This is the 6th of a multi-part blog series on “Maximizing profits when developing and publishing your Phone 7 application”. This series is based on my experience of having over 70 apps on Marketplace to date.
Part 1 Marketing Basics.
Part 2 How to get your app noticed in Marketplace
Part 3 Globalization Multiplier Effect
Part 4 Instrumentation
Part 5 Trial Strategies
Free Version and More Trial Strategies
Posting your trial app as a free app will significantly boost your download rate as well as your sales rate... more so than any tip provided in this blog series. 100 to 1 ratios are not uncommon for download increases vs. a traditional trial offering in the paid tab. This is especially true on the first days of publication when it also appears in the new tab in addition to the free tab. (So make sure your app is bug free when you submit a free app, because you will have many downloads!)
You need to modify the name of the app in order to have it appear in both the paid tab and the free tab of a category in Marketplace. One approach is to append ‘Lite’ to the title. Also, change the properties of your project with a different name as well for the xap file. Note that you now get 100 submissions for free apps included in your annual publishing subscription. After that, you get charged $19.99 for each app submitted to the free category. If you use advertising in the free apps, the $19.99 fee will eventually be paid for via revenue from the ads alone. Better yet, start a new subscription for $99 and get another 100 Free App submissions. In either case, the increased visibility should result in sufficient sales to eventually cover this expense as well.
At the time of this writing, there are over 70 Shortcuts applications published, of which 29 are Lite versions in the free category and the rest all have trial support. There are currently approximately 18,000 unique users on the various flavors of Keyboard Shortcut Apps (Shortcuts Win7, Shortcuts Outlook, Shortcuts C#, Shortcuts IE, etc…) . Enhancements in the trial logic approach logic and results are summarized below…
1) Trial has ads only, full features in both Trial and paid – 0 % conversion from trial to paid
2) Trial has limited functionality (with ads)– primary feature of one touch fully enabled in trial, the 3 other features are only available in paid version – 1% conversion
3) Trial has limited functionality (with ads) – primary feature limited to three category choices, fully enabled learn list on enabled categories, no learn all and no search features available on trial – 4% conversion
4) Trial has limited functionality (with ads) – Primary feature is less limited by having half of the category choices (more choices on the main page are available than just the first 3), full learn list on enabled categories, no learn all and no search -9 % conversion ratio
5) Offered fully functional time trial (with ads), based on time stamps as a free app – 9% conversion ratio.
You might want to consider keeping the limited trial in the paid list tab if you have a fully functional time trial in the free list tab. Doing so will not allow a second 2 week fully functional trial, delaying your sales by another 2 weeks. The goal is to have a customer go from free app to paid app. Time trials can be accomplished by storing the start date of the trial in isolated storage or writing and calling a web service to maintain time stamp data in a database. Be aware to test dates using different cultures. Use the CultureInfo.InvariantCulture parameter on DateTiime and the UTCNow method when storing and retrieving the start date of the trial to and from isolated storage. This eliminates unhandled error exceptions that you might get otherwise when parsing the stored date when switching between multiple cultures (The test of switching cultures is done by the marketplace submission testers and your app could fail if an unhandled exception occurs).
//setting the start trial date
appSettings["StartDateofTimeTrial"] =
DateTime.UtcNow.Date.ToString(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
//getting the start trial date
//…
mytrialstartdate = appSettings["StartDateofTimeTrial"].ToString();
DateTime date1 = DateTime.Parse(mytrialstartdate, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
DateTime dt =date1.Date;
DateTime dtToday = DateTime.UtcNow.Date;
if (dtToday < dt)
{
//today's date cannot be less than the start date (it was reset to an earlier date by user)
dtToday=dt;
}
TimeSpan diffResult = dtToday.Subtract(dt);
// test if within time trial range
if (diffResult.Days > 14)
{
if (!appSettings.Contains("TrialExpired"))
{
appSettings.Add("TrialExpired", string.Empty);
appSettings["TrialExpired"] = DateTime.UtcNow.Date.ToString(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
}
}
So, which trial strategy is best? Put on your consultant hat, scratch your chin and say “It depends.”.
It is entirely possible that limited trials and time trials can result in the same conversion rate on different apps, one using a time trial and the other a limited trial. For a limited trial, it depends on what you are limiting. If the feature is one that is highly desirable, this will result in more sales, just like the classic version of the Dr .Popper game. As for a time trial, if you have live data coming in your app, than a time trial would not be a bad idea, as the app will have little value without the live data and if the highest desired feature is obtaining the live or reference data. You might have one strategy in the free tab and another in the paid tab. The only way your know for sure is instrumentation (repetition is good on that statement!). This provides usage information in your app for the most desired feature. It will also show the trial to paid conversion rate. You might find that users expect the Free version to be fully functional and if you choose a limited free app rather than a fully functional time trial, you might get comments like, “the free version doesn’t do much”. So, consider free Lite versions to be fully functional, perhaps with a 2 week time trial. The corresponding full version could still have limited functionality on the trials. You will need a feature tick counter whenever the buy button is pressed. This will give you an indication there is interest in the paid version. This is particularly useful in the case of a Free app as it is the only way to monitor Free to Paid (not Trail to Paid as the code provides above). The free app is a separate XAP and has its own isolated storage for counters that is separate from the paid/trail version.
In your Buy Button click event, on the free version, you can use a case statement or read in the values of the guid’s of your real apps… The ContentIdentifier can be found by editing catalog details of your app in app hub after it is submitted. This will be covered in the next part.
In Part 7 I will look at using the About box to generate sales.