Over the years, four main monetization models have come to dominate the world of mobile apps: ads, paid subscriptions, freemium, and in-app purchases. In this article, we will be focusing on in-app purchases (IAPs) and share some tips on how you can incentivize them.
An offer to buy an in-game item or any other form of content within an app (excluding subscriptions) is called an in-app offer. A properly designed system of offers would enable you to convert more non-paying users into customers, boosting your profits as a result.
In our recent study, we calculated average conversion rates for different game genres.
We’ve reviewed recommendations by leading gaming and mobile monetization experts and compiled five tried-and-true methods of increasing the effectiveness of in-app offers.
If you don't want to scare off or lose potential customers, each of your offers must be properly timed.
Serve up an IAP too early, and you may rub new users the wrong way, as they are not yet aware of its value. But if you take too long, you might miss out on potential conversions.
You want to display the offer at the right moment, when the user is most likely to take you up on it. Here’s how you can do that:
1. Calculate the average session duration and focus on the latter half of that period. This way you will neither be late nor risk annoying the user, as they’ll have already learned the value of the purchase. Experiment with different offer timings.
2. Remember to highlight your app’s premium features as early as the onboarding stage. Just take it easy and don’t go overboard with offers and requests to register, subscribe or turn on notifications.
3. Display offers after certain triggers, like a lost round in the game – users probably won’t buy new lives until they've almost run out of them.
Anastasia Grishina, brand manager of MyGames, recommends integrating analytics into your app for a clearer understanding of when the user performs target actions and when they do not.
Always remember that re-using offers leads to a loss of interest. A study published back in 2013 showed that 77% of users prefer to see different content at each product stage.
In other words, if users don’t make purchases, do not repeatedly show them the same offer. If your offers get ignored, take a short break and then switch tactics.
Additionally, you can always raise the stakes and lure users in with a more tempting offer or experiment with different products and options.
According to studies, 86% of users openly admit that personalized offers greatly impact their decision to make a purchase.
In the mobile segment, personalization is mostly done by means of audience segmentation. There are dozens of parameters you can use to segment users, including:
This will enable you to tailor a perfect offer for all sorts of groups, be that residents of major Russian cities with iOS devices or paying users aged 25 through 35.
One of our experiments showed that tailored offers may help increase the average revenue per user (ARPU) by 23%.
Predictive analytics can also be a great addition to your personalization toolkit. For example, our standalone recommendation engine – MyTracker Personalize – automatically collects user data and uses it to train ML models to then select the most appropriate offers.
If your app’s premium features don’t sell too well, maybe it’s just inconvenient to buy them. Perhaps you offer too many similar products that people struggle to choose between, your store’s interface isn’t very user-friendly, or the value of the purchase is not all that obvious.
Here are a few tips to make your in-app store more accessible:
The way you incentivize purchases is also important. For example, offers can be displayed via push notifications, which pop up when the user taps the mail button, or take up the full screen. Those need to alternate, and you need to fine-tune all the display options.
Elizaveta Gutnik, MyTracker’s business development manager, recommends analyzing your sales funnel’s bottlenecks based on user feedback.
Скриншот: Надо сделать скриншот из Lamoda -
If people just don’t seem to buy anything no matter what you do, perhaps your offers are simply not valuable enough, or their value is not obvious. For example, players may be unaware of how buying a certain item will affect their experience.
So what can you do about it? Ivan Klevakichev, head of design and analytics at MyGames, recommends to always look at your offers through the eyes of potential customers.
Make sure you consistently communicate their value to users without misleading them. For example, before offering the player a certain resource, give them some of it for free to try things out.
Adjust offers to make them look appropriate for your market, taking into account the genre and geography.
Working on the pitch for in-app purchases is a universal way to increase your mobile app’s revenue without hindering user experience.
There are many ways one can improve the effectiveness of integrated offers to make a purchase. However, when applying them in practice, remember that poorly-thought-out experiments can affect key metrics in unpredictable ways.
