Case study

Launching in a new market

Overview

Some markets, like South Korea, are regulated to require especially high payouts on free streams. Given the high degree of paid streaming usage in the market, we lead with a direct-to-paid marketing strategy.

Our team’s task was to create and test a Premium first proposition that would resonate for users who do not have long to fall in love with Spotify before converting to Premium.

 

My role

I led the Premium design strategy and execution for the launch across mobile and web. I worked closely with the local market team and product teams across the company to drive the research and messaging behind the onboarding and offboarding experience.


The team

  • 2 Product Managers

  • 2 Engineering squads

  • Localization and translation team

  • 1 UX Writer

  • 2 User Researchers

  • Product Marketing & Consumer Insights team

  • Korea Business team

  • Legal and licensing

The Problem.

We rely on our Free Tier product to both demonstrate the benefits of Spotify and provide a fallback for users who do not want Premium. South Korea did not launch with a Free Tier, which meant users can only try Spotify Premium for 7 days before they are locked out of their account. Once their 7-day access is over, they will only be able to access a single page in the app where they are prompted to subscribe to a Premium plan to access their music.

How might we set expectations when their 7-day access is over and encourage users to subscribe?

The Process.

Because this was the first market to launch without a free tier, we knew we had to scope and test concepts in that local market. We worked across many teams and localization experts to create propositions and a friendly experience for users trying Spotify for the first time.

 
 

  • Defined the opportunity and success criteria for the user needs.

  • Conducted market research and competitive research to understand user needs and product landscape.

  • Met with the design and tech teams to ideate based on our research and how to communicate with users in a timely and friendly way.

  • Worked with User Research, the Translations team, and UX Writing to run usability tests of the onboarding and offboarding trial experience.

  • We used the results from the usability test to understand which parts of the experience were necessary to launch with and which could be built later post-launch. We coordinated with squads across the company to implement our proposition strategy on other platforms so there was consistency in the messaging and experience.

 
 

What we launched

 

In addition to a new sign-up, onboarding, and offboarding experience, we also created localized messaging for our channels. In total the whole experience helped set expectations and engaged users to sign up for a paid Spotify subscription.

See more work.