Last weekend Appy Entertainment ran a sale. Why did we do it, and how did we do? Read on!

Our decision to put on this sale came together in about five minutes … and that’s one of the things we love about this job, and this market. You can be really nimble and try things out. We didn’t come to work on Thursday morning knowing that we’d be running a sale, but by the time we turned out the lights that night, we’d dropped prices across the line, sent out communication to press, and contacted everyone on our mailing lists. The first chatter appeared on Twitter in the early hours of Friday and our half-price weekend was on.
Why a sale, and why now? Our primary motivation was to drive volume … there had been a huge influx of new users into the iPhone/iPod touch market over the holidays, and while we saw a nice little bump at Christmas, we still wanted to introduce ourselves to all those new players. We’re also planning to release a new game in the next couple weeks, and increasing our customer base before a product launch is never a bad idea.
We dropped everything in the line to .99 for the weekend (Weekly World News remained at .99). And how did we do?
The best way to appraise our results is see how much volume increased as a percentage of the previous, non-sale weekend’s totals.
What do these numbers tell us?
The biggest gainers were Appy Newz and Weekly World Newz, but these apps enjoy lower volume than our games, and so are subject to greater fluctuation week-to-week even when we aren’t running a sale. Appy Newz also saw the biggest price drop in the sale (from $2.99 down to .99), which may have goosed its numbers a little bit. The increase in volume was enough to boost our gross on these products, which was nice.
Games are our bread-and-butter, so we were much more interested in the performance of FaceFighter and Zombie Pizza. For whatever reason, FaceFighter sales were slow to pick-up on Friday, which dragged down the whole weekend. If we’d sold FaceFighter at the same rate on Friday as we did on Saturday and Sunday, we would have come out well ahead. As-is, we lost a bit of gross, versus the previous weekend, but we did drive a lot of volume and hopefully brought some new players into the Appy fold. Zombie Pizza responded very well to the sale, earning us a little bit extra scratch. Seeing Zombie Pizza jump up as fast as it did might mean the market is telling us it should be priced at .99 permanently, but that’s a discussion for another day.
Two other trends are worth mentioning. First, while we almost doubled our paid volume with this sale, volume of our free apps also went up almost twelve percent. Even when apps are on sale for a buck, people still like to browse, and there’s no better way to do that than by downloading a free app. Second, we think we enjoyed a little bit of a “line effect,” where having several games on offer lifted sales, overall, as folks showed up for one game, and decided to download two or more. This is encouraging news for our brand and for our future plans as an app micropublisher.

Bottom line? We did OK. We drove volume, which was our primary objective, but the sale did not substantially impact our grosses when compared with the previous weekend. Across-the-board, our products jumped 20-30 slots in the ranks during the sale, then subsided to right about where they were when we returned to full price. Paid sales this week have shown a very slight increase over last week, while free downloads have dropped off a bit, but it will be several weeks before we can evaluate if these are meaningful trends. We do think the majority of our sales came from new customers, which is a very good thing, and there were collateral benefits to running the sale, as we were mentioned in several blogs and news sites over the weekend, which is good exposure for our brand.
Will we run additional sales in the future? While we do have a secret promotion hitting next week, for the most part, we intend to stick to our current scheme of introductory pricing for several weeks or months, followed by permanent increase to full price. We have no desire to be in the dollar app business. Sales are one of many tools we will use to build our audience, but they won’t occur more than a couple times a year.
That’s the way we see things … for now. Remember, we didn’t come up with the plan to run our sale until the day it happened, and our plans change as fast as the market. So our policy toward sale promotions might change, too. Besides, the ground can change under us at any second — our as-yet unannounced next game will ship fully-featured and for free, with an in-app paid upgrade, and that will be a whole new world for us.
We will know more in a couple months, which is about three years in dog years, and a decade or so in the app market. Wish us luck!
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