40 Secrets to Making Money with In-App Purchases

28. Offer IAP As a Reward

When you offer an IAP asset to a user as a reward for performing a certain action, your offer will usually be received with gratitude. As well, it has the added effect of strengthening your brand credibility.

Subway Surfers offers the following reward for logging in to their Game Centre:

When you give away virtual currency as a gift for returning to your app each day, you increase the longevity of your app — that is, how long people will keep using your app as the days go by.

One great example of rewarding the user for returning is found in The Simpsons™: Tapped Out:

Not only do rewards increase as the user keeps returning to the game, but the “Mystery Box” also increases curiosity and will draw players back over many days.

The chart below is provided by Localytics and illustrates the likelihood of a user making an in-app purchase as the number of gaming sessions increases:

The end result of having your players return time and time again to your app is greater confidence in your products, which leads people to spend more on in-app purchases.

A loyal user base is a must for a successful and long lasting game, if you are interested in building your monetization strategy around this concept, take a look at Beintoo.com a mobile engagement platform, offering a unique loyalty program for mobile and web applications.

29. Manage the Difficulty of Your Levels

If your game is level-based, you could provide an IAP to allow users to skip levels that they find difficult. As well, you can tweak the difficulty of each level via your good friend the plist file to find the optimum balance between level difficulty and in-app earnings.

You need to be careful when changing the difficulty of your levels; if you frustrate your users, they’ll exit from the app prematurely and the likelihood of them returning will plummet. One thing you can do is offer power-ups in the level as you tweak the difficulty; you can gauge how difficult the level is by the usage of the power-ups.

30. Adapt to Different Demographics and Tastes

If you have some type of player characters in your game, keep your users happy by allowing them to buy customized clothing, or giving them the choice of an avatar that they feel represents their true self.

The game Temple Run has done this in a superb way, as shown below:

31. Offer Assistance in the Heat of the Moment

As the saying goes, you don’t realize that you’ve run out of toilet paper when you’re standing in the supermarket. Instead of making your players load up on in-app purchases before they start your game, offer them assistance when they need it most — in the midst of battle!

Contract Killer Zombies 2 uses this technique to great effect. Run out of ammo? Need a stronger weapon to kill a boss? No problem! Let the user pause the game and purchase what they need, and allow them to get back to what’s important — killing zombies!

32. Make Purchase Recommendations

As players negotiate through your levels, they’ll often think “Shoot! I should have bought that weapon before I faced this boss!” You can make your players’ lives easier — and increase your IAP conversion rate — by offering some hand-picked items for sale before every new level.

Eternity Warriors 2 offers the player several items they might need prior to each level as shown below:

33. Sell Real-World Merchandise

Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds are such huge titles that they can sell their own merchandise through the app. Most developers don’t achieve quite this level of success, but if you have a critical mass of loyal gamers, you can offer such real-world items as T-shirts or mugs through your app.

Temple Run offers game-branded wallpapers for purchase — there’s no reason that you couldn’t do the same in your app!

34. Keep An Eye on Top-Grossing Apps

Top-grossing apps are built by studios that have mastered the art of engaging players and maximizing in-app purchases. Download their games and play them with an analytical eye to see what makes them so addictive — and what cues they use to encourage people to buy!

App Annie is a great web-based aggregate of app grossing charts, like the one shown below:

35. Leverage In-App Content for Non-Purchase Objectives

Although the majority of people won’t spend money in your game, they’ll still love to receive virtual currency in exchange for their services.

Ask users to perform actions that have some value to you, and reward them with some in-game virtual currency.

Some things that you can reward your users for doing are:

• Inviting friends to the app via email, SMS, or Facebook
• Completing quick actions that generate value for you, such as Tapjoy or Sponsorpay
• Sharing scores on social networks
• Logging in to their social networks
• Subscribing to your mailing list
• Creating an account in your game

Money isn’t the only thing of value in a monetization strategy. A mention on a social network , as well as building your marketing list via email signups, are both actions that have a great deal of value.

36. Create Big Content for Big Spenders

On average, less than 2% of your user base will purchase your IAP content.

According to W3i researches, content priced between $0.99 and $1.99 only generates 6% of your game’s total revenue. However, content priced between $9.99 and $19.99 generates 47% of total revenue.

You can try to optimize your content and try to entice casual users to make more in-app purchases, but the reality is that IAP is not a long-tail game.

The numbers show that users who are willing to spend money will go for the big purchases. Although you will likely sell a lot of content at the 99¢ price point, in the long run you will make more money on the big-ticket items — even though you’ll sell less of them.