Mobile app marketing problems

I love the mobile apps business. If done right, there’s a lot of money to be made here. At Collectorz.com, we’ve been selling apps since May 2009 and it’s a big part of our business now.

However, from a software marketing perspective, I keep running into 3 main problems of the current mobile apps biz (one of which is App Store specific):

  • No customer information (App Store specific)
  • No ways to do coupon or bundle discounts
  • Low pricing levels

Here’s the full story on all three, including my suggested workarounds:

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Simple coupon codes

I was browsing through the orders of the past few days and noticed something interesting in the way our users enter our coupon codes.

You see, all our coupons are always published written in all uppercase, e.g. “CLZTWEETZ”, “GETORGANIZED”, “GOOGLER”, etc… But our order tracking system stores the coupons exactly as entered. And scrolling through this list, I found that for most coupons, users enter them in all lowercase (e.g. as “clztweetz”), indicating that they typed them manually (as opposed to copying/pasting from our emails).

With one exception: the coupon we give to all our trial users: ITRYB4IBUY
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RebateDelivery – Mail-In Rebates for online sales

rebatedeliveryAt SIC 2009, Sytske and I talked with the RebateDelivery people, Jason Foodman and Steven Miller.
We have worked with these guys for years, when they were running SwiftCD, so we were curious to hear what they were up to now.

Well, in short, RebateDelivery is a new system for offering Mail-In Rebates for online software purchases. Let’s look at the details of how it works and how to use it to improve sales. Oh, and of course I am running a new A/B split test to find out if it indeed helps to sell more software 🙂
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Discount Coupons – how to use them effectively

Discount coupons can be an effective tool to increase your sales and, more importantly, your profits. But how big a discount do you need to give? Should it be a percentage off or a fixed amount? How do people use the coupons? Pass it on the URL? Enter it into a coupon box? Where to put this box? Who do you give the coupons to? And aren’t you loosing revenue because these people pay less for the same stuff?
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