What Audible Gets Wrong About Repeat Purchases

Amazon owns Audible, so it's unsurprising that you can purchase an audiobook in a few clicks.

But, unlike Amazon, they're a few bad clicks.

You're cooking with the same ingredients as everyone else, but yours just tastes better.

And unlike a subscription (a recurring purchase), you usually have to be proactive about designing and spinning a flywheel for repeat purchases.

I've designed and experimented on these set-ups with more than 100 different companies, on (at least) hundreds of millions of users.

Here are some techniques that have reliably worked for me.

We've covered the process of buying a book, but what about turning the flywheel?

If you're like me, you'll listen to books until the acknowledgements—the bit where the author thanks a bunch of people for putting up with them. 

Then you'll stop.

Although Audible breaks these out into chapters, they don't automatically mark a title as finished unless you've listened to the entire thing.

So my library is mostly unfinished books with a few seconds or minutes remaining. These will then be continuously recommended to me as the next thing for me to listen to.

I could manually mark them as finished, but I don't.

A behaviour that could be recognised by looking at data (percentage of "unfinished" books that only have the end credits left), effectively neutralises a major conversion opportunity for Audible.

A single oversight.

There are two main reasons why companies show analytics for individual usage:

For example, people rarely brag about the number of ads they’ve not seen. Perhaps because they don't have a clear grasp of the alternative. The benefits are silent.

I suspect that Audible is a combination of the two. 

But through the simple criteria of framing or bragging, you can roughly judge how effectively these analytics are displayed.

Audible's barely works. 

Often the charts are outright broken. For example, look at my daily listening time:

You have to tap to reveal the raw data, which then doesn't align to the bar chart at all.

And then conceptually they often miss the point.

If you click to view your listening time, it'll always show you today's analytics, even if you've got no data.

Something to remember is that the default time frame for your analytics can make all the difference.

In Audible's instance, weekly or monthly would likely be better. But some apps benefit from a lifetime view.

At least it's not as bad as the badges...

I've found that badges and achievements are considerably more effective if the user proactively works towards them.

For example; you've read 400 words of this article already, congratulations.

But you didn't feel much, did you?

If you click on a locked achievement, you're shown a pop-up like these:

Typically this type of milestone would be used to encourage specific behaviours, like trying new features, or committing to repeat usage (streaks).

The concept is simple: nudge the actions that create stickier users.

But the vagueness doesn't tell you if it needs a day of effort, or a whole year. You'd need to look it up online first.

It's a style of hardcore grinding that will only appeal to a very small cohort of their users—and they're probably pretty dedicated anyway.

It's the rest of their audience that they need to nudge.

P.S., If you're interested in how to make your badges, achievements and streaks way more effective, I've published an entire Cheatsheet on Gamification.