc. Depending on when the use re-opens your app, if ever, that data may or may not be collected by attribution providers in a timely manner. RevenueCat can send those events in real-time, server-to-server to attribution providers to help better optimize marketing spend. For example, if a new ad campaign starts generating a lot of trial starts, but those users immediately go turn off auto-renew, you can ramp down spend immediately instead of waiting 7 days to see the revenue dip from that underperforming cohort.

📄 Connect RevenueCat to an attribution partner

Fill in gaps left by App Tracking Transparency

Apple’s privacy changes have made it more difficult to attribute app installs and user engagement directly to specific marketing activities. RevenueCat Charts, however, can help. By analysing cohorts and grouping users based on their acquisition day/week/month, you can assess their long-term value and behavior. This doesn’t replace more granular estimates from an MMP, but the cohort-based approach allows for incrementality testing, blended ROAS calculations, and analysis of known changes.

Where to start:

• Measure blended 14-day ROAS: On a recent episode of the Sub Club podcast, Opal co-founder Kenneth Schlenker shared how their focus on short-term blended ROAS allowed them to grow quickly in the early stages without an MMP or getting too bogged down in the details of trying to measure the performance of every campaign. By tracking which campaigns launch on which day/week and then looking at blended ROAS from those cohorts it’s easy to get a sense for how well certain ads are performing. It’s also a great sanity check for campaign performance if you are using an MMP where “probabilistic attribution” can sometimes meaningfully over or underestimate performance.

• Cohort RevenueCat charts against known changes: RevenueCat’s charts make it easy to analyze specific cohorts when circumstances change. Whether you ship a big update, your app is featured by Apple, mentioned in the press, or you start a new marketing channel, the impacted cohort’s performance often changes your baseline metrics. Our growth advocate, David Barnard, noted that trial start rates (shown on RevenueCat’s Initial Conversion chart) spiked significantly when his app was mentioned on Daring Fireball, compared to mentions by TechCrunch and other press, indicating higher intent. This suggests that advertising on Daring Fireball or to similar audiences would be more impactful than reaching broader audiences like TechCrunch.

📄 Learn more about the Realized LTV per Customer Chart and Realized LTV per Paying Customer Chart

2. Conversion 

RevenueCat comes standard with a connected suite of native monetization tools built to help you to maximize conversions from trial, to paid, to upgraded.  Easily ship native, remotely configurable paywall templates to custom target audiences and optimize every aspect of the conversion journey with A/B testing. Iterate on what works and create an ongoing loop of revenue-maximizing improvements. 

Optimize pricing, packaging & paywalls for each audience

RevenueCat Targeting lets you tailor every aspect of your offering based on your target user segment and where they are in-app.  Use ready-made filters to strategically group your users by any custom attribute you define; or by dimensions like country, app platform, app version, RevenueCat SDK version.

Where to start:

• Tailoring to local markets: Adapt the presence, duration, and pricing of trial offers to suit local preferences. In some markets, longer trial periods may be more effective, while in others, shorter but more feature-rich trials could lead to higher conversion rates.
• Target offerings by App Version: iOS and Android users have distinct behaviors and preferences, as well as device capabilities. Targeting enables you to fine-tune your app’s Offerings to each platform’s audience.

📚 Check out 24 practical suggestions to tailor your monetization with Targeting.

Customize one of our native paywall templates or bring your own

Customize ready-to-ship, native templates or remotely configure any element of your existing paywall. 

Where to start:

• Launch your first paywall — no engineering effort required: Our growing gallery of ready-to-ship paywall templates make it easy for you to monetize and optimize your app. Templates make it easy to support your ideal configuration and have you covered with native-code for seamless loading, error case handling, localization, and more. These templates are remotely configurable, so making changes can happen without requiring an app update. Explore the our gallery of RevenueCat Paywalls Templates in use by real apps
• Pair a partial-screen purchase component with your own design: You decide how the purchase component displays on your paywall. Select from full-screen templates or a partial screen footer paired with your own design. Learn more about paywall display methods in the docs.
• Configure and test any element of your existing paywall remotely: Looking to optimize a paywall you’ve already built? When fetching products for your paywall from RevenueCat, attach a custom JSON object to the response to control the elements of your paywall. See the docs 

Learn what drives growth with easy-to-deploy A/B tests and full-funnel analytics

RevenueCat Experiments offers easy to deploy A/B testing that lets you see the impact of your changes on full funnel subscription metrics. You don’t even have to bug engineering to test your hypothesis, these experiments are “remotely configurable” which means they don’t require an app update to ship.

Where to start:

• Find the optimal subscription duration: Discover if offering your subscription for a shorter or longer duration (weekly, monthly, or annually) drives better adoption and lifetime revenue.
• Test the importance of trial presence: Does offering a trial make a difference, or are you giving away usage for free without it moving the needle for your bottom line? 
• What copy and designs win: Test different graphics and text elements to find the most compelling way to display your offerings.

📚 Need more inspiration? Explore 10 price test ideas for your mobile app.

3. Lifecycle marketing & revenue optimization

Once you’ve gotten a user to download and trial your app, RevenueCat is there to help you retain and maximize the value of the users you convert. Connected, real-time data is the key to unlocking smart and timely campaigns and strategies that reduce churn and increase LTV. 

Trigger smart campaigns to drive adoption and reduce churn

RevenueCat has pre-built integrations to all the top lifecycle marketing tools your team is likely already using (or considering), like Braze, OneSignal, Iterable, and webhooks. RevenueCat acts as your single source of truth for subscription data, sending real-time events like product changes, trial conversion, trial starts, initial purchases, trial cancellations, and cancellations to your lifecycle marketing tools. 

Where to start:

• Build smart onboarding campaigns: Target key moments like new downloads and trial starts to trigger messaging campaigns. Here’s how to use OneSignal with RevenueCat to build a simple onboarding campaign.
• Trigger win-back offers: Send timely, compelling offers to recently churned users. Here are nine win-back campaign ideas.
• Welcome subscribers back: Celebrate and encourage returning users with a welcome campaign.
• Ensure seamless access: Trigger messages when billing issues arise. Automate reminders when a trial is about to end and auto renew is off.
• Learn and improve with targeted surveys: Automate surveys to those who churn or don’t renew. 

Connect product usage to customer value

RevenueCat offers pre-built integrations to your product analytics tools. This allows you to attach cross-platform purchase data with product usage to help draw conclusions about what behaviors and patterns are correlated with revenue growth. 

This can help you identify more profitable use cases to optimize acquisition, onboarding and lifecycle marketing around. 

Where to start:

• Identify valuable user behaviors to inform the roadmap & drive revenue: Running training app, Runna uses RevenueCat’s integration to send key lifecycle event data to Mixpanel to better understand how user behaviors correlate to customer value. For example, Runna found that those who connect a calendar to the app have a better retention rate. They’re also exploring the impacts of other connections, like wearable devices on revenue metrics. This sort of insight can help drive feature prioritization and even feed into top of funnel targeting (for example, targeting those with wearable devices).
• Measure the impact of product changes on growth: When Photoroom was looking to optimize its offering for the Japanese market, it relied on RevenueCat conversion data synced to Amplitude to determine how changes to its product would impact growth. By monitoring the impact of changes to their design templates relative to customer behavior, they drove a 2-3X increase in trial rate for Japan. 

Key takeaways

• Centralized data for growth: RevenueCat consolidates revenue data, making it easy to connect with your marketing tools and see the true LTV impact of your campaigns.
• Successful case studies: Mojo doubled their ARPU while Runna grew subscriptions by 30X using RevenueCat’s insights and flexible reporting.
• Optimize acquisition:
  • Gain deeper insights and improve campaign effectiveness with our Apple Search Ads integration.
  • Connect with MMPs to refine your UA strategies.
  • Use RevenueCat Charts for cohort analysis to assess the impact of marketing and other factors.
• Boost conversions:
  • Tailor products and paywalls to specific user segments and local markets. Here are 24 practical suggestions.
  • Implement and measure paywall and pricing A/B tests easily. 10 price test ideas.
• Enhance lifecycle and revenue:
  • Automate targeted messages and offers based on real-time subscription data. Here’s a simple onboarding campaign idea using RevenueCat and OneSignal.
  • Connect product usage data with revenue insights to drive better decision-making.