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.
Continue reading
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?
Continue reading
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:
Continue reading
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!
Continue reading
Here’s the results after another week of testing
(results of new design compared to the old design):
Something’s not right in the new design, but it’s hard to determine what it is.
Yes, I know, that is because we changed too many things at once.
Continue reading
This week we submitted our first iPhone app to Apple for approval.
It’s a companion app for our Movie Collector software, not a stand-alone product. Users can catalog their DVD collection using Movie Collector, then export their collection to the iPhone viewer app, so they can always have their collection with them (e.g. at the DVD store, at friends, etc..).
Continue reading