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.

The Collectorz.com situation

Of course, testing any form of sign up approach only make sense if your going to follow up, either automatically or manually. Otherwise the reduced number of downloads will only hurt your sales.
At Collectorz.com, we have been experimenting with autoresponder (AR) follow-up sequences for over a year. We are currently using a simple, but effective 4-message sequence, that is being sent out to people signing up for the free trial:

• Day 0: Welcome, $5 discount coupon, download link, link to Getting Started guide, testimonials.
• Day 2: Buying guide, standard vs pro, barcode scanners, iPhone app, testimonials.
• Day 6: Subscribe to newsletter invitation, benefits of cataloging your stuff, testimonials.
• Day 30: Outright invitation to buy, more testimonials.

Up until 2 weeks ago we used the soft approach, with the sign up being sort of optional. That is, our product home pages only showed a sign up box, no download link, but on the Download page one could still download the trial without signing up. (the Download page could be reached through our navigation bar at the top).

I have always been procrastinating to go for the mandatory sign up only, because:

• I was afraid I might loose sales.
• I wasn’t sure my AR sequence was good enough.
• I didn’t have a solution for existing customers yet. I mean customers who already own a license and are just looking to (re)download the latest version of their software.

But I have been optimizing my ARs in the past year, plus a few weeks ago I implemented a smart download link request form for existing customers.
So I figured, let’s go for the big test.

The test

In the past 2 weeks have been running the following A/B split test:

Version A

As described above. The product home pages showing a sign up box only, the download page allowing direct download, plus offering an optional sign up for the Getting Started guide:

Download Page - Version A

Version B

The Product homes as in A, but the download page having a Sign Up For The Trial box only:

Download Page - Version B

Note that in version B i have added the Download Link Request box for existing customers.

The results

These are the results after running the above A/B split test for 14 days. In these two weeks, the test counted 69,000 first time visitors and just over 600 sales.

• #Downloads: down by 33.6%
• #Sign Ups: up by 20.7%
• #Sales: up by 3.4%
• Average First Purchase Value: up by 13.5%
• Profits: up by 15.4%

Interestingly, the sales of the B group lagged behind during the first few days of the test, then began catching up fast, to end the test as the winner. The effect of the AR emails at work, i guess.
Another fact to notice is the most of the gain in profits is caused by the increase in the First Purchase Value, not so much by the number of sales. Maybe the AR is helping to build trust, convincing users to include a barcode scanner with their purchase, or to buy multiple cataloging programs in a bundle?

My advice?

First, don’t try this at home! At least not until you have a tried and tested AR follow-up sequence in place.
And even then, your results may vary. My customers are home users and my guess is that these people are more likely to willingly provide their email address. If you are selling to more tech savvy users or to businesses, your download counts may drop too much to be compensated by better AR conversions.
But then again, business users may be more serious about evaluating software and therefore perfectly willing to let you email them more info. And if you’re in a “low volume, high ticket” business, you could even send personal follow up emails manually. Or here’a a crazy idea, ask for their phone number and just call them.

Anyway, for us a mandatory sign up process seems to be workig. And I haven’t even implemented all our AR ideas yet. Obvously, that is at the top of my to-do list now.

We have received notification from several Internet Service Providers that your recipients are reporting your emails as spam at a rate which exceeds their allowed thresholds. In order to prevent any further spam complaints from your contacts and to protect your email sending reputation, we have temporarily disabled all email sending capabilities.
To restore email sending service to your Infusionsoft application and learn how you can prevent future spam complaints, please contact the Infusionsoft Customer Care Staff at the information listed below.

FYI: this threshold is normally set at 0.1%, which means that you are allowed one spam complaint for every thousand emails you send.

We did send out our monthly Collectorz.com Newsletter on Wednesday, but this newsletter is quite popular among our subscribers. So I am surprised if we would suddenly get a lot of spam complaints about it.

Of course I checked my Spam Complaints reports inside the InfusionSoft system. It showed 12 spam complaints for this newsletter, for about 100 thousand emails sent! That’s not too bad, is it? At least way below the 0.1% threshold.

Maybe one or more ISPs did get a higher percentage of spam complaints, fine.
But what bothers me is that InfusionSoft just disabled my email sending capabilities without waiting for my response. And then their email just tells me to “contact them”, without any hint as to what exactly has caused the problem, what actions I should take to resolve it or what information they need from me in my response.

Of course, I did reply to their email right away, giving them as much information as possible, about my list, my autoresponder sequences and the newsletter we had just sent out. But no reply from InfusionSoft until now, other then a reminder of the disabled state on Saturday.

Guess they are not working weekends. I am though and my business is continuing in the weekends too, for us these are the best days of the week. But not now, because my autoresponders are not working.

Anyway, looks I will have to call them tomorrow. Sigh…

Sorry for the rant, just had to vent my frustration. But there is a lesson here too:

Autoresponders are a great way to raise conversions, both on the front-end and on the back-end. But make sure sure your business does not fully rely on them. Because one spam compaint too many, and you’re out.