How Snappy Touch made an extra $290 daily giving away Flower Garden for free

In his third blog post about the ongoing sales and promotion of Flower Garden, Snappy Touch's Noel Llopis explains how he successfully used a Mother's Day promotion, combining it with the power of free.

With Valentine's Day previously being one of the game's download spikes, Llopis decided to go all out for Mother's Day in the US, adding an new update with iPad support and new in-app purchases.

More significantly, he also gave away the complete game for free.

"The idea sounded really scary at first," he explains.

"After all, I would be giving away my baby for free. Would I lose a lot of money doing that? Would it depreciate the perceived value of Flower Garden? Would it annoy loyal users seeing an app they paid for given away? Fortunately it appears that the answer to those questions was no."

During its first free day, Flower Garden was downloaded 12,500 times, which compared to around 1,000 daily downloads for the cutdown Lite version. Clearly a great improvement.

What really kicked off the promotion however was people sending bouquets to each other: a viral move which resulted in a further 26,000 downloads.

This worked so well, Llopis kept the game free for nine days, by which point the free version was being downloaded only marginally more than the Lite version had been.

Obviously, the business model was to gain a lot more users in the hope that they would become active players and hence spend more money on in-app purchases than would otherwise have been generated if they had bought the game.

And it worked.

"Mother's Day went on to become the biggest day in terms of revenue since Flower Garden was launched. Bigger even than Christmas or Valentine's Day," Llopis reveals.

Indeed, in the two months since the promotion, Flower Garden generated $25,285 in revenue or $421 a day. This compared to a previous daily average of $131.

The game has now made $76,731 since its April 9, 2009 launch, or $170 per day.

What's particularly interesting about the promotion now the game has switched back to its usual $1.99 price, is that Snappy Touch's revenue split is heavily weighted to in-app purchases, such as seeds, as well as the fertiliser required to grow crops quickly.

This demonstrates that for the right games, using free promotions as a mechanism for wider distribution can be a great strategy for increasing sales, because active gamers do spend a lot more on in-app purchases than the initial price of buying the game.

"This was a wild ride again! It was definitely worth doing the promotion and it definitely brought home how powerful free can be," Llopis says, although that doesn't mean he's completely sold on the freemium model.

"However, I'm trying to decide the pricing scheme for my next game, and even though free plus in-app purchases is very tempting, I'm not sure it's the way to go."

You can read the full blog post here.