In this article i am going to write about two little known ways on how to monetize your apps & games that very few app developers capitalize on. This two strategies are huge monetization channels on the internet marketing world.
Read until the end to receive some real life examples on how to apply this and get 1 profitable app idea you can create starting today.
Let’s start.
1 — Build your Email Subscriber List Inside your Mobile Apps & Games
Email list building & email marketing are essential elements for every online business and have been implemented on the web successfully.
Let me show proof:
The average ROI of email marketing is $44.25 for every $1 spent. Source: Experian
The question is, why email marketing and building your subscriber list is so profitable even if now we have Social Media and Messengers? Because the email inbox is a personal place where you can connect with your app user. More people are checking and reading their emails first thing in the morning on their mobile devices. You open the messages that are important to you and read the messages from the people you care about.
That can be a family member a business partner or Apple, sending you a notification that your App have been featured in the front page of the App Store :)
So, your email inbox is important. All your social media accounts are dependant of your email account. I want you to see the importance of email list building because it can be relegated as not an essential part of your app business. We have a lot of technology that is more advanced than the email address for communicating with our app users that’s why email list building is forgotten. But the stats show, that if you want to make money then you need to start your email subscriber list and communicate in a valuable way with you app users with email marketing.
We can use services like
You can send automated email campaigns and give value to your app users. What kind of value can you give to your email subscribers?
You can start email list building inside mobile apps very easily. Just integrating Lead Layer Mobile Landing Page Generator into your mobile apps . You can integrate with various Autoresponder Services like Mailchimp, Aweber or ActiveCampaign.
In my Newsstand Magazine App called Sxy Mag for Men i give a Fitness related PDF report with great High Intensity Training information and workout sheets tailored for men.
The app user needs to give me their email in exchange for this PDF report. I will send this to their email inbox via an autoresponder service. As you can see, this way, you are giving value. You will line up a series of automated emails you can program in your email marketing software of your choice.
By building your email subscriber list and communicating with your app user, you are giving what your users wants and need help on. So if you provide the kind of content that will help your audience, they will thank you for it and trust you. You are a straight shooter and are giving all this information for free, the concept of reciprocity will be in this relationship with your app tribe.
When the time comes for you to launch a product or a new app that will help them, they will buy it because of your great help in their first interaction and following months you were giving value to that email subscriber list (app tribe). In the app world you can publish an app that is getting thousands of downloads per day. That is very valuable because you can get those users subscribed in your email list and start communicating with your audience.
For example if your app is getting 1,000 downloads per day, and you are getting 50% of those users subscribed into your email list (500 email subscribers per day), you can build a 15,000 people email list in a month. That amount of email signups in a month would make an experienced internet marketer jealous.
2 — Monetizing your App with Affiliate Marketing
Amazon is a pioneer in the internet, there is no doubt about it. Amazon invented the affiliate marketing model implementing the affiliate program on the amazon marketplace.
What is an affiliate program? You refer customers or website visitors to the amazon marketplace and if people are interested in what they see and buy anything on Amazon, you get a an affiliate commission of the sales your referred. This affiliate marketing model was adopted for the whole e-commerce ecosystem and now generates billions of dollars in many industries across the internet.
Only 8% of app developers create e-commerce apps.
“The median revenues of organizations involved in e-commerce are $2,750 per app/month, by far the highest among all app revenue models that we track.” (source: http://www.developereconomics.com/reports/q1-2014/)
But why do app developers that create e-commerce apps make $2,750 per month from each app? I can give you an example and app idea. You can promote Amazon products with their affiliate program and you earn 6% from every checkout of a customer you refer. For example if you make a trivia app in the topic of luxury watches and they buy a $10,000 watch on the Amazon marketplace through your affiliate link you earn $600
That can be an explanation of why e-commerce apps are making that much money per month, because you can make more money per transaction than with in-app purchases or ads.
Apple has it’s own iTunes Affiliate program and my guess is you are not being a part of this.
You can register here:
http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/
In my App called 1App — 1 free app every day, the app is tailored for the spanish speaking market. With 1App i built an email subscriber list of 47,000+ and earned money by referring app store users that wanted free app deals through the iTunes Affiliate Program and Ads inside the app.
I used link trackers to get data on how many people i was sending to an app promo every day, and also to redirect each user geographically to its country app store and get credit and earn a commission.
I have used these two link trackers
Conclusion
Now that you know these 2 little known ways to monetize your app users you have a winning strategy for a long term app & game business.
