How Poor Messaging Strategy Kills Subscriptions for Health & Fitness Apps

Introduction

Successful subscriptions are not a given. It takes effort to keep users from slipping away before they hit the “Buy Your Personal Plan” button. We analyzed 250 M Health & Fitness app users, and found that up to 92% of installs don’t actually buy a subscription plan. The figures underscore a major pain point: poor communication with potential subscribers during acquisition. This could usually be fixed with surprisingly little effort with automated campaign orchestration and marketing support solutions offered by Reteno.

When acquiring new users, subscription-based health and fitness (H&F) brands face the same challenge as any other app: how to best present their value proposition to convert free users into paying subscribers. This struggle hinges on several well-known factors, including pricing, user experience, product features, and competition, to name a few.

Converting app downloads into revenue-generating subscriptions has long been a challenge for marketers. According to RevenueCat’s annual in-app subscription performance review, only about 1.7% of installs convert to subscribers within the first 30 days. Each lost subscription means, the initial investment in acquiring the user isn't recouped.

H&F marketing teams often overlook a critical component that can make or break subscriptions: marketing strategies based on 1:1 user communication. This leaves fitness fans unconvinced of the need to become premium app users. In turn, fewer paying subscribers means less recurring revenue, which directly reduces the app's bottom line.

Health and fitness apps can more effectively convert casual workout geeks into committed subscribers and drive significant revenue growth by developing timely, event-driven messaging strategies. Research shows that providing tips and announcing features during onboarding can increase user engagement by 52%.

Poor or no guidance/support at the subscription stage undermines the acquisition process and leads to early churn. Continued drop-offs can damage brand perception and limit reinvestment opportunities for future product improvements. Therefore, creating and implementing the right messaging strategy and its automation is critical for driving subscriptions and preventing user churn. 

Marketers' Pains That Right Messaging Strategy Can Heal

The Conversion Gap

Watching newly acquired installs, freemium, or trial users drop off is one of the biggest frustrations for an app marketer.

To make matters worse, dormant users often remain inactive despite promotional efforts, meaning countless revenue opportunities go unrealized.

You can trace these challenges back to a single cause: inadequate messaging strategies that fail to engage and guide prospects at the right moments in their journey.

Failure to Communicate the Value Proposition

Messaging strategies repeatedly suffer from poor timing, vague wording, or an overabundance of generic notifications that don't clearly communicate the product’s value to a potential subscriber.

Without tailoring messages to user actions or behavioral triggers, the brand-user dialogue feels more like noise and drives away prospects. But even if marketing teams recognize the issue, they still face the challenge of optimizing campaigns on the fly. This process may drain resources and leave little room for creativity or innovation.

Development Dependency

The heavy reliance on developers to set up and optimize campaigns adds to the communication-related pain. Every tweak to a messaging strategy often requires coding changes or integration adjustments. This creates bottlenecks in launching new campaigns, running A/B tests or experimentation.

Together, these barriers make it difficult for marketers to harness the full power of their messaging strategies. That's where automated workflows and data-driven campaigns come in.

Conversion Effect of Poor Messaging Strategy

Regardless of industry, up to 63% of consumers consider the onboarding period when deciding whether to subscribe or purchase. It is during this time that tailored communication through the right channels can improve your brand's conversion rates.

On the contrary, inadequate or outdated messaging strategies can significantly affect the success of your H&F mission.

High Uninstall Rates

Bombarding users with excessive, generic notifications often proves counterproductive. Many potential app admirers will turn off notifications or, worse, uninstall the app altogether.

In the long run, even genuinely useful messages can be dismissed if a health buff's first impression is that all communications are spammy.

Low Engagement & Lost Subscription

On the flip side, subscribers-to-be may drift away before paying for a premium plan if they don’t get enough messages tailored to their needs. Even motivated users may fail to discover the benefits of subscribing if notifications are not timed to key moments, such as the end of a free trial.

When the messaging strategy fails to highlight the true value of upgrading or alerts come too late, your health and fitness app risks losing prospects who might otherwise be ready to subscribe.

Common Messaging Strategy Pitfalls

Key Takeaways for a Winning Messaging Strategy

• Segment users based on their specific goals, behavioral patterns, or engagement levels, and tailor subscription messages to each segment. Re-engaging users who might otherwise abandon the subscription process is much more effective with targeted, personalized communications.
• Make the premium upgrade path crystal clear during onboarding. Reduce the risk of confusion and early abandonment by helping free trial users move smoothly through each step.
• Synchronize your sign-up prompts with key moments (e.g., nearing the end of a free trial). When messages align with user intent, they're more likely to trigger a successful upgrade.
• Run A/B tests of subscription offers, notification frequency, and timing. You can pinpoint the most effective messaging strategies for reducing abandonment by constantly refining your approach based on hard data. So, test, test at scale, iterate. And test again.
• Use marketing automation to ensure that no user drops out. Triggered message flows will keep free-trial users engaged and remind them of upgrade opportunities. All without requiring excessive manual effort.

Final Thoughts

Let's face it: health and fitness apps often leave potential revenue on the table by ignoring consistent communication with workout/yoga fans during the critical acquisition-activation phase.

Creating a targeted, timely, and value-promotional messaging strategy is not a trivial task. When done right, it can significantly increase the conversion rate of free users to paying subscribers. In addition to directly increasing subscriptions, well-structured messaging strategies indirectly support other important aspects of customer acquisition. They reduce churn, increase engagement, and highlight premium benefits.

In short, by targeting user needs and behaviors with data-driven messaging strategies, you both optimize the conversion funnel and create a more seamless, rewarding experience that keeps health buffs coming back for more.

How Reteno Helps You Build Actionable Messaging Strategy

As a marketing automation & support platform, Reteno has both the expertise and tools to help your app address the crucial subscription stage of the user journey. Combining advanced segmentation, analytics-driven insights, innovative A/B testing, and real-time triggers, it enables your brand to communicate with each individual user to deliver precisely timed messages through the channels that resonate best.

Once the app is installed, we help guide free users toward premium plans by ensuring the right offer reaches them at the exact moment they’re most likely to convert.

With Reteno’s automation and optimization tools, your H&F product will keep its value prop top of mind, refine messaging strategies based on performance data, and ultimately drive sustainable revenue growth. And all of this while minimizing the manual work and cost typically required to manage multiple campaigns.