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Growth

How to monetize your app in international markets (and what not to do)

Improve your mobile app conversion rates in new countries

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Nick Godwin

Product and Growth

Published

Is international expansion your next growth lever? It’s almost inevitable that every app developer turns to opportunities for their apps to grow abroad.

There is plenty of opportunity when you expand, but it’s tricky to get right. If you approach expansion with an experimentation mindset and put in a little effort, you’ll give your app the best odds to grow in each new market.

In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the top markets and the monetization best practices we’ve seen work incredibly well in each one. Whether you’ve already launched internationally or are about to start, there are growth tips for everyone.

But first, what not to do

Before we go any further, we need to share a few problematic international expansion approaches we’ve seen (and some we’ve done ourselves 🙈).

The “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” method

We’ve seen developers simply flip the switch to open app availability to multiple new markets as a litmus test to see which ones their product resonates with, only to find nothing but silence.

And nothing is quite as scary as silence.

The problem is you have a chicken and egg situation. Users are far less likely to download an app that isn’t localized, but developers may not want to spend the effort to localize without knowing if their product resonates with that market.

Be warned that if this approach doesn’t work, the reason won’t be clear. Blind launching only works if your app installs and retention are sustainable.

Not localizing your app

Speaking of localization, this is a hands-down best practice. Some markets like the Phillippines have a large segment of users with their devices set to English, which may not require localization. But the majority of the time you’ll want to present your app in that market’s native language.

There are several tools we recommend to automate the process, including Lokalise, Crowdin, and strings.dev.

Not localizing your app store pages

If the app page isn’t localized, users will assume your app also isn’t localized.

We’ve personally seen this deter users from downloading our apps, costing precious downloads and potential paying subscribers. If you want to seriously compete in a new market, app page localization is a must-have.

Not taking device market share into consideration

According to Statcounter, 60.2% of all mobile devices in Japan are iOS. However, in India, that number drops to just 4.05%. If your apps favor one platform over another, each market can have an enormous impact on app downloads and revenue growth.

In RevenueCat’s annual State of Subscription Apps report they found that both Japan and South Korea seem to monetize Play downloads better. They attributed Samsung’s local dominance to this effect in South Korea, but it’s surprising for Japan. Do your research before launching and be sure to track results by platform.

Not tailoring price to the market or region

Pricing is a massive factor when you expand. Alessandro Rizzo, who works on product growth at PhotoRoom, shared this international pricing tip:

Pricing strategies are generally tied to cultural factors (for duration), GDP (for price), and even the payroll cycle (for weekly or yearly). Regarding paywalls, the copy of the CTA and having a prominent image or gif are two big factors.

Not tailoring your paywall for each market

By now you should probably get the sense that localizing your app also means localizing your paywall. This wraps everything we’ve covered so far, including design styles, pricing, and localization.

Each market will respond differently to each design, which is why experimentation is a must.

What increases mobile app conversions in top markets

Japan

PhotoRoom’s Larissa Morimoto shared that paywalls mentioning “priority customer support” in Japan led to more conversions, a signal that having a strong customer support team is a key to growth.

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Add "Priority Support" to paywalls shown in Japan

Additionally, we’ve found that paywalls with social proof, specifically displaying user reviews in your paywall design, led to increased conversions.

Germany

Germany’s purchasing behavior tends to differ from other markets. Specifically, we’ve noticed resistance to recurring payments.

We suggest testing longer subscriptions, such as one- or two-year plans, as well as lifetime purchases because of this.

China

China can be one of the more challenging markets for app developers to grow in. However, regarding paywalls, we found that designs with lifestyle imagery, images of people on their phone rather than the app UI, perform better.

India

We’ve found the top lever for increasing conversions in India is pricing. Adjust your app’s prices due to the difference in income to prevent charging a subscription that’s a huge portion of someone’s annual income.

Additionally, around 95% of people in India use an Android device which makes it the platform to lead with in this market.

Latin America

Michal Parizek, head of product growth at Mojo, shared these findings from his experiments in Latin American countries:

We've learned that specifically for LATAM (mainly Brazil 🇧🇷  and Mexico 🇲🇽 ) we need to be careful about pushing yearly plans too much. Since it's more expansive, pushing yearly plans resulted in lowering new revenue. In the rest of the world, experiments told us that the best trial length is 7 days for yearly and 0 days for monthly plans. But not in the LATAM countries. We are seeing much better performance there with the same 3-day trial length for both yearly and monthly. Also, in that region, we achieved (by far) the biggest lift in adding a copy  (equivalent to X/month) to the yearly price tag.

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Use 3-day trials in Latin America

Paywall conversion levers for Latin America:

  1. Shorter trial lengths for all plans

  2. Be cognizant of a preference for shorter interval plans

  3. Use weekly or monthly equivalent pricing to show the value of the yearly plan

How to localize your Superwall paywalls

We’ve established that localizing your app is a crucial step. If you’re already using Lokalise or Crowdin, you can integrate Superwall with these platforms in your account Settings, or upload strings using our template.

From there, you can localize each paywall in the paywall editor.

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How to optimize your paywalls and pricing for each market in Superwall

Setting up a localized paywall for a new market is straightforward in Superwall. Within your existing campaigns, simply add a new audience with filters for each market or group of markets.

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Currently, you can set up a filter using the device locale parameter, or set up a filter where device locale contains a country code. In late Q2 2024, you’ll be able to create filters for country codes and even the region within a country.

Just be sure to move this audience to the top of your audience list since they are evaluated in order.

Once you’ve set up your audiences, experiments with different prices, designs, and copy are simple to launch.

How to get started

International app growth is a challenge but doing your research and putting in a little effort ahead of your launch will lead to higher conversions much quicker.

Remember, when you’re launching in a new market, consider some (or ideally all) of these growth levers:

  • App and paywall localization

  • Pricing and plan options

  • Optimal trial length

  • Paywall design and content

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Thanks to Superwall, we were able to 2x our iOS app profitability in just six months. It has greatly assisted our growth team in achieving exceptional results by facilitating high-frequency experimentation.

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Superwall made testing paywalls so much faster. Instead of releasing a new version of the app each time, we were able to iterate on the winning paywalls much quicker. Thanks to that it increased our revenue per customer by 40%.

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Superwall lets us move 10x faster on our monetization strategy. We can build and launch multiple paywall iterations without the need for client releases or complicated deploys. Our product iteration loop is days, rather than months because of Superwall.

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Superwall enables Bickster’s marketing team to design and optimize app paywalls, freeing up engineering to concentrate on innovation. As a result, Superwall helped accelerate our install-to-subscription rates, lower engineering expenses, and cured our team’s frustration with the (once) time-consuming process of iterating on paywalls.

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Superwall has revolutionized our monetization strategy. It’s an essential tool that allows rapid paywall testing and optimization, leading to remarkable improvements in our subscription conversions and revenue generation. Can’t recommend Superwall enough for any app-based business.

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Vahe Baghdasaryan, Sr. Growth
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Superwall has played an integral part of improving our subscription business. Compared to other providers, Superwall has proven superior in facilitating high-frequency experimentation allowing us to achieve an ideal monetization model, resulting in a significant increase in revenue.

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Superwall is the single greatest tool we’ve used to help us increase our revenue. Our material wins from Superwall are greater than any tool we’ve worked with to date!

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Jordan Gaphni, Head of Growth
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Shout out to Superwall for helping us dial in our paywall — made a big impact on monetization, increasing revenue by more than 50% 💸

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Chris Heinrich, CEO
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Superwall increases revenue. Full stop. Being able to test paywalls on the fly and quickly analyze results has drastically increased our revenue and improved our monetization of users. Highly recommend this tool!

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