Today I want to talk about selling your iPhone App.
Internet Marketing
Over the past year, I have been a student of what is called “Internet Marketing” – that is essentially how to sell products online. The brand of Internet marketing that seems to have the most promise in this new economy involves developing a relationship with your customers, finding out what they want the most and delivering a product to them that “over-delivers” in value.
Relationship – Listen – Provide Exceptional Value
Can Internet Marketing Be Applied to iPhone Apps?
What I have been trying to learn over the past year is if this proven successful model can be applied to selling iPhone apps. There are serious challenges to applying these marketing approaches to selling iPhone apps; I feel that there is some magic formula out there waiting to be found when it comes to selling iPhone apps (specifically for indie developers).
What are some of the challenges?
Price-Point – the majority of iPhone apps sell for 99 cents netting a 70 cent profit per app. This price point makes it very difficult to justify investing a lot of effort into only one customer.
Loyalty – it is difficult to determine if a customer’s positive experience with your app will translate into sales of your next app or your more expensive desktop app. The App Store seems to be driven more by impulse sales than anything else.
Control – The 300 pound gorilla in the room is Apple itself. The reality is that the most important things that affect sales all involve the App Store which Apple controls completely. Once you have an app on the App Store you will not be able to communicate with your users making it difficult to establish any sort of relationship. Decisions about how apps are presented on the store (top 100 lists, new and noteworthy and so on) all drastically effect your sales. But, you will not be able to influence these things at all.
There are more challenges as well.
What can you do?
That being said, there are some things that will help you sell your app. What needs to be done first is to make sure you have a solid product, good supporting material and you must update your app frequently.
Polish – the cheapest advertising in the world is to simply have a well polished fantastic app. This should translate into positive reviews on the App Store.
Icon & Artwork – do your best to have a eye-catching icon. This is the first thing people see and it is your ad. It should speak to the audience that you are aiming at.
Screenshots – your screenshots on the App Store should show off the best aspects of your app. People should feel compelled to buy your app just by looking at the screens. This is the closest thing we have to trial demo in the App Store.
Description – learn how to write descriptions that SELL your app. Be honest, but speak right to your audience and their wants.
Solicit Reviews – if you have a mailing list or friendly people who would like to try your app give them promo codes (free copies of your app) and ask them to review it. Testimonials are a very powerful way to promote your app. Once you get some of these testimonials put them into your description right at the beginning (user comments are that powerful).
Submit Updates Frequently – Apple rewards developers who update their apps by moving them to the top of the new release list. This always bumps sales up drastically if you do one little hack (changing the release date in iTunes Connect). The more sales you make the more likely it is for you to get into a top 100 list. If you do that sales will increase even more. Plan to update frequently in the beginning – update each week or every other week. At least plan on updating once a month.
Discussion
The suggestions above are the only things I know to be effective when it comes to selling iPhone apps. But, my gut tells me that there are more ways out there. I am going to continue to do research on this topic, follow marketing oriented blogs and even try some testing of my own.
My questions to YOU:
What other ways have you used to sell your app? Did it work? Any ideas that you would like to try someday? Can “Internet Marketing” as discussed in the beginning of this post be effectively applied to iPhone apps?
Comment below…
Couldn’t agree more with your list.
I have also experimented with using mobile advertising to promote my apps. So far I can say that I have seen absolutely zero benefit from using companies like Admob…so my advice is to stick to the points above and don’t waste any money on direct advertising.
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Thanks for the comment – I tried to use Google ad last year with Tasting Notes. It cost a lot and it was hard to tell if it helped or not. As far as I know there is no way to track metrics of sales on the App Store. Sometime this summer I want to do a test of AdMob to see if it impacts sales at all.
- However, most of what I read on the web supports your experiences of having zero impact using ads…