Using Promotions and Giveaways to Improve App Discovery

Who doesn't love freebies? Giving away something of value is a great way to draw attention to your iPhone app, especially if it's your app that's being given away for free! Temporarily reducing your app's price to free for a single day or a weekend can help boost it higher in the App Store's Top Free Apps charts, especially if you notify all the iPhone news sites of this limited-time offer. Those sites love to report on price reductions and freebies, so the stunt should gain quite a bit of exposure. And if you partner with a popular giveaway site like FreeAppADay.com

(http://www.freeappaday.com/), then the extra publicity should really improve your app's ranking and visibility in the App Store charts!

If you're scratching your head, wondering how you're supposed to profit by giving away your app, then you're not looking at the big picture. It's true that you won't be making any money from all those users who downloaded the app for free, and you won't see a huge spike in paid app sales after the free offer ends. So why do it? This strategy is all about the up-sell.

By removing the price barrier for a limited time, thousands of new users will have taken advantage of the free download. Those are new customers who probably would not have purchased it before anyway, not to mention the thousands of new users who are discovering your app for the first time. If they enjoy the free app, you've just expanded your customer base with an opportunity to up-sell future In-App Purchase content and other new apps. Even if you were already doing that within a free lite version, there's a big difference in audience size. The lite version of your relatively unknown app may reach 50,000 users, whereas a highly publicized weekend giveaway of your full paid version may add more than 100,000 new users to your existing customer base in only a few days. But this strategy only works if you have a way to eventually convert a large percentage of these new users into paying customers.

Robert Szeleney partnered with FreeAppADay.com to offer his popular Rope'N'Fly game as a free App Store download for one day. He did this with the express intent to spread awareness for the new sequel, Rope'N'Fly 2. He capitalized on the free download offer by promoting the sequel on the original game's main screen (see Figure 10-2), reaching a much larger audience in the process. This extra exposure helped propel Rope'N'Fly 2 into the App Store's Top 50 Paid Apps chart.

Figure 10-2. By offering a free one-day download of Rope'N'Fly, the game's main screen helped promote the new sequel, Rope'N'Fly 2, to a much larger audience.

If you currently have only one iPhone app available and do not have any plans to integrate In-App Purchase, then offering a limited-time free download will aid in app discovery and visibility within the App Store, but it may not improve your sales. Candy Cane was fortunate in that its gamble of giving away Fling! for a short time pushed the game to the #1 spot on the App Store's Top Free Apps chart. When Fling! returned to its normal price, the wave of positive word-of-mouth recommendations from users resulted in enough sales to catapult Fling! into the U.S. Top 50 Paid Apps chart. If you have faith in the quality of your app, then this strategy may work for you, but it's risky. For most apps that try this approach, the developers see a slight bump in sales after the free offer ends, but it doesn't last long. Without a way to up-sell In-App Purchase items or cross-promote other products, it's often hard to justify this kind of freebie strategy.

If you're worried about cannibalizing potential app sales, then why not give away something else? That's what Tap Tap Tap did. To promote the launch of the voice-morphing app Voices, Tap Tap Tap partnered with Potion Factory to offer a free copy of its Voice Candy application for Mac OS X. To leverage the software freebie to help promote the Voices iPhone app, consumers had to tweet about the special offer on Twitter in order to download their free copy of Voice Candy. Tap Tap Tap announced this "TweetBlast" promotion through MacHeist's email database and Twitter feed, initially reaching almost 600,000 members. By spreading the word via Twitter, more and more people found their way to the web site, who in turn tweeted about it to receive the free Mac software. It was a successful viral campaign that motivated tens of thousands of people to tweet about it, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of people checking out the Voices app. Besides providing the promotion details, the web site also beautifully showcased Tap Tap Tap's Voices app with demo videos and an App Store buy button (see Figure 10-3). And sure enough, the ploy worked. With an introductory price of only 99 cents, enough people purchased the app within the first few days that Voices skyrocketed to #1 in the U.S. Top Paid Apps chart.

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Voice Candy

Voice Candy is a fun and useful recorder for your Mac. Think of it as Photo Booth for your microphone. You get 6 different effects to play with. Switch the effects while recording for some extra fun.

Look at who got Voice Candy for free...

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Figure 10-3. By offering a free copy of Voice Candy for Mac to anyone who tweeted about the special promotion, Tap Tap Tap's clever TweetBlast campaign helped propel Voices to #1 in the U.S. App Store's Top Paid Apps chart.

With Tap Tap Tap's John Casasanta being the creator of MacHeist, the company had unique access to an extremely large targeted audience. Obviously, most independent developers won't have mailing lists as large as MacHeist, but this kind of social media-based promotion can still work on a smaller level. If you followed my advice in Chapter 8 and have spent the past few months cultivating your own audience via Twitter, Facebook, email newsletters, and blog readers, you should have a sizable base for communicating special offers, giveaways, and other app-related news.

Any online promotion, especially one that utilizes social media, should always be designed to grow your audience. Don't give away free software, promo codes, or prizes without receiving a valuable connection in return. Even if they tweet about your iPhone app, there's no guarantee those tweets will turn into sales. But if people were required to follow you on Twitter or subscribe to your free email newsletter in order to participate in the promotion, then regardless of the outcome, your marketing efforts would be rewarded. That's exactly what Tap Tap Tap did with its Voices TweetBlast campaign. To get the free Voice Candy software, participants were required to first sign up for a free MacHeist account, follow @TapTapTap on Twitter, and then tweet a very specific message. Even if the promotion didn't pay off with a substantial boost in Voices sales, it added thousands of new Twitter followers and MacHeist members, enabling Tap Tap Tap to easily reach those people again in the future with special offers and new product announcements.

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