40 Secrets to Making Money with In-App Purchases

19. Offer the Right Tool at the Right Time

Special offers made to the right players — at the right time — are powerful selling techniques.

For instance, the above offer to hire a mercenary pops up in Contract Killer Zombies 2 when you’re faced with an arena full of zombies. Picture players in this situation who know the odds are stacked against them — an offer of help at the right time is a great way to drive IAP.

20. Create Beautiful and Useful Stores

Noble Nutlings has one of the best stores out there, as shown below:

The store is easy to use, really good-looking, and is straight to the point. One great option in this store is the ability to “try before you buy”. The Apple Store uses this to great advantage; when people can try out something before they commit to buy, the conversion rate tends to be much, much higher.

21. Use the Psychology of Color

Think about how you present your IAP contents, right from the store popup to the simple buttons people press to buy your content. How does color affect your users’ purchasing habits?

Below is a chart which matches mood with color:

You can use this as a starting point to help guide you while crafting your design assets.

A great idea is to use a technique known as “A/B testing” in order to understand what color — or combination of colors — lead to higher conversion rates.

You don’t have to rebuild your entire UI; sometimes small changes like changing the color of a “Buy” button are enough to get great results.

clutch.io is a great online tool to use for A/B testing your app. They have recently been acquired by Twitter but provide all the needed tools in order to setup everything on your own server to support A/B tests in your app.

Here’s a few examples of how colors are commonly used to influence buyers’ behavior:

• Yellow is often used to grab the attention of window shoppers.
• Red creates urgency; try to combine it with time-limited deals.
• Blue creates a sense of trust and security.
• Green is the easiest color for our eyes to process, and is commonly used to help people relax. Maybe that’s why we like it so much on this site! :]
• Orange creates a call to action.
• Black is powerful and used to market luxury products. If you’re using a relic in your store, associate it with black and gold to create a sense that the item is priceless.

22. Make Your Store Easy To Find

Try to create several ways for users to find your store. The easier it is to find your store, the greater the chances are that people will buy something.

Check out this screenshot from Draw Something – there is not one, but three different ways to get to the store!

23. Offer One-Time Deals

Eternity Warriors 2 makes great use of the one-time offer model:

One time offers are incredibly appealing, but they get really, really annoying if you present them to the user too frequently. Don’t show your “one-time deal” on every application launch, just once in a while to make the user think the deals are sparse. But when you do present your one-time offer, make it worth their while by offering the user a really cool item or giving them a great deal.

24. Grab The Player’s Attention With Bling

If you want things to stand out such as relics, or the button users click to access your store, use some shiny effects or embellishments to grab people’s attention, as shown in the screenshot below:

25. Offer Multi-Buys

Offering something for free if a user buys a certain number of items is a technique frequently used in supermarkets to encourage multi-buy behavior. However, don’t overdo it; if people become too accustomed to your “bargain basement” deals, there’s a chance that you may risk cannibalizing other IAP contents.

The app below shows a good example of a multi-buy offer for IAP content:

26. Create Your Own Economy

Build an economy composed of achievable and premium virtual currencies. An achievable currency is the one that a player can collect during game play and redeem for in-app items. Premium currency is available only to users who use real money.

You should either allow your users to collect achievable currency through playing your game a lot (thus capitalizing on other streams like ads), or allow them to purchase and exchange premium currency for achievable currency.

In this screenshot, you can see an example of premium currency for sale:

A good approach to controlling your economy is via remote downloads of plist files to tweak the variables in your virtual economy. This simplifies the maintenance of your IAP asset pricing, and can lead to more complex scenarios dealing with price multipliers for subsets of IAP content.

27. Use Applicasa to Manage Your IAP Strategy

Applicasa.com is a mobile games management platform that helps you set up and optimize your IAP.

Their product is still in beta, but they show strong promise and their products are top-notch.

There are several ways that Applicasa helps you manage your IAP offerings:

• Understand if your prices are too high or too low.
• Keep track of the currency available in the economy and how much of it is used everyday.
• Validate every IAP transaction.
• Set up a dynamic virtual store where you can update items prices and upload new items.
• Understand what items are appealing by tracking how many times an item was purchased.
• Run A/B testing for any of your contents.
• Auto-segment your users based on behavior and their activity in your app. This allows you to promote your paid contents to different categories of users, as well as promote them during different game events.

It’s important to remember that all users are different; you can’t sell the same way to everyone.

The image below shows how Applicasa allows you to segment users:

Applicasa also helps you create promotions, deals or announcements based on user behavior:

• Spending habits — those who spend almost nothing, up to “whales” who spend a lot.
• Usage habits — those who play very little to those who play obsessively.
• County of origin — consumption patterns change based on the countries and cultures your app services.
• Demographics — modify your in-game offers by age and gender of the user.

The two following graphs illustrate how things like age and gender affect a user’s spending habits: