Role
Senior Product Designer, Growth
Scope
Design, Hypothesis Development, Experiment Design
Impact
+1.7K subscriptions annualised
Date
Fy26

Problem

For customers on a paid edition trial with payment details on file, the “end of trial” (EOT) email is a critical moment in the decision to stay paid or downgrade. Every month, around 12k customers upgrade with PDE on file, but roughly half manually downgrade, with 20–30% doing so in the final three days of trial. The existing EOT email was plain, generic, and focused more on reminding customers that their trial was ending than on reinforcing the value of paid plans. We needed to better communicate the value of Paid Editions at this decision point so fewer customers downgrade and more remain fully funded products (FFP).

Approach

I partnered with ChatGPT to generate five distinct content directions for the new EOT email, varying tone from encouraging to loss‑aversion and ranging in dev effort from simple to more complex and dynamic. After exploring multiple visual treatments, I landed on a feature comparison table as the clearest way to frame what customers gain by staying on a Paid plan versus what they lose by downgrading to Free. I sourced value propositions for the 3 apps from other successful experiments using a Growth Content Agent, and developed 8 email designs (4 x Apps @ Standard vs Premium tiers). I recommended shipping the lower‑effort design first to validate the concept quickly, then iterate from there. As part of the redesign, I introduced a new, clearer “Billing details” component, which has since been adopted across all transactional emails.

Value delivered

The new EOT email variant drove a +3.05% relative uplift in FFP, equating to 1.7k annualised incremental FFPs from this single high‑volume touchpoint. This experience was rolled out to 100% and will be used as a baseline for further optimisation, using my Iteration 2 Social Proof concept, to personalise EOT communications.

Key steps in the process

Quant data showed a clear jump in manual downgrades that coincided with the EOT email being sent to Standard and Premium trials
Competitor research for inspiration
Exploring different illustration concepts
Exploring 5 different content directions using ChatGPT
Final design localised to Japanese
A more complex concept for a second iteration that uses Social Proof
Control and Variant with Hypothesis
The final and successful email design