A few weeks ago, one of my most popular app MyTextTwister Pro was selected to be featured in Red Stripe deal on Windows Phone. The deal ran from 23^rd – January 29^th, 2014 and offered a 50% discount on its regular price of $1.99

Below you can read more about the red stripe deal invitation and how being featured for a week in this deal impacted the downloads and revenue of my paid app.

The Invitation Email

A snip of the e-mail that I received from Microsoft. Exciting stuff!

Free promotion

During the Read Stripe deal week, my app not only got listed in the Read Stripe deal section, but was also regularly shown in the featured section of the app store with a red border.

It also received free mention from popular Windows Phone news sites like WPCentral and WMPoweruser.

Impact on Downloads

Normally MyTextTwister Pro saw downloads (both paid and trial) in the range of 200-800 every week. Note that there is a free alternative available for this app which sees a much higher download rate (2000-3000 weekly).

During the Red Stripe deal’s week, the app saw around 6000 downloads (out of which 210 were paid downloads). The highest number of downloads happened in United States, followed by India, UK and Italy.

Daily Downloads of MyTextTwister Pro

Even in the subsequent weeks, download above the normal rate was seen. Since I was not running any additional promotional campaign, I believe this after-effect was totally on the basis of word of mouth promotion from happy users.

Impact on Revenue

As already seen, the number of downloads was high during this time, which translated into good number of users paying for the full version of the app. The following graph shows the spike in number of paid app downloads of the app. Most number of paid apps were downloaded in United States, followed by Italy, UK, Germany and France.

Paid downloads of MyTextTwister Pro

Impact on Ranking

MyTextTwister Pro jumped to as high as #4 in top paid social category app in US during the red stripe deal promotion from its usual position of around #20. In France, UK and Germany also the app jumped to the top 5 social paid apps.

Advice for others from my experience

• Having trial in your paid apps allows you following benefits,

  • Reach bigger number of customers (more paid conversions)
  • Trial downloads get counted towards app total downloads while calculating its popularity and ranking.
  • Reviews from trial users get shown in the app store and get counted in the overall rating.

  therefore do try to include trial in your paid app.

• It is necessary to reduce your app price by at-least 50% during the red-stripe deal, therefore I believe that only apps starting from 1.99$ get considered for this deal. All my other apps are priced at lesser and never received such offer even when some of them were more popular.

• Even if you don’t get featured in red-stripe deal, it’s possible for you to offer your own discounts for a certain time period for your app and such deals are often covered by app review sites and other channels. See my post about App Review sites for Windows Store for more details on how to contact these sites asking them to write about your discounted price.

• It’s possible for you to achieve higher ranking in paid category by offering discounts for a certain time period or by even making your app free for a certain time.

• Don’t over do. Some developers use the trick of often switching app from paid to free to boost and keep their app at #1 in paid rankings. However I feel that overdoing it will make your user feel cheated and they may leave negative review.