At Collectorz.com, we have multiple people doing customer support. Most of the first and second line support is handled by AJ and he’s doing a great job.
But we recently found out that AJ is even better at creating cool promotional videos for our software. Check out the vids he did for Movie Collector here.
We decided that AJ should spend more time creating videos and that we should start looking for an extra customer support employee.
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If your site offers multiple products, add-ons and extra services, then cross selling and up-selling are important ways to maximize your profits.
At Collectorz.com, we sell seven software products (each available in two editions), five iPhone apps, two different barcode scanners, plus we offer CD delivery and a paid support option called “Priority Support”.
The software products are all related and targeted at the same type of customers, so cross-selling has always been important for us. And with the introduction of the barcode scanners we added some great stuff to up-sell to new and existing customers.
Before telling your about our current solution, let’s look at the various methods for cross selling and up-selling we tried since we added our second program.
You’ve probably heard this age-old piece of marketing wisdom before:
“Sell benefits, not features”
In general, this is good advice. But in the software world, it is not always the best approach. In some situations, pushing your features will sell better. I encountered a situation like that a while ago.
It all depends on your product, your target audience and your sources of website traffic.
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Of course we never have bugs in our software, but still… we have always used some method to keep track of “misbehaving features”.
Through the years we tried: simple todo.txt files in our CVS project trees, Word documents on a shared file server, Google Docs (both spreadsheets and text documents), Mantis, The Bug Genie and since a few weeks: Lighthouse.
Discount coupons can be an effective tool to increase your sales and, more importantly, your profits. But how big a discount do you need to give? Should it be a percentage off or a fixed amount? How do people use the coupons? Pass it on the URL? Enter it into a coupon box? Where to put this box? Who do you give the coupons to? And aren’t you loosing revenue because these people pay less for the same stuff?
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A few weeks ago, Christian Mairoll of Emsi Software posted on the ASP forums about an interesting experiment he tried. He replaced all .99 and .95 prices (often called “odd prices”) with rounded prices. He reported that for him it made no difference. Interesting…
So I tried it myself. Last week I started an A/B split test on this. Group A getting my regular .95 pricing, group B getting rounded prices. But for me, it did make a difference. Here’s my results after 8 days:
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Today, I created two new ads in one of my ad groups, to start a new test of two different messages.
For some reason, both got flagged for manual approval, but now look at the Status of both ads:
In the past seven days I have been testing these headlines against each other:
Version A, emotional, benefit-oriented:
Starting right now, you will enjoy a perfectly organized DVD collection…
Movie Collector Instantly Catalogs Your DVD & Blu-Ray discs.
You’ll Save Time and Money Today.
Finally Have Total Control Over Your Movie Collection.
Version B, practical, feature-oriented:
Automatic DVD Database Software for Windows, Mac OS X & iPhone
Movie Collector Automatically Catalogs Your DVD Collection.
Just Enter Movie Titles or Scan DVD Barcodes.
Instantly Download All Movie Details and Cover Images.
And a week has gone by again. But now we’re finally seeing better results from the “B design”. Phew…
In terms of numbers of sales, it’s doing about the same as the old design. The profits for category B are slightly higher (about 3%), mainly because the average first purchase is still higher for the new design.
All in all, the new product pages are not a great success. But at least they are now performing well enough to switch to the new pages and start optimizing their details. I already have a couple of ideas I want to try:
Yes! Our first iPhone app has been approved by Apple!
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