You finally accomplished it – you have built an awesome mobile app for your entrepreneurial journey.
Now, your customers can interact with you like never before, and the data you’re pulling from the app is helping you think of all kinds of new ways to kickstart your business.
But there’s something you can do to fuel your app even better for your brand: monetize. Often monetizing an app can seem to be much more difficult than it actually is especially if you have a few business models at your disposal.
With an estimated global revenue of $46 billion in 2016, app industry is big business. The adoption of mobile app monetization strategies has led organizations on a pathway to success, with enhanced customer service and increased productivity. Having the right in-app strategy helps entrepreneurs in leveraging the growing ubiquity of smartphones to innovate and drive top-line revenue growth.
Highest Revenue Generating Apps
The app market has experienced substantial growth since its first conception, and it shows no signs of slowing down. With a cost of $2.49 a piece and over 500,000 downloads, entrepreneurs have earned over 1 million dollars in revenue. Mobile app monetization strategies are significantly boosting cost savings and revenue generation while enhancing productivity and efficiency, resource utilization, and streamlining business processes with lower operational costs.
Here are some different ways through which you can turn your app into a profit generating machine:
Add more In-app purchases: “In-app purchases” delivers what it actually promises – it enables users to pay for the option and unlocks the features for them. The potential of in-app purchase in app monetization strategy has been tremendous, and there is no doubt the revenue and profit from this will become twofold by 2018. This “run-only-as-all-you-need” concept includes purchasing or buying virtual and physical goods and exchanging in-game currency within the apps. Those companies who do not become early adopters of this system will be left to ponder why they have been left behind.
Premium vs. Freemium App: (Premium-Paid vs. Freemium-Free-to-Play Apps) Under premium apps method, the user purchases your app directly from an app store for a one-time fee. This strategy results in a higher average revenue per download. With the freemium business model, users have the option to pay for premium features after they have downloaded the free app. As per the data released by both the IDC and App Annie, at least 83% of all listed apps are leveraging this model and generating a whopping 92% of the total revenue generated by all apps. A two-pronged approach in app development helps developers create both a free and a paid version. For example, The Guardian (UK) is testing two apps: a free, ad-supported Android app and a paid iPhone app. Echofon is great example of an app that caters to both kinds of users.
Advertising: Apps in the industry of shopping, gaming, retailing and more have all started experimenting and integrating with in-app advertising advancements.The use of advertising as a means to improve app monetization has become prevalent in the mobile industry. Displaying different type of ads inside the apps can bring the ad-free version in the paid form. The important takeaway is the fact that advertising brings with it a much higher profit margin. As the cost of acquiring users kept soaring, it became vital for entrepreneurs to pick a right model at the price they could use additional methods to remain profitable.
And when advertisers create ads to be used in apps, these are the five types of ads typically used:
- Interstitial/full-screen ads – These ads are usually placed at natural pause points, like when moving between menus. Because these aren’t actually interrupting the experience of using your app, they’re more likely to generate clicks without causing frustration.
- Notification ads – These pop up in the mobile device’s status bar and make users more aware of the ad’s presence. Be warned, these aren’t the most well-loved ads out there and could damage your app’s reputation.
- Capture form – Relying on user opt-ins, these offer incentives (like points or tokens) for users who enter their email addresses. You’ll most often find capture forms in mobile games.
- Advanced overlay – These use transition points like interstitial ads but are interactive instead of being simple clickable images. They’re a mixture of capture form and full-screen ads.
- Banner ads – These are usually found at the top or bottom of the screen and can be somewhat ineffective because they are more distracting than other forms. They can also irritate your users, so think twice before agreeing to incorporate one into your business’s app.
Brilliant Idea enables new business scenario: Incorporating ideas into an app business strategy can help keep a user engaged and loyal to your brand. For example, Flappy Bird; the game, despite lacking a beautiful layout and design did exceptionally well. With an increasing immediate access to informative users, apps are now more than ever personalizing the user experience. When considering shopper expectations, it is clear that creativity has made a strong impact on customer experience and will be at its heart going forward.
Dynamic Approach: In today’s digital world, new business models are creating new revenue channels, improving innovative techniques and leveraging new modes of user engagement to increase market penetration and workforce efficiency. Whether it is to monetize the existing app, enable better customer service, tap into new profit sources or generate revenue profitability, a well-devised in-app strategy can not only help organizations expand to new markets but also keep costs in check.
User Interface & User Experience: A well-crafted design, layout, and structure of an app can help keep a user engaged is one of the many goals you have for the store. It’s extremely important to understand that beautification of the interface and design is quite necessary. You can look more and dive deep into the information you’re getting and then make more informed decisions. Interface management, layout management, smooth user experience, quality, and development decision-making are other areas of interest.
A recent study by Cambridge University computer scientists found that 73 percent of apps in the Android marketplace were free and amongst that 73 percent, 80 percent relied on advertising as their main business model. Hence, the future of app monetization majorly lies in two models; in-app purchases and ad-supported model.
