VSCO

The challenge

Unreliable data straining marketing performance and engineering capacity

Prior to RevenueCat, the VSCO team had been relying on internal server logs for Google subscription data and had recently integrated the App Store Connect subscriptions API for iOS. Internal server logs did not prove to be reliable and as a result, our Android subscriptions were known to be estimated. Additionally, server logs did not provide receipt-level data, so we were unable to tie back transaction_ids to the dollar amounts coming from the Google Estimated Sales API. On the Apple side, we did not have the engineering capacity to keep up with changes coming in from Apple over time. Ultimately, we did not have a reliable single source of truth for subscription event data.

The solution

A single source of reporting for mobile and web

Our iOS engineers had previously heard of RevenueCat and pushed for it as a solution for VSCO in an effort to eliminate a considerable amount of the backlog across almost every team. With RevenueCat our team was able to get more accurate and consistent subscription data into all of the tools their teams use. 

With far less engineering management, we were able to easily test and eventually increase pricing with far less risk. The out-of-the-box RevenueCat events gave us more confidence in the data, enabling us to validate our results and ensure we were targeting users accurately (and in real-time). Using RevenueCat’s native integration with Braze, a leading customer engagement platform, we were able to build automated message campaigns based upon a relevant subscription event—for instance, automatically triggering a messaging sequence using Braze Canvas designed to reduce churn for customers that turn off Auto-Renew for their subscriptions.

The result

Improved marketing performance with fewer engineering resources

After implementing RevenueCat, the renewed confidence in subscription data and ease of testing directly helped scale revenue by increasing pricing in our top geographies after testing. With a single source of revenue event data for mobile and web, the RevenueCat and Braze integration allowed us to implement fast winback and upgrade messaging that ultimately resulted in a Membership churn reduction of almost 5%. In particular, we were able to generate uplift on renewals of customers who had turned off Auto-Renew by targeting them with Braze-powered messaging campaigns in the final month before their subscriptions expired.

RevenueCat’s friendly UI made it easy for employees across VSCO to handle subscription management tasks (i.e. comping a user’s subscription). Because RevenueCat has native integrations with the existing tools in our marketing stack, implementing RevenueCat has also led to drastically reduced maintenance time for third-party tools by reducing the scope of our integration management from three separate data channels (VSCO to AppStore, VSCO to Braze, VSCO to AppsFlyer, etc.) to one data channel—namely, VSCO to RevenueCat.