It’s been over a month since I emailed all Music Collector 8.x users about our “Vee Nine” upgrade. So time to try and pull in some more upgrade sales. This time I am doing an “Upgrade week”, during which we have a reduced upgrade fee for the rest of the week (valid through Sunday May 9). We have done upgrade weeks before and the urgency of the nearby end-date really helps to generate a lot of upgrades. Continue reading
Last week I searched Facebook for any active groups about ISVs and software marketing in particular. And to my surprise, there don’t seem to be any.
(I did find the “MicroISV” group, but the last post there was in Oct 2008)
So I figured, why not start a “Software Marketing” group myself?
My idea is to have an easily accessible place to find (and post!) tips and useful links about marketing your software. And to discuss marketing ideas and problems with other developers and people from the industry.
Topics: Adwords, SEO, trial versions, Website Design, A/B testing, email marketing, shopping carts, social media, sales tracking, press releases, etc…
Are you on Facebook? Then just go here and click Join at the top to become a member:
Software Marketing group on Facebook
It would be great if you could also invite any ISV friends that you may have in your Facebook friends list.
Let’s help each other sell more software.
This has been on my ideas-list for soooo long: Building some microsites that target specific keywords, for both SEO and PPC purposes. But I finally found the time to actually work on it and my first microsite is now live: www.musicdatabase.com.
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Once in a while, I try to take a “fresh” look at my website. I just put one of our product pages on my screen, I sit back and try to imagine what it looks like for a new visitor, who just arrived there after a Google Search.
The last time I did this, the main thing that struck me was all the Try/Buy “noise” on the right side of the screen. There’s a Sign Up for the Free Trial box, a Get it Free (TrialPay) option and five (!) different buying options (Standard, Pro, two “Pro + scanner” options, plus a “custom order” option). I realized that I had been replicating most of my shop page right there on the landing page.
So I started experimenting with a different approach, aimed at getting more people to sign up for the free trial. Then just let the trial edition and the autoresponder sequence do the conversion to sales. I didn’t want to remove all buying options though, because we see a lot of customers buying without trying. But it would have to be reduced to just one button, simply taking the user to our recently re-designed shop page. Continue reading
Two weeks ago I started experimenting with Adwords Remarketing. As with most new advertising methods, this sure isn’t something that you can just switch on and then expect it to work. It takes time to understand it and then more time to test, tweak, test some more. Here’s an update on my findings so far.
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Three months ago, we released a major (paid) upgrade for our Music Collector software, version 9. Since then, about 15% of our existing customers have upgraded. Not bad at all.
But it also means that there’s still a lot of people who did not upgrade (yet!). And of course I am not going to let em get away with that.
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Here’s something from a project I have been working on off-and-on for the past few months: Rewriting the entire shopping-cart system of the Collectorz.com site.
From the shop, via the upsell interstitial page and the name/address page, to the payment details page and finally the order confirmation page. I have written some new back-end PHP classes and am now rewriting all website pages based on those classes, making the pages more consistent, and more importantly, easier to maintain. Easy maintenance is essential, because I am tweaking these pages quite often.
I have already posted about my upsell interstitial page a while ago, which was the first page I based on the new back-end classes. This long Easter weekend I have completely rewritten the first page of the check-out, the shop page. Continue reading
I was browsing through the orders of the past few days and noticed something interesting in the way our users enter our coupon codes.
You see, all our coupons are always published written in all uppercase, e.g. “CLZTWEETZ”, “GETORGANIZED”, “GOOGLER”, etc… But our order tracking system stores the coupons exactly as entered. And scrolling through this list, I found that for most coupons, users enter them in all lowercase (e.g. as “clztweetz”), indicating that they typed them manually (as opposed to copying/pasting from our emails).
With one exception: the coupon we give to all our trial users: ITRYB4IBUY
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Offering a free trial edition is an important tool to sell more software, I think we can all agree on that. But how do you make that trial editon available to potential customers?
Do you let them download the trial using a publicly available download link on your website? Or do you force them to give you their email address first (mandatory sign up)? Or maybe a softer, optional sign up?
If you want as many users as possible to evaluate your trial version, it makes sense to make downloading it easy as possible, no barriers at all.
On the other hand, having the email address of your trial users lets you follow up with them, hopefully increasing your chances of converting them into customers.
Which approach will bring you more profits?
Public Download Links or Mandatory Sign Ups?
As always, there’s only one way to find out: an A/B split test. Continue reading
Last Thursday, Adwords started offering remarketing options. I heard about remarketing first in Maui, during Jonathan Mizel’s presentation. A couple of big advertising companies were already offering it. It sounded interesting enough to put it high on my “must check out” list. But now it is available through Adwords, so I started using it right away.
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