marketing, software, advertisingI developed a desktop tool for Windows. I have a good conversion rate and good user feedback and I’m now trying to quickly grow my user base.
I’m considering the possibility to give free time limited licenses (6 months) through a well known european online computer magazine during a weekend. According to them, I can expect to get about 10,000 new users.
The goal of this operation would be to:
Test this strategy on a limited audience (one european country).
Quickly get new happy users (because they got a product for free) who will spread the word.
Try to convert them into paying users in 6 months, when their free licenses will expire.
My fears are that:
Giving free licenses could devalue my product.
The audience will not be very targeted and the user feedback may not be so good.
It could cause frustration and bad comments when the licenses will expire.
Have you already used this marketing strategy?
I looked at the website for your product AquaSnap and it seems as if you already have a solid strategy. When it comes to online software or the like I am a big proponent of using the ‘freemium’ model, which is offer a version of your premium product with less features or attributes for free to gain users and convert them to paid users later.
Because you are already doing this here is my recommendation. Offer your personal freeware instead of a six month trial of your premium product. First of all it will not devalue your premium product. Second, if you have your six month trial expire those who don’t convert will remove the now disabled software. You can no longer try and convert those who remove the software after the six months, but if they download the freeware you can keep re-targeting them and trying to convert them as long as they keep the freeware. This may also lead to insight from data as to what your new European market is looking for in your software.
Go for it!
I feel that you are definitely over thinking this. Anything that gets your product more visibility is worth it. Everything else is details.
Unless you are charging something outrageous per seat, you’ve got a good chance that you’ll get a flood of valuable customers when it expires… The ones who found value in the product will just buy it. I would maybe shorten the time frame from 180 days to 60 days.
All feedback is valuable in the sense that you close the gap on what you “don’t know that you don’t know”. You know what you know, you may have an idea what you don’t know and will learn from feedback, but the “unqualified” feedback is worth skimming over just to see what people are saying.
Where are you worried about getting comments? On your private forum? In a public forum? I wouldn’t worry about that feedback, because nobody is going to pay attention to people with that feedback.
Really all you can do is run the experiment to see if it works, but I would be skeptical that a 6-month trial is necessary because your product sells itself. All you need is more exposure and a fully-automated, streamlined trial activation and follow-up process for the pro version. Require the user to supply and confirm an e-mail address prior to trial activation, and send a follow-up e-mail after a week to solicit feedback. The follow-up also serves as a reminder to use the software, in case the user installed it and forgot about it.
To answer your fears:
Competitors
Your competitors are WinSplit Revolution (free) and DisplayFusion (freemium). Look at what they do to promote their products. I prefer WinSplit over DisplayFusion because of WinSplit’s more intuitive keyboard shortcuts, but I bought DisplayFusion purely because of the multi-monitor taskbar (which worked much better than the free MultiMon Taskbar). AquaSplit seems to offer several features which either replace or complement those of these other products.
Who are you targeting?
Freeloaders will not purchase regardless of what you do. If your software requires 6 months before someone realizes its value, then the software will be a hard sell either way. If someone can immediately realize its value, a 6-month trial seems excessive for desktop software.
With the advent of social media and deal-sharing sites, your offer through the online magazine may get more exposure than you expect, so make sure you’re prepared for this possibility.
If you choose to offer something through the magazine, each reader will do one of the following:
What you’re banking on is that enough people will fit into the 5th group. Most of those who find the promotion through a deal-sharing site will be freeloaders or will not accept a 6-month trial as a “deal” and won’t bother to even look at your software. But those who do see its value won’t need 6 months to do so.
Conversion
The trick to convert someone from free to premium is that you must get exactly the right balance of free vs. paid features. If the free version isn’t functional enough to be very useful on a day-to-day basis, people won’t get hooked on it. It looks to me as though you’ve done that, but it isn’t clear to me from your website whether I can get a trial of your premium product, even for 14 or 30 days.
These days, if there’s a piece of software that I find useful for work and it costs less than $30, it doesn’t even pay to think about it after I’ve used a fully-functional trial–I just have my employer buy it for me. If it costs more than that, I may hesitate but as long as it provides significantly more value than the free alternatives, it doesn’t pay to spend much time thinking about it. Examples: DisplayFusion, SnagIt, BeyondCompare.
Ideally I would just run a series of different experiments whose sole purpose is to gain exposure, and track your exposure with Google Analytics (or similar) to see what works. Make a 30-day trial publicly available. After the premium trial expires, revert back to free mode but allow the user to extend the premium mode at least one time. This reminds the user that there is some additional problem that the premium version solves, but also reminds the user that you he or she is using the premium features on borrowed time.
For example, I used the free version of Boomerang for Gmail for more than a year. This product allows you to schedule messages to be sent later, or to schedule them to reappear in your inbox at some point in the future (which you specify). After I used up my 10 free credits, Boomerang gave me the option to “give me just 1 more!” for several times, then the free credits were refilled at the beginning of the next month. (A couple times I clicked “give me 1 more message” too many times and wasn’t offered 1 more free message.) After a few months of “give me just one more” I decided I should subscribe, which brings us to the next point.
If the paid features aren’t valuable enough to support the asking price, then the customer will be turned off and will go back to using the free version or will look for a cheaper competing product. This is exactly what I ended up doing, but I never did find a better product and eventually I found myself running out of credits very early in the month. I still think the asking price of Boomerang is excessive, and it took me another year of clicking “give me 1 more message” probably a dozen times every month before I decided it was providing enough value to my employer that I should just subscribe using my company card. If I had to pay for it myself, I would just make do with the free version and/or one of the competing products that I found.
How do I get a trial of AquaSnap Professional?
So, what about AquaSnap? I immediately see its value just from looking at your website, but I’m hesitant to buy anything these days without using a fully-functional trial first. If you had a single installer and I could just activate a trial of Professional mode for 30 days, you can be sure that if the Professional features work at least as well as I expect them to, I’d buy it either after receiving an e-mail follow-up a week later, or when the trial expires.
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