Ninja Techniques that Will Grow Your Business 143 With Alan, I immediately saw how this applied to the app world and decided to cross-promote my apps with him. But I didn't stop there. I got in touch with other entertainment app companies including Lima Sky, the creators of Doodle Jump. It was great timing because they were releasing their new Bubble Wrap app. I was able to get them to cross-promote with me and this increased the amount of traffic to my app network. If you model this strategy with several developers, instead of one, you have the potential of seeing your traffic skyrocket. Find developers whose apps have similar amounts of traffic and similar demographics to your own and maximize your conversion rate. Utility apps, for example, will not cross-promote as well to games as they do to other utility apps because the demographic differs. PUSH NOTIFICATIONS Push notifications are another effective advanced marketing tactic. A push notification sends a message to customers who have your app on their phone. The notification can contain whatever message you want to pass on to the user. It pops up on the screen like a text message, requiring the user to discard the message or to open the app that has sent it. The inge- nuity of push notifications is that you're reminding users of your app and giving them the option to open it up with a touch of the screen. Since these notifications are displayed like text messages, the open rate is close to 100 percent. After all, have you ever not read a text message that popped up on your screen? That's huge for marketing your app and untouched by any other type of advertising in any industry. Push notifications are a powerful in-your-face way of marketing your app and have to be used tactfully. Don't send push notifications every day because customers will get annoyed and delete your app. It's one thing to show them some advertising when they are actively engaged with one of your apps, but it's different to send them a push notification, interrupting whatever else they may be doing at that time. This strategy works best after you've built a solid fan base that is excited to use your apps or to see what your next update will be. The company Outfit7, with their hugely successful Talking Tom and other "talking apps," do a great job with this. They rarely send push notifications and when they do it's something fun like "I miss you" or "Come play with me." Sometimes they also advertise a new feature.