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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Almost two months since my last post. And if we don’t count my “Amazon-Free” updates, the last post about something related to software marketing was 3 months ago. (But at least I caused some commotion with that one).
I haven’t even posted about the new car I purchased in January 🙂
The Amazon-Free project has been taking up most of my time, but I have also spend two weeks on Maui (for vacation and for Perry Marshall’s Adwords seminar).
Anyway, I am back at it. The Maui seminar gave me lots of fresh marketing ideas and we’re working hard to implement all of them. I’ll post updates about the results here, probably in the form of more frequent short “brain-dumps”, as opposed to long articles.
But first things first… the new car… coming up next…
Let me give you an update on our issues with Amazon and the iPhone apps. First, a quick summary of what the issue is about exactly:
Our Collectorz.com online media database systems use Amazon searches as a fallback, only for items that are not in our own databases yet. Users of our Windows or Mac software can use that downloaded data (*possibly* containing Amazon data) for cataloging their CDs, DVDs, books or video games. Then, if they also have our iPhone app, they can export the data to the mobile device. Our iPhone apps do not access the Amazon data feed directly.
But last week, I received an email from Amazon, saying that we must stop using Amazon data in mobile apps, because it is a violation of their agreement. Or else they would turn off our access to the Amazon data feed. So to play it safe, we removed our iPhone apps from the App Store.
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