Sending Promo Codes to Press and Creators Without Wasting Them

Handing a reviewer a free copy is the easiest part of press outreach. Almost everything that goes wrong is logistics, and one specific mistake accounts for most of it.

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The mistake that kills most press codes

App Store promo codes expire four weeks from the date you generate them — not from the date you send them, and not from the date they are redeemed.

So the common workflow — generate 100 codes at launch, work through a press list over the following weeks — quietly produces dead codes. The journalist who gets to your email on week five finds it does not work, and you will usually never hear about it. They just move on.

Generate press codes immediately before you send them. Not from the launch batch. If you are emailing ten outlets on Tuesday, generate those codes on Tuesday. If someone replies three weeks later asking for a fresh one, generating a new code takes thirty seconds and is not an imposition.

The same logic applies to your allocation: you get 100 promo codes per app version, per platform. Do not burn all of them on a public giveaway if press outreach matters to you — hold some back, or ship a version bump to reset the allowance.

Steam is more forgiving here: keys do not expire, and you can request large batches from Valve. Different platform, different plan.

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The email

Journalists and creators get hundreds of these. Yours is competing on how little work it creates.

Subject line: what the app does, not what you want. "Sudoku app that teaches solving techniques" beats "Review request — new iOS app."

First sentence: the app, plainly. No "I hope this email finds you well." No paragraph about your journey. What is it, who is it for.

Show you know who you are writing to. One specific, genuine reference to something they covered. Not "I love your work" — that reads as a mail merge, because it usually is.

Put the code inline. Do not make them reply to ask for one. A code sitting in the email is a thirty-second decision; a code that requires correspondence is a task for later, and later never comes.

One clear ask, easy to decline. "Happy to answer anything — no worries if it's not a fit."

Length: under 150 words. If you cannot describe the app in two sentences, the problem is upstream of the email.

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Unique codes per contact

Send each person their own code rather than a shared one.

It is not about exclusivity. It is that you can see which specific codes were redeemed, which tells you who actually looked. That is the difference between "I emailed 40 outlets and heard nothing" and "31 redeemed the code and none wrote it up" — which is a completely different problem, and a much more useful thing to know.

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Creators: the tier question

You will read a lot about micro versus macro influencers. The practical version for someone with no budget:

A creator with 5,000 engaged subscribers in your app's actual niche will do more for you than one with 500,000 general-interest followers, because their audience is self-selected for the thing your app does. They are also far more likely to reply.

Judge fit by whether their audience would plausibly want your app, not by follower count. And send the same short email — creators get the same flood, from the same people, with the same padding.

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The follow-up

One follow-up, seven to ten days later, three sentences. Then stop.

If they redeemed the code but did not write anything, that is an answer. If they never redeemed it, the pitch did not land — change the pitch before you send the next twenty.

Do not ask for a review of the app on the App Store as a favour. Beyond it being a guidelines problem to trade anything for a review, a promo code redeemer cannot leave one anyway.

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Promo Code Queue tracks which codes get claimed and when, so you can tell the difference between a pitch nobody opened and a product nobody wrote about.