Archive for the ‘Shareware’ Category

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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.

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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!

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Posted in Shareware | 1 Comment »

“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.

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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 »

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Don’t let them get away with not upgrading

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Music Collector logoThree 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.
More »

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New Collectorz.com shop page

Monday, April 5th, 2010

newshopHere’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. More »

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Posted in Shareware | 1 Comment »

Simple coupon codes

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010

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
More »

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Posted in Shareware | 18 Comments »

Mandatory sign up for the free trial ?

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

sign-upOffering 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. More »

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Posted in Email Marketing, Shareware | 8 Comments »

Protecting software with Themida

Thursday, December 24th, 2009

piracy1Remember my post about fighting software piracy? A quick summary:

Don’t bother protecting your software against piracy. Your software will get cracked anyway.

If your software is protected, it will only take slightly longer before the cracker publishes his crack. Making the cracker’s life harder has no effect whatsoever on the number of users that get access to a cracked copy of your software.

In any case, don’t let piracy irritate you, drain your energy, waste your time or take away your focus from the important stuff: Improving and selling your software.

Well… I changed my mind… More »

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Posted in Shareware | 16 Comments »

What to focus on: Product, Conversion or Traffic?

Friday, November 20th, 2009

pctThe core message of my Art of Ignoring presentation is focusing on the right stuff and in particular, choosing between working on Product ( = Programming), Conversion or Traffic.

Many developers default to working on their Product, spending most (or all) of their time programming. But that may not be the best way to increase your sales. For example, if you are getting about 100 visitors a day, then adding more cool features to your program is not going to help your sales. (Tip: if this is you, focus on Traffic).

On the other hand, if you are getting thousands of visitors per day, but are only averaging one customer per 1000 visitors, then spending time and money to get even more Traffic may not be the smart thing to focus on. You should improve your Conversion first.

Final example: if you are getting 1 or 2 sales each day, then trying to optimize the Conversion of your check-out process is not a good idea, as you won’t be able to measure the effects reliably.

That’s enough examples of what not to do. Here’s some simple guidelines for deciding when you should focus on Product, Conversion or Traffic. More »

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Posted in Shareware | 3 Comments »

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