Category Archives: Marketing

Customer survey: which mobile device(s) do you own?

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About a year ago, we launched Collectorz.com iPhone apps and they are selling well. However, the availability of these apps has caused a lot of requests for similar apps for Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and lately, for iPad.

We are already working on iPad editions. The iPad development costs are relatively low because of our in-house experience with Apple iOS programming and because we can share a lot of code with the iPhone editions. Moreover, I strongly believe that the iPad is going to be an important software platform. Especially for our type of software and our target audience.

But what about Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile? Are these platforms popular enough to justify the development of dedicated mobile apps? What is the popularity of these devices compared to iPhone and iPod touch? More importantly: how popular are these devices amongst Collectorz.com customers?

Well, let’s just ask them with a simple survey. Continue reading →

Single stacked pallets or double stacked pallets?

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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

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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… Continue reading →

SIC 2010 – Dallas here we come

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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!

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

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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?
Continue reading →

Upgrade week

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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. Continue reading →

“Software Marketing” group on Facebook

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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.