Increase your app’s revenue with Huawei IAP
There’s plenty of room for mobile developers to generate a profit from their apps. The most known is paid applications. However as an end user, you might have noticed how hard it could be sometimes to press the Buy button for a paid application. So how to persuade your customers to spend money on your app? Well, what if I say that if you can promote the app for free, you will make more money than the paid version? Consider an engaging monetization strategy with in-app purchases.
Many applications provide the option to get extra content and features by making purchases through them. This method is known as In-App Purchases.
Huawei IAP offers a service that allows the digital content we produce through the App Gallery to be purchased within our app. We produce the products that we plan to sell in our application via App Gallery Console and sell these products by using their Ids.
There are two different type of products:
- Subscriptions
- In-app products (Consumables & Non-consumables)
Let’s get back to the main question: What are the best options to make money from mobile apps with in app purchases? The trick is obvious!
You can set your pricing model depending on the type of application you offer.
Let’s take a closer look at how we can achieve this.
- Subscriptions: Subscriptions contribute the most to growing mobile revenue numbers. If your app’s providing public content and services you can get benefits from the techniques below.
- You can offer a free trial or promotional price for your new subscribers.
This encourages your users to try your service and they will prefer to continue using it with renewal prices when it’s right for them. Offering a free trial could also help you re-engage your users. You can find out here how to set promotional prices for your products via App Gallery. - You may consider lowering prices. This adjustment takes effect upon the next renewal of a subscription and is effective for all subscribers, including existing subscribers and new subscribers. You can offer a special price to all of your subscribers to increase the user engagement.
- You can choose to postpone/defer billing for rewarding users by increasing product usage duration. You can defer the settlement date by at least one day and at most one year. Before the new settlement date arrives, you can call the API to postpone the date again. You should notify your users by email or within the app to inform them about the billing date has been expanded.
- If there is no renewal (for example, a user cancels a renewal) or the renewal fails after the grace period ends, a subscription enters the lapse period. For a subscription in the lapse period, there is a 30-day retention period when services are unavailable but a user can resume the subscription. In this period, you can try winning your users back by some offerings like lowering prices, deferring billing date.
2. In-app products: Huawei IAP offers us two different types of in-app products.
Consumable: This kind of product can be purchased multiple times. For example, a consumable product can be a number of extra lives in a game. Consumable products unlock app features just for a small period of time, and they don’t have permanent effect.
Non-consumable: A non-consumable product is one-time purchased. For example, buying extra filters for a photo-editing app, upgrade an app to no-ads version to remove ads. These are not consumable, so this functionalities stays with you permanently.
- If you have in-app products in your app, you could modify the products price temporarily.
- You may also offer expanding entitlements of your users for a one-time purchase. For example, video content is rising in use and popularity across industries. Lets say you have some elements of audio or videos in your app, if you have an event-based app and offer access to a live event, you may now consider offering access to recorded videos as well. So expanding entitlements of your users wouldn't be a bad idea to intensify their engagements.
If you have configured implementation of Key Subscription Events, the Huawei IAP server will notify your server of a key subscription event after a user purchases a subscription of your app, subscriber entitlement state changes (e.g., subscription purchased, subscription cancelled, subscription on hold)
- If a user cancels a subscription, the services already paid will be still valid, but the renewal will stop. In this case you can try to offer your best opportunities winning your users back. As I mentioned above deferring billing, lowering prices etc.
- If the number of users that resumes the renewal of a subscription which has been canceled are increasing day by day, you are in the right way. Keep it up!
- If a user agrees that the price of a subscription increases, the subscription will be renewed with the updated price in the next period. In case of most of your users don’t accept the updated price and cancels their subscriptions, put your head down on your desk and check your decision again if your app has been affected with this price change. You would better decide the price plan according to the feedback came from your users.
Please visit this page for more info about Key Subscription Events.
I hope this post has helped you think a little more strategic about the direction you take your IAP based mobile app.
You can always have the most success with growing products using a feedback driven process. So take this into consideration if you’re planning to develop an app with in app purchases. Because, understanding what your target audience is actually doing and what they want from your app can reveal the difference between a mobile app that completely misses the target and a mobile app that is seriously successful.
To make the long story short, we shouldn’t forget that a successful monetization strategy will bring more profit when engaging it with in-app purchases.
