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Engaging the customer in practice

For the first time in a few months I’ve had a few software sales, I mean I’m not surprised that sales have been so poor, as I not done anything to warrant new releases and their marketing.

However, I’ve had the opportunity to email a couple of customers to tell them about the free offer and to send their serial number. At the same time I asked some questions about why they purchased.

I began to think of blue saying about engaging the customer and how I’d never moved forward on this.

Obviously I don’t want to launch myself into a new project to enable me to put an automatic system in place to email customers. I mean I don’t have the sales to warrant the effort and  it wouldn’t be a simple system as people may send their serial numbers or not follow the natural progression of the emails I might normally send.

Having said this I could certainly put some plans in place if I found myself in a position where I were to get a lot of emails. In fact I do get a lot of  newsletter subscription emails, which I don’t do anything about.

I guess what ever system I could put in place, I would still need to create several standard emails. I guess I could knock up a small program which would read in standard email files from a folder and get the clipboard contents aka the email address and create the email so this would take the effort out of sending emails.

However, this doesn’t cater for sequence emails (emails sent out after n days in the trial for example). I guess this would be more suited for a web application, so that submitted emails would automatically be added to a que. But this is a lot more effort and I wouldn’t have a history of emails send, like my sent mail folder.

Thoughts please?

by JM

2010 02 14 Dipsy Marketing Comments (3) Permalink

Finalised plans for my I program.

I’ve now got two plans for my I program, which I think I should try and do both.

Firstly, improve my main page and order page, fine tune it and make sure everything the customer needs to know they have. Then optimize the pages for new keywords, aim for good PR and get lots of good links. Have a free / lite version which will provide more downloads. The lite version will be single user. Hopefully this will lead to more download, a better sales strategy, better pages and sales.

The other plan is to create a new website, with a domain name of something like form filler dot com. Create lots of new additional templates and create a web page and a download for each. With a pad file program title of something like  “Contact System – Form Filler”. Again have the same sales strategy, lite / free etc.

So the program should be identical, apart from the name and the template selection.

I know the second plan involves more work and a new domain, but the url will be nicer.

I didn’t really post this here to get comments, but as a place where I’d be able to easily find it.

However, if you have any comments I’d be happy to hear them.

by JM

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2010 01 22 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (8) Permalink

Why does our maths shop do so much better than our jewellery shop?

I haven’t done any stats, but I know that our maths shop http://www.kidsmathstore.com get a lots more sales than our jewellery shop http://www.enchantingjewellery.com .

At the moment the jewellery site is PR3, well the main page and the maths site is PR2.

I’m just wondering if that pad file stuff I do has anything to do with it.

Thoughts?

by JM

2010 01 20 Dipsy Search Engine Optimisation Comments (2) Permalink

Plans for SoftTester?

I’ve been making plans for all my projects.

Options :-

– Hmmm, improve the speed and functionality of the site I guess. Add extra dynamic pages.
– I guess I could add affiliate buy links etc, but this will require a lot of on going admin, requesting and being approved etc.

Of course I could share the data and use it in a second site.

Maybe I’ve missed or forgotten something big ?

Thoughts?

2010 01 14 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (3) Permalink

Maybe I’ve been using the adwords all wrong?

Its just occurred to me, that maybe I’ve been using the adwords tool all wrong.

When I’ve done keyword , in the past, I’ve looked for keywords which don’t have a full bar of competition, I then look at other things. But I don’t touch keywords with a full bar of competition.

As a result these tend not to be popular keywords from a traffic point of view.

I’ve always thought those keywords are unachievable as there is high competition. However, maybe I CAN gain a slice of the traffic?

Maybe I could work on said keywords and improve further ?

by JM.

2010 01 13 Dipsy Search Engine Optimisation Comments (2) Permalink

Finalising a Sales Strategy

I’m pretty near having a version of my enhanced package ready to release. I’ve still got work to do like beef up my backend programs for analysing the sites it works with to ensure submissions work properly but I’m on the home run. The analysis needs to do more checks than are needed for my existing program. I think I might also do a beta run prior to release with a selected set of people.

One of the final things I need to do is decide on the sales model. With the existing version I sell at a low price for 3 months use. This price is fixed to be a competitive fee for doing a submission run for a single customer website. I also offer a higher price for 12 months use. I’ve had quite a few resales from customers on the low price and a number of one year sales too. With the new program I’m wondering what sales model I should use.

I could sell at a one-off price. The problem with this is that the website serves up data, so there’s an ongoing cost to me that I need to cover.

Some competitors sell on a site-by-site basis, i.e. you pay $20 say for submitting one site to all the supported dirs. This involves registering the customer website’s URL and so on to check the URL isn’t being changed during a submission run. I’m not particularly keen on this though since I think it’ll increase the support overhead each time someone want to change the site URL when they make a mistake or if someone wants to resubmit the same site.

So I could go down a similar route to the existing package I sell except charge a higher price. The new package also restricts use to a limited number of PCs per purchased login – to stop armies of submitters buying one copy and running a whole company off it.

2010 01 13 MikeL Tech Talk Comments (1) Permalink

A new idea about what to do with my I program

I guess its not so much of a new idea, it has been suggested before.

My idea is so sell a 1 user version of my “I” program VERY cheaply.

Its current price is £13

I did think £5 but I could go for £3

Thoughts ?

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2010 01 10 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (8) Permalink

Deciding whats wrong with your site?

We’ve been bouncing a few emails around over the holidays, looking at my stores and the keywords.

Its difficult to know what to do to improve your site.

However, most of my keywords that i’ve optimized for are working for me. But they aren’t popular keywords which bring in lots of sales.

With online shops you generally have a lots of products and therefore finding keywords which work for a lots of products would be almost impossible or VERY time consuming.

However, keywords bring free traffic so its worthwhile contiuing to find good keywords.

The quickest way to prove keywords is to run an adwords campaign, however this costs money.

The main aim here is to bring in traffic which produces sales.

So anything which bring in traffic could produce sales. Mike has for a long time suggested competitions which create interest in the product and hopefully people who don’t win will consider buying instead. However, competitions are short term.

Its easy to blame your keywords and assume that your ranking is to blame for your lack of sales. But if you haven’t yet found the right keywords you must continue your search and find new ways to bring in traffic to your site.

by JM

2010 01 03 Dipsy Search Engine Optimisation Comments (0) Permalink

Whats blog posting all about really?

I was just wondering about one of my sites, it does quite well for traffic, I think one of the reasons is that I used to regularly post on a forum, when I was developing my software, I had a signature link to my site. However, my traffic doesn’t lead to sales and therefore I could leap and say the forum posting did get me some traffic but not the right traffic.

Perhaps blog posting is the same as forum posting.

I know I blog here as I’m interested in discussing things, but on most blogs its more like a kind of newsletter or diary.

I’m thinking if I could find a topics which interest me that I could blog about them on someone elses blog and gain some links.

I guess one issue is that blogs aren’t like forums and unlike this blog, people don’t comment and post other posts out of interest.

I guess another issue is that I’m not passionate about jewellery or maths. Even finsing adjacent topics could cause me interest problems.

by JM

2009 12 27 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (1) Permalink

A Guide to Buying Blog Posts

I’ve been going round in circles with link building and I find that compiling all the guidance and my thoughts on this blog to be a really useful and an “in  your face” area to keep them.

In the last couple of days I’ve been through all the emails I’ve had on using blog posts as a means of link building. I know that buying links is frowned upon by google. But since I haven’t bought any and if I don’t to grips with it, I’m never likely to do so, so posting about it here in public seems a small price to pay if it gets me off the ground.

I’ve had a hard time trying to find relevant links to buy via DP and therefore blog posting seems a good alternative.

A blog post should contain about 3 links to your site, make sure the site where your building the post isn’t on a dropped domain and check every so often that your post / links are still in place.

Although its better to have your link from a site relevant to your topic, as long as the anchor text has your keywords, thats the main thing.

Its cheaper to write the blog post yourself than it is to buy a link from someones site. However, a mixture of both doing them yourself and getting other people to do them is best.

$10 for a blog post on a PR3 site, where you write it yourself is OK.

For $100 you should get between 5 to 10 posts on PR3 / PR4 blogs.

Don’t post in the links section on DP, PM people.

From the advice I was given, my friend only used DP and hadn’t tried other sources like RentACoder.

by JM

2009 12 27 Dipsy Link Building Comments (0) Permalink