Archive for May, 2010

Single stacked pallets or double stacked pallets?

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

We just received the following email from our rep at CustomCD (they handle the shipping of our CDs and barcode scanners):

I have a favor to ask – the last batch of scanners that was sent to us came on a double stacked pallet. Our receiving dock isn’t able to accept these, so they asked that the next shipment we get if it could only be single stacked pallets.

Single stacked? Double stacked?
I don’t even know what that means :-)

The joys of selling hardware, I guess. Sometimes, I long back to the days when we were just selling software, “shipped” by email.

Analyzing Adwords Geographic Performance Reports

Monday, May 24th, 2010

I was checking our Visitor stats in Analytics when I noticed that over the last 30 days, Mexico was nr. 2 in my top countries list, accounting for 8% of my visitors.

Mexico? We hardly ever sell to Mexico.

A quick peek at the Ecommerce tab confirmed that: In the same period only 0.37% of my sales came from Mexico. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if all that traffic was organic and thus free. But what if I am paying for those visitors with Adwords?

Sadly, information like that is not readily available from your Adwords interface. You will have to run a Geographic Performance report to get to the data. And even then, it takes some work to turn the data into actionable information.

But, it’s definitely worth doing. For instance, I found that for the past five months, a considerable part of my Adwords spend had been going to Mexico and a couple of other countries (Greece, Spain) that were not resulting in enough sales.

So I highly recommend that you spend some time to analyze your own Geographics Performance report. To help you do it, I have created a step-by-step tutorial on creating and analyzing this important report type. Here we go… More »

SIC 2010 – Dallas here we come

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

This year, the Software Industry Conference (SIC) is in Dallas, Texas. Sytske and I were not planning to go, mainly because of the not so exciting conference location (at the DFW airport).

But after looking at the Conference Schedule, I changed my mind. This could be quite interesting after all.

And of course it’s always fun to meet our ISV friends in person again, drink some beers, play Rock Band, etc… :-)

So Sytske has just registered us for the conference, booked our flight to Dallas and the stay at the Hyatt hotel. Plus we signed up as a Bronze level sponsor.

See you in Dallas!

The importance of Display URLs in Adwords ads

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

adwordsA few weeks ago, I posted about my new microsites project. In short: I am creating microsites targeted at specific keyword phrases, for both SEO and PPC reasons.

Here’s some of the first effects I am seeing when using a microsite as the target URL and, more importantly, the Display URL of Google ads. More »

CD Delivery and Priority Support – Opt-in or Opt-out?

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

Delivery on CD and Priority Support options, do you offer those up-sells “opt-in” or “opt-out”? In other words, when users click your Buy button, do you put these extras in their shopping cart automatically?

CD delivery companies (we have worked with SwiftCD and CustomCD) are always pushing us to have “Delivery on CD” pre-checked. Understandably, because this is bound to sell more CDs and thus bring them more business. And automatically adding a $10 Priority Support subscription is sure to result in more subscriptions to that service.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Making more money on each sale, who can say no to that?
More »

Upgrade week – the results

Monday, May 17th, 2010

Music Collector logoLast week, I told about our Upgrade Week, during which we had a reduced upgrade fee for Music Collector ($14.95 instead of $24.95).
On Tuesday I emailed all old-version users about the offer, then on Saturday I sent out a short “2 days left email”.
Yesterday, was the last day of Upgrade Week, so the results are in.
More »

Upgrade week

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

Music Collector logoIt’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. More »

“Software Marketing” group on Facebook

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

software-marketing-logoLast 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.

My first microsite: musicdatabase.com

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

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.
More »

Website Design: Less is More?

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

lptest-smallOnce 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. More »