Ron Packard Jr. is CEO at Cloudburst Games.

You’re going to laugh when I tell you why I was so eager to watch a LinkedIn presentation by the New York Times Bestseller author of “Pre-Influence”.

I went into an AT&T store recently to check out the new Apple iPhone 7.

I sat down with them and talked it over and I must say I didn't stand a chance. They sold me with a very powerful sales pitch.

I was truly devastated after my purchase.

But it occurred to me, there must be a lot of science to the art of sales.

And that’s when the same day I noticed the author of “PreSuasion” on LinkedIn and watched his video.

Sure enough, his explanation of the top selling mechanisms sounded like a checklist for how that sales pitch went down at AT&T. I honestly complained to AT&T, but now I owe them a million!

Because my eyes opened up. I got itching to see our sales go up after watching that video. So I searched Google and found a very good article:

40 secrets to making money with in-app purchases

Funny thing was, the first five things I could do to align myself with this article only took my programmer and graphic designer two days to accomplish.

This is by no means small stuff. Although, honestly most of this can be implemented easily.

So here’s my conclusion based on my analysis of what I could do for my first wave in our game Castle Breakout - Escape!.

1. Incremental difficulty

We had a second level where we were losing 35% of our users, and our levels were way out of order in terms of difficulty.

I've seen our funnel chart before that shows player progression level to level, but it never occurred to me before that the trailing off after level two may be because the Blacksmith room was really difficult and should be held back as the last level before the locked content.

This chart shows the traffic progression chart for our first seven levels.

Here’s how the numbers break down:

1. Alchemy room - 16% don’t finish
2. Blacksmith room - 38% don’t finish
3. Armory room - 19% don’t finish
4. Dungeon Room 20% don’t finish
5. Kitchen Room 14% don’t finish
6. Great Hall - 15% don’t finish
7. Bedroom - 36% don’t finish

So from this breakdown - looks like the new order should be:

1. Kitchen
2. Great Hall
3. Alchemy Room
4. Armory
5. Dungeon
6. Bedroom
7. Blacksmith room.

I estimate this will help the flow of traffic by 50% up to level 6.

2. Blur the last three levels

Make them grayed out at first to promote curiosity. These will be blurred until the user at least gets past level three. This will give the player a goal to help them get past the increased difficulty after level two.

Curiosity will keep them intrigued with what these levels contain.

Making the last four levels cloudy creates excitement and anticipation from the user, as people like the mysterious. To unlock all the levels however, the user must perform a single social share on Facebook. We are hoping this creates a somewhat viral effect.

3. Don't annoy the user

We have an advertisement for an in-house ad to promote our store. Since it’s a one-time buy, showing the ad afterwards would be annoying, so it is removed once a purchase has been made.

4. Request the user's email after paying

With an email list you can shoot the user new updates and new apps and sell them on merchandise and contests. Some users may not like that, but Candy Crush Saga, for example, took my email by simply connecting to my Facebook account.

Let’s keep close to our chest our most faithful users.

5. Mental mind trick

We made the pricing of our IAPs as follows:

Slot 1 - $.99. 12 hints
Slot 2 - $2.99 36 hints
Slot 3 - $2.99 72 hints

Slot 2 acts as the decoy.

After implementing these changes, the conclusion was a surprise to us. There wasn’t an even increase between genders in terms of revenue based on our alterations.

Let me lay the background - our Facebook ads generate a 100% female audience and our organic traffic is about 50% male and female.

What happened is our ARPU from our Facebook traffic went down by a few cents and our ARPU from organic traffic nearly doubled.

This means is that the men were very happy with our new level order - placing the throne room first.

Women, it seems, were disappointed. So now our next hypothesis is that if we make a version for women - we ask the user for their gender - will they prefer the Throne Room more?

Here is a snapshot of one of the changes we did for women. We’ve made about two dozen such changes in the Throne Room to cater for different genders.

Feel free to shoot me an email if you want further details on any new findings from us.

Ron Packard Jr. and the team at Cloudburst Room Escape are looking for an investor / publisher. You can contact Ron Packard Jr at ron@clbg.co.

http://www.cloudburstroomescape.com

http://www.cloudburstroomescape.com/welcome-the-pocketgamer-patrons

http://www.castlebreakoutgame.com