Accidental Success

 Remember my little experiment of setting all apps to paid over the weekends and free during the week?  The scheduling was a little more haphazard than that but for a rough description that is pretty close.  Well let me show you the results of that experiment:
 We already know that sales spike when an app goes to free and you can see this here as a sum for all of the apps, but remember the pattern in this chart because the next one was a total surprise for me. 
 Yes, those are actual sales.  Paid Downloads.  I can’t explain why this happened but it just doubled my income from my apps for this month and gave me some new ideas to test.

 Here’s the shocking thing for me, when I set up the pricing cycles it was really random.  I picked a Monday and set the price to free, counted over a few days and set the price to anywhere between $0.99 to $12.99 because I never expected any sales at all.  Then I’d go to the next week or maybe two weeks later and do the same thing this time starting with a Tuesday or whatever.  I was just trying to set up cycles that were not the same every single week.

 I picked at random because I suspected that if it was a fixed cycle every time I may not benefit as highly from the spike in downloads.  I had no proof that I would see that happen at all it was just my thinking at the time.  For my next trial I am going to pick one of these four top apps to have a fixed schedule so I can see if it has an impact.

 What you can also see from these two charts is that when the app is free I’m getting hundreds of downloads across all of my apps, but when things go to paid I’m at best getting 10% of the downloads.  If you have a background in marketing and sales you know that the best online marketing campaigns expect 2% success rates.  So sending out that spam email to 1000 people should get you 20 sales in a good campaign.  I just did 5x that and it was a totally crazy experiment that I decided to run because I was bummed about my daily user count crashing over the weekend.

 Ok, time to analyze this thing.  Do I think this is reproducible?  Yes.  Do I think that it will work for every app developer?  No.  I think there is more to this than just pricing schedules.  I think that there are two factors that specifically make this reproducible, one being good reviews and the other being notifications.

 Let me explain my thinking a bit.

 I think that triggering the StoreKit review at the right time will get you better reviews and I believe that impacts your appearance in the app store.  I also think the number of reviews you have is a factor.  The problem is that you don’t have much control over the reviews themselves, but you do have control over when to present the review pop-up.  So if you can determine a specific point in your app where you are more likely to encounter a happy user, placing the review there is a pro level move.