REWARDING USERS FOR PROMOTING YOUR APP

One of the best ways to promote your app (other than it being extremely awesome on its own, worthy of immediate praise and 5-star ratings) is to incentivize your users to proliferate the Internet and their own friend lists to extol its virtues, or ask for free virtual swag. How exactly is this accomplished? Offering tangible rewards is one good strategy with varied methods of accomplishing it. Another is offering a sense of community that can build organically around your app.

Gifting with Virtual Objects, Free Stuff

In psychology, there is what's known as the rule of reciprocation. Give someone something for free, and most people will feel strongly obligated to not only accept the gift, and when doing so, feel obligated to return the favor. It's one of the core persuasion techniques used by sales people in all walks. How many times have you walked past a person or kiosk giving away free stuff (pamphlet, trinket) only to try your best to ignore them because you know all too well that if you accept it, you're inviting them into a conversation about something you're probably not interested in?

The rule of reciprocation is also true for apps, especially as proven so successfully in Facebook, albeit with some amount of conversion loss. For example, not being face to face with a sales person provides some anonymity, and not being there to accept in real time means there will definitely be conversion rate problems. Still, the rule retains some of its effectiveness, and ways have evolved to mitigate loss.

You should split-test some of the following to determine what works best for your app:

• Targeted gifting — This remains a traditional approach for most games, and, because Zynga (the metrics powerhouse) continues to use it, that must mean it still has merit. Picking a friend to give a virtual gift makes it more personal, especially if the gift itself is valued by the friend (which can be virtual or real-life practical). When you see a flower pot appear in your “Smurfs' Village,” it shows who it's from and there's some small amount of guilt if you don't reciprocate in turn. In “Zynga Poker,” users can target other users to gift chips, as shown in Figure 10-10.

  

  FIGURE 10-10: An example of targeted gifting in “Zynga Poker”

• Competitive gifting — Offering up a gift to the first user who claims it encourages friendly competition.
• Gifting to all — Conversion rates for reciprocity won't be anywhere near 100 percent, but some significant portion will react. Usually, this is combined with sharing an achievement, as in everyone gets a reward if they take a peek at your app.
• Emotion-based gifting — This is a clever method to tempt users to buy into a “story” by appealing to their emotions. If you've played “Farmville” or “Frontierville,” you know how it works. Essentially, as shown in Figure 10-11, a surprise occurs, such as an injured or lost animal, and you share this event with your friends because you don't want to see it lost or hurt. In this case, the key emotion would be sympathy. Similarly, when the event appears to other users, they also have a sympathetic need to buy in and help out, thus completing the chain. This occurs most often in games, but could be something fun to add in socially oriented apps (for example, friend X or friends need your help to accomplish Y). The key emotion in this case does not always have to be sympathy; jealousy, greed, empathy, fear, surprise, anger, joy, love, and so on, are all candidates. The more social you make the event, the more dominant the emotion becomes.

  

  FIGURE 10-11: An example of sympathy gifting in “Frontierville” appeals to the emotions of users

• App-to-person gifting — Gifting need not apply only to person-to-person gifts, but app-to-person as well. When users enter your app or game, consider giving them something in return. If it is an app, you could include a useful notification or stat, and, if a game, some reward. Popular Facebook portals and games utilize this to encourage you to come back after an absence. One popular way is free spins in a casino style to provide a currency reward bonus.

Gifting does not have to apply only to games either. Sharing a picture in Facebook is a form of gifting. Even tagging another's post or comment with a “like” or “+1” (a public statement that you endorse the comment) is a form of gifting subject to the rule of reciprocity.

Gifting in-app with virtual objects is the most common form of gifting, but certainly not the only way. There's another gigantic social marketing trend that has emerged in the past year, which is that of incentivizing users to both “like” your Facebook Fan Page in exchange for a real-world or virtual gift (personal or collaborative), or become a follower of your Twitter stream in exchange for insider information such as discounts or first-to-know knowledge about the brand.

One of the proven success stories in this regard is that of the Dell Outlet (shown in Figure 10-12), Dell Computer's Twitter account that offers discounts exclusive to followers of @DellOutlet. In 2010, Dell made more than $6 million in sales just from its Twitter feed.

FIGURE 10-12: Dell Outlet has made great use of its Twitter stream, earning millions in sales via follower-only discounts

Providing Users with a Sense of Community

As users become engaged and retained with your app, the heavier they become invested, the more social options become important for expressing and sharing their experience. One of the ways to tap into this desire and enrich their experience is by building a sense of community, either within the app, or, more commonly, outside of it.

When heavily engaged, users will often remain engaged with your app, even when unplugged from it. They'll think about going back to it, make plans to do so, and figure out how most efficiently to use it, all within their minds. Exploring or sharing their experiences of using the app is one outlet many users enjoy engaging in. One of the most popular ways to achieve this is to build up a brand site where users can not only explore this app, but others from you as they become available, assimilate your brand as a whole, and engage in a forum for expressing their needs.

Sometimes, without this, one of the first places to go and vent issues is in iTunes, where any frustration might be expressed in a negative review. If your site has a brand presence instead (even if just support), users might go there to seek fixes to their issues, rather than taking the easy route of complaining, and likely then breaking their retention for good.