Every entrepreneur worth their salt knows that apps are a great way to make money. They are incredibly scalable, and once you have a subscriber, they’ll often stick around for many months or even years. Every new subscriber you add creates more revenue, but your marginal costs hardly increase at all.
Just look at Twitter. Ten years ago, Twitter was making billions of dollars in revenue every year, and its company headquarters only had 50 people in it. That’s a remarkable return on investment.
What can you do to sell your app to users so you can make these sorts of profits? Here are some ideas:
Stop selling features
You want to start with a simple marketing ploy: stop selling features and instead sell your app’s superpower. Most customers just aren’t interested in the specific features that your app offers. For example, if it has a data tracking dashboard with reminder notifications, nobody really cares about that. Almost every single business app has that.
If you say something like, “You’ll get back two hours a day that you usually spend sending emails,” that really is a lot of value added for people, and they’ll often be willing to pay for it.
Use acquisition analytics
You should also invest in systems that can record user acquisition analytics. You need to know how many people you’re attracting and where you’re attracting them in your sales funnel. If you don’t have this information, it can be much more difficult to make strategic business decisions and understand where your processes require improvement.
Add urgency and scarcity
Another age-old marketing ploy is to use the art of urgency and scarcity when trying to sell your app. Most human beings are procrastinators, and they need a reason to act right now. Top-level marketing uses psychological triggers ethically to push people in this direction.
For example, let’s say you have a special membership offer for your app that’s only valid for the next 48 hours. That adds a sense of urgency, and people are more likely to want to take the plunge. Similarly, if there’s an irresistible bonus, like a template pack or an exclusive master class, that comes with the app but only for the first 500 users, that creates scarcity, and again this encourages them to buy.
Leverage social proof
You could also look into leveraging social proof instead of bragging about how good your app is. Get other people to do it for you. Many of the biggest apps in the world grew this way, simply because users recommended them.
These days, there’s a whole industry dedicated to creating authentic user-generated content for businesses. You can log on to platforms and pay for what you need. If you don’t want to do that, you can run a campaign among your existing app users, rewarding them if they post their reviews of your app online. The more you can get the word out, the better.
So there you have it: how to sell your app to users like a boss.