The stats and the theoretical app marketing techniques from “experts” are aplenty. But what you really want to know is how the people in the trenches are marketing their mobile apps. What are their marketing secrets? What improves their app user engagement and user retention? What techniques do the other app developers use to increase their app ratings?

If you really want to know what works, here’s 21 mobile app marketing stories from the app development teams themselves.

How to Increase Revenue with In-App Purchases

My Favorite Takeaway: What I loved about Veam’s app marketing story here was the smart approach to measuring and testing their in-app purchase pricing. A lot of mobile app marketers A/B test button placement, button colors, and push notification messages, but can overlook something as impactful to their bottom line as optimized in-app purchase prices.  If Veam didn’t test the impact of lower in-app purchase prices on total revenue, they would have missed out on 37% more revenue.

App Store Marketing is Not All About ASO 

My Favorite Takeaway: It’s not all about optimizing your app store description, app store screenshots, or app store app icon when you are trying to get your app discovered. Justin talks about how important regular, old-fashioned SEO helped him acquire a huge amount of additional downloads that his clever competitors were missing. Sometimes it’s the simple things that have the biggest rewards and SEO seemed to pay off big time for Justin.

Everything Is Marketing

My Favorite Takeaway: This is a great 3 part series on all things app marketing from idea to design. My favorite part is actually the most boring part to most people, but it’s one of the most important in my opinion, creating personas. I find the bulk of mobile apps marketing plans revolve around spamming blogs with press releases, getting app reviews, and hoping for an Apple or Google Play feature. The problem is even if everything works out and you get a few app reviews and even an app store feature, your core audience could still never know about your app. Creating user personas and truly learning about your mobile app user can ensure long-lived marketing success.

Testing Your Mobile App Before Launching Your App

My Favorite Takeaway: A lot of attention is put on marketing before your app release. Although pre-launch marketing is crucial to your app’s success, you don’t want to waste your efforts acquiring customers just for them to have a poor experience. This article goes in deep on A/B testing your app icon, pricing, screenshots, and more BEFORE hitting the app store. It’s just cheaper and more efficient to do your testing before launch.

Timing, Relevancy, and Placement = App Store Genius?

Oh, how could this list not include a story about Flappy Birds. Although the developer was not directly interviewed for this story, everyone in the mobile space is trying to find out how a solo developer pulled off such a success with almost no marketing budget. I’d say the most interesting marketing discovery about Flappy Birds was not the bot downloads, but how much the timing, placement, and relevancy of his review prompts drove him up the charts. Some people consider it “cheating” but I think asking your users to review your app right after they finish a round and looking to play again is simply clever.

Clash of Clans Reverse Engineers For Success

My Favorite Takeaway: Why reinvent the wheel when so many mobile app development teams with large marketing budgets, awesome business intelligence teams, and mobile product managers have done the hard work for you? Clash of Clans has been criticized for not being unique, but this is exactly what made it super successful. They were smart enough to copy the game elements that were proven to offer the best ROI and WIN in the app store. As the saying goes ‘Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal’!

How To Get Featured on the App Store

My Favorite Takeaway: Who doesn’t want to get featured in the AppStore? Some people think only luck and a phone call to your Apple contact will get you that coveted Apple App Store feature. While these do work, as the guys over at Real Mac Software explain, make what Apple wants and an App Store feature is in your future. Think about the categories Apple makes the most money from, look at the trends of the app store features in the past,  look at what categories are most prominently featured in the app store. Study them and you will increase the odds of an AppStore feature.

Quizup Learns to Update Frequently to Win

My Favorite Takeaway: If you want to engage and retain your mobile app users, you have to give them a reason to care. What better way to do it than with frequent app updates? At least that’s what Quizup learned. Quizup doesn’t keep 130,000 new users a day in their app for 40 minutes with the same stale content. All of the new, fresh user-generated content keeps other’s coming back looking for more. Even if you don’t have an app with lots of user-generated content, you can take advantage of updating your mobile app often with your own in-app content updates. Find a way to update your app everyday and see what it can do for your user engagement and retention.

Feature Creep is a B*%th

My Favorite Takeaway: We’ve all probably experienced feature creep before and as much as you try it avoid it, it happens to the best of us. One of the big problems with feature creep is trying to market all of those features. When marketing an app you need a way to deliver a relatable, interesting, FOCUSED message to your potential app users. Adding a ton of features can make this difficult. What’s worse, as inMarket brings up, is the potential bugs you introduce to your users when you hurriedly add tons of features into the app. Even though the guys at inMarket could have just switched the buggy features off until they found a fix, your user onboarding and user retention can suffer tremendously from adding too many features.

You Can Make $57,000/Month on Android, But Do it Fast

My Favorite Takeaway: There aren’t enough stories about the big wins for mobile app developers on Android, but they definitely exist. Edward discusses his ride to $57,000 per month in sales, with one interesting point. It can be over in a snap. One unique thing about creating mobile apps is that oftentimes your success is short lived. Even if you do reach $50K+ a month, like Edward it could last for just a few months. Treat your app business, as just that, a business. Do what it takes to get a big release, keep the users, and keep them engaged so you can earn more revenue, longer.

High Monetization Can Mean Low Ratings

My Favorite Takeaway: It’s simple really. You CAN make a lot of money with intrusive ads and over-the-top push notifications, but you better prepare for the fall out afterwards. There are a lot of apps finding the perfect balance between monetization and user retention. Find it and keep your app in the top of the charts longer, by earning better reviews that push you higher up the app store charts.

Push Out an Update for a Boost In Ranks

My Takeaway: Again, a win for frequent app updates. David discovered after pushing out an app update that he earned 100 more downloads per day. Although it was short lived, you can see the power of releasing app updates, even if it’s just for a temporary boost in the charts.

The One Button That Changed It All

My Takeaway: You could A/B test everything in your app, update frequently, and focus totally on awesome app design before discovering the one thing that really catapults your success. Sometimes all the testing and BI in the world can’t replace common sense and creativity. Michael’s team added books into their app for users to buy individually. Even though they got sales, it wasn’t until they encouraged their users to buy all of them, with a “buy all” button that they really saw the light. Find your own buy all button. Think of just one thing that could drive your user engagement, user retention, revenue, in-app purchases, or whatever you want through the roof.

How to Make a Hit Mobile Game in China

My Takeaway: Sorry folks, you have to do more than simply translate your app’s app store description and in-app text to make it big in international app stores. Henry’s team learned this first hand and earned 25 MILLION new players for making the right changes. Yodi won by tailoring their app content to their Chinese user’s taste, optimizing their monetization structures, and making the file size smaller, which is more suitable for the Chinese market. Basically,  learn what your users want in each market and win big.

“Old School” App Marketing Exhibition Style

My Takeaway: When you think conferences and exhibitions, you think of boring name tags, dry looking conference halls, and logo filled swag. You’re right, that’s the reality. But the other reality is, they can be just what you need to get the word out at launch. The guys at Box Cat games learned that the right app, at the right conference, with the right knowledge about talking to the media at conferences can work out even for the small guys. Even though they didn’t experience a huge boost from it, they realized their app may not have been the right fit for it. If your app fits, you could have the press begging to tell others about your app.

Find Your Real App Users and Save Some Major Dough

My Takeaway: This one is all about not making assumptions. The Shnergle team thought their app was going to be popular with students and boy were they wrong. Their actual users were 25-40 year old professionals that were concerned with saving time. If they figured this out earlier they could have lowered their user acquisition costs by 85% and improved their user engagement rate. DOH!

Paid Reviews, Press Releases, App Video Aggregation Don’t Equal Sales

My Takeaway: It’s just as important to know what doesn’t work as what does work when marketing your mobile app. The Flow Studio guys realized in the first month how ineffective paid app reviews, press releases, and video aggregation were for sales and feedback. Shortcuts are rarely the answer, eliminate these time and money wasters and get the word out about your app the “hard” way.

Consider App Reviews From Review Sites Feedback, Not Sales Boosters

My Takeaway: Your marketing plan can’t rely solely on reviews from app review sites. It doesn’t work. Even when you get the reviews, as Split Milk discovered, it could be useful more as app feedback than sales. Treat app reviews as extra credit and you will learn how to get more creative with app marketing.

Free For a Day Isn’t Necessarily Free

My Takeaway: Every Free For a Day blog loves to promote how many more sales you can get “for free” after you make your app free for a day. The problem is, this isn’t always true. If you don’t have optimized monetization in your app, that paid free for a day promotion you are running (yes, you have to pay for some of them) will just be spike on your app download charts.

A Story About A Timely Text Message

My Favorite Takeaway: The one important thing you can learn (or be reminded about) from this video is the importance of timing and relevance in marketing, particularly on the mobile platform. The Cabela’s team was smart enough to send text messages on one of the coldest days Denver winter days for an offer off on a coat. What they forgot was to send it when it was 10 degrees outside and to mention how low the temperature was right now. Even with that slight oversight, it was a smart marketing move that provided real ROI. Use text messages and push notifications the smart way, with relevancy and timing in mind.

Your Android Users Aren’t iOS Users

My Takeaway: I know mobile app development is tedious and downright difficult sometimes, but shortcuts rarely work. The guys at Cute Hacks learned that marketing an Android app that looks like an iPhone just doesn’t pay. After the bad reviews and feedback, it took a few updates to make it right. Spare yourself the trouble and make your app look and behave like an Android app the first time around.

What are your favorite stories about mobile app marketing? What are the lessons you learned along the way? What are the favorite mobile app marketing lessons, stories , and resources online. Let us know on Google+!

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