Are you ready to explore the world of gamification and behavioural economics? Discover how the principle of loss aversion can help turn curious free trial users into devoted subscribers.

At The Hindu, we leveraged the powerful principle of loss aversion in our free trial onsite onboarding journey to improve the free trial to subscription conversion rate.

In a typical marketing funnel for digital news businesses, a user gets into the activation phase with a free trial. Every digital news business aims to improve subscription conversion from free trial users.

Inside the free trial onboarding journey

The onboarding journey is the first time a user experiences your product/service. The free trial onboarding journey is usually a benefits/functional type of onboarding where a business can showcase the benefits of its product/service to users.

In digital news subscriptions, the free trial onboarding onsite journey is the critical bridge between curious readers and devoted subscribers. It’s where we introduce our potential subscribers to the wealth of content, value, and insights The Hindu provides. This is where they decide whether to commit themselves to the continuous knowledge seeker or continue as casual readers.

After implementing Google one-tap sign-in on our digital products, we witnessed a surge in free trial sign-ups. However, the next challenge was to improve the free trial to subscription conversion rates. We needed a strategy to nudge those curious minds towards becoming dedicated subscribers. Hence, we needed to improve our existing onsite onboarding journey for free trial users.

Understanding loss aversion

In 1979, Daniel Kahneman and his associate Amos Tversky coined the term “loss aversion,” defining it as when “the response to losses is stronger than the response to corresponding gains.”

“Losses loom larger than gains” implies that people, by nature, are averse to losses and tend to avoid them. Loss aversion is a behavioural economics concept that suggests people feel the pain of losing something more acutely than the pleasure of gaining something of equal value.

Our gamification initiative harnessed the power of loss aversion by crafting a clever discount system. We gave users a discount that decreased with the number of articles they read during their free trial.

But here’s the twist: We sweetened the deal with a rewarding mechanism. If users read more than a certain number of articles, they received a massive discount on subscriptions.

By implementing this loss aversion-based gamification strategy in our free trial onsite onboarding journey, we hypothesised that users would be more motivated to leap from casual reader to subscriber. We expected to see a boost in conversion rates.

But does it work?

The results of this experiment blew us away.

In just 40 days, subscription conversions from our gamification onboarding journey surpassed the conversion rates from the previous six months of the onboarding journey. Our innovative gamification strategy ignited our users’ curiosity and determination, driving them to become loyal subscribers.

In conclusion, gamification with a sprinkle of loss aversion has proven to be a game-changer for improving free trial to subscription conversions. It’s a reminder that innovation and psychology can work hand-in-hand to deliver exceptional results.

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