How to Growth Hack a Paid App

I have talked about this campaign multiple times because it is my favorite and I’m back at it again because I have case study to share. We ran this campaign for a paid app and it garnered over 37k downloads. I tag this as the Paid-to-Free Campaign strategy and it is very simpliest way to drive downloads to run.

Here are the ways to do this:

First, if you have a paid app, you basically make them free for a couple of days. And second, for those which are already free, you make one of your in-app purchases free. For free apps, we have run this campaign for remove ads, virtual characters and weapons, or anything which you can give away.For paid apps, bots will pick it up, marketing-wise but for free apps, it is very essential that you get press for it for your efforts not to go to waste. To do this, you can pitch AppAdvice and BGR. As of this time though, keep in mind that this is just applicable for iOS. I have observed that AppAdvice is a greater app download driver so again, make sure to reach out to them they cover this 7 days a week.

In the case study that I have shared in this video, you will see that we have ran the campaign just last August 3^rd and you will not miss the big spike in downloads when we ran this campaign. The key to this is to run this just for a day as you will notice in the charts we shared that we were still able to drive about 5k downloads although most of them are now priced at $12. We did not need that much downloads to reach at $1k in sales.

A tip I can give you if you are priced at a lower range is to play around with pricing. If you are a $1 app, make it go up to $5 then run the campaign. It will show as a $5-app-gone-free. After the campaign, retain the price so you can reap the benefits. Note that the first two days will be the biggest download days.

Another thing I highlight in the video is the fact that this campaign also drove downloads for other apps without doing anything. No big spend like Facebook Ads but reaping good results…it’s such a no brainer that you should simply try it!