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If you are about to have your magazine app published in the App Store, take your time to learn what you should know about apps marketing.

The field of digital publishing – as is the case with any other business – requires undertaking specific marketing activities in order to generate sales.

People tend to overestimate the App Store. The worst thing you can do is leave your app on its own, counting on App Store’s internal marketing mechanics, which in fact are very limited, to do the job for you. It is still a store, not a marketing machine. In this article, you will learn the methods of maximizing your presence in Apple’s App Store.

1. New apps count more in the App Store

Downloads
This chart shows a particular app’s downloads, but it still gives a general overview into the global behavior.

When a new app gets published, it has a higher value and thus its App Store discoverability is inflated. We have analyzed the download rate of our magazine apps and the pattern seems to be clear. Statistically, the period of a peak in downloads lasts up to a fortnight. It looks like this is how the App Store works – new apps seem to get some karma from Apple. Thus, we can recognize that the first weeks in the App Store are crucial in terms of downloads. This does not, however, affect in-app sales.

Tips:

Use this “golden period” to market your magazine app in order to accumulate downloads. The bigger the download number, the higher your magazine app will climb in App Store’s ranking. To do so, drive valuable traffic from every channel you manage, whether it’s your magazine’s website, Facebook page or any other social media channel you communicate through, linking to your app’s page.

2. The sales/downloads ratio tells you where you’re going

PressPad sales reports
PressPad offers wide range of reports for.

This is an important measure because – if studied periodically in a constant time span, biweekly, for example – it gives the publisher the opportunity to identify the dynamics and direction of progress. The first measurement gives you a reference point, so you’ll know where you are going in terms of sales conversion.

A big number of downloads combined with a decreasing sales/downloads ratio tells you that readers eagerly download your magazine app but don’t feel the need to purchase its content. There might be several possible reasons for this:

  • price
  • lack of real interest
  • frustration/confusion

Tips:

You can experiment with lower or higher prices. Pricing is a real science, so before you go experimenting, try to figure out whether people aren’t buying your content because they are not your real readers. It means that the readers come from various sources and approximately half of them come from outside the App Store – including search results, too.

Determine whether you are marketing your magazine to the right target group, and whether you use the right keywords. Sometimes people may get frustrated because, while the magazine app itself is free, they still have to pay for content. To fix this, upload a free sample of your magazine. You may call it a free edition for a “test drive” with your magazine.

3. Successful magazines are more engaging

These are the facts. Successful magazines reach out to their fans and followers, encouraging them to download their magazine. They post direct links to the App Store and Play Store, post links to the landing pages and send push notifications to take control over app retention and push sales.

Spikes in download on Mondays
Spikes shows increase of downloads on Mondays which comes from organic traffic.

Our big data has helped us determine that Monday is when the downloads peak occur as a pure behavioral pattern. This means that “poking” your readers during the weekends will yield the best results.

We have confirmed this assumption through a test. Sending push notifications can boost in-app sales even by 300%.

According to Ad Age “The most thoughtful time on the iPad is between midnight and 1 a.m. Eastern Time, when readers spend over seven minutes, on average, on consuming content, which is the longest of any hour during the day”.

Tip:

  • Send push notifications during the weekend, around midnight
  • Use Notifications available in the PressPad panel to send email notifications, too
  • Schedule multiple updates – containing a message and a link to your app – across your social media channels using tools like Buffer

In the digital environment, the killing factor of each venture is simply a silence.