Effective Marketing Strategies to Monetize Your App

There are many reasons why you might be building your own app — gain new customers, produce company awareness, or cultivate loyalty. But all these three point to just one important thing: making money. Making mobile apps can become a solid source of income when done properly. It is also one of the best ways to make your brand known and promote it. But what mobile app marketing strategies are effective enough to monetize your mobile apps?

In-app Advertising

Perhaps, this method is one of the most frequent app monetization techniques available on the web. By using in-app advertising, you’d allow your apps to be downloaded for free. By removing the cost barrier, you will be able to accumulate a large of user base and get their feedback. In turn, you sell your gathered data to app publishers who will pay you for targeted ads that will be placed in your apps. People love free apps so this can be an effective technique for monetization. However, not everybody appreciates ads while using their apps, so that’s another point to consider.

In-app Purchases

Sometimes, apps downloaded for free come with in-app purchases. This is particularly used in game apps, where the user can purchase a physical or virtual item like an accessory or extra lives to continue the game. Most times, in-app purchases come in the form of virtual products, especially if the items are a natural part of the apps and the users are likely to use it. For mobile app marketers, mobile apps with in-app purchases have the lowest amount of risk involved. Just take note that if you sell virtual goods, the app store might take a cut on your revenues as compared to selling physical goods.

The Freemium Model

There are some apps that can be downloaded for free but require the user to pay an amount for an “upgrade”. This is how the Freemium monetization works for apps. All you have to do is provide the app users with the basic functions of the app and let them decide to upgrade by charging them a premium. This type of monetization strategy for mobile apps works just like in-app advertising since it helps you build a solid user base, especially if you have a good app in the works. However, beware that offering very limited features can result in high app churn and can make convincing your users to upgrade difficult.

Paid Apps

Now, there are apps that cannot be downloaded for free mainly because they usually look and work better than other apps like them. Paid apps are one of the easiest ways to make money upfront and prices range from $0.99 to $999.99. Since this type of app marketing is paid, users expect an app that is unique and different from others and innovative in a way that other apps are not. However, this is also where the problem lies. Since too many free apps of the same kind can exist, selling the app can become a challenge.

Subscriptions

If the app you’re selling focuses on content rather than interactivity, paywalls or subscriptions are the way to monetize it. All you have to do is to let the user view a fixed amount of content for free and be required to take a subscription if they want to see more. Service focused brands are the ones that mostly benefit from this type of app marketing.

The Bottom Line

To boil things down, there exists a multitude of effective app marketing strategies for monetizing your mobile apps, including the five techniques listed above. To find out what works best for you, the trick is try them out to see which option works best with your user-base.