Marketing 101: Why People Don't Register Software

NOTE: This essay is getting long so I'm going to break it into multiple parts over time.  Send feedback to sjohnson@fuzzygroup.com if you want to see more on this topic.

This marketing essay is written for everyone out there who has ever written a piece of shareware or freeware and then not gotten what they consider an adequate return.  It should also be of interest to those who considering this approach of marketing their products.  This essay is going to primarily focus on helping you understand how people evaluate software, the "download problem" and touch on support.  The next part of this essay will talk about the installation process and other issues.

Understanding the Evaluation Process

When considering the question of why people don't register their software, we first have to start with what goes on in the head of the person downloading the software.  What is the process, what are the steps?  I've downloaded a lot of software and paid for very little.  It's not that I don't like it or even try it; it's that developers so often miss the mark and just don't understand the customer and the process.

Here's the evaluation process quickly summarized.

1. Realize that you need software for some task at hand.  Usually this is a utility type function or a development tool function.
2. Go to some location to download it.  Often this is www.download.com or www.tucows.com or a Google search.
3. Search for what you are looking for.  Let's assume that the person is using www.download.com since they do a pretty good job.  Here are the metrics by which to evaluate the product:
   • Product Name
   • Short Description
   • Latest Date Updated
   • Byte Size
   • Number of Downloads
   • User Rankings
4. The user has to figure out from a list of possibly hundreds of programs which program they want to download and evaluate.  User's differ on what criteria is the right one to use but the Number of Downloads, description and User Rankings are the normal ones.
5. The user downloads the software and saves it to their hard disc. 
   NOTE: This is where the problem starts.  See next section.
6. They have to install it.  Sounds obvious, right?  Not really.  See below.
7. They then have to use it enough to make an informed purchase decision.
8. They have to get some type of support (probably 50% of the time this occurs).
9. They then actually have to get to your home page, fill out your order form and give you money.

The thing to realize about this overall process is that it's long and complex and there are at least 8 different points where the potential customer can get turned off on purchasing the product.  What the vendor has to do is minimize these problems at every step.  The first step is obviously distribution or getting the software onto download.com, etc.  This is understood fairly well so we're going to move right into downloading.

The Download Problem or "What's this damn zip file?" or "Where'd it go?"

Every programmer I have ever talked to on this has had problems with this section of this essay.  Take a deep breath because you aren't going to like what I'm going to tell you.  Here are facts:

1. People are busy.  People are very busy.  See my Marketing Software when You're a Small Company article for more.
2. People are highly interrupt driven.  They start downloading and then a phone call comes in.  Or an email or a
3. They are your priority.  You ARE NOT their priority.
4. People are incredibly bad at managing their files.  Yes, I know you are a bright, skilled developer, who looks on the rest of us mere mortals with skepticism when I make a statement like this.  Here's an analogy that might make it clear for you:
   • Do more people in your experience have messy desks or neat desks?
   • For most of us there are more messy desk folk than clean desk folk.
   • Messy desk folk lose track of files.  Even files they just downloaded.  This brings us to the next point.
5. Dump the 8.3 names already!  Here are three programs I downloaded recently:
   • susetup.exe
   • ftpvsetup.exe
   • epp211_en.exe
   • ow32enen601j.exe (to illustrate that even non 8.3 names can be bad)
     
   • Do these names make any sense to you? They sure as hell don't to me.  Here's how I would rewrite them:
   • susetup.exe -- I can't even remember what this one was.
   • ftpvsetup.exe -- FTP_Voyager_setup.exe
   • epp211_en.exe -- Editpad_Plus_ver211_english.exe

What often happens to people on downloaded stuff is that they download it, get distracted and then can't even find the file or don't know which it is.  This is why you really have to dump the 8.3 / or long but obscure names.  Your product has a real name -- use it for your downloadable file.

Installation

Installation is something that people make errors on all the time.  The next part of this series of articles will cover this topic in depth.

Support

Once people get your product downloaded and installed, the inevitable problems occur.  This means support is needed. Here are my guidelines about support for free software during the eval period.

1. You have to support it well for free during the eval period.  I don't care if it's a $40 ftp client.  You have to support it and do a good job if you want that $40.  Here's an example: I downloaded FTP voyager and had an issue.  I popped an email to support@rhinosoft.com.  An auto responder gave me an immediate response, sent me the url to the faq and then 4 or so hours later a real person even responded.  The makers of FTP Voyager, RhinoSoft, have recognized that once they get a customer hooked, they'll purchase FTP Voyager and then they'll try and sell you another product that they have.
2. Getting support has to be easy and use a standard approach.  There is one standard for support in the high tech industry.  It's called "mail to support@company.com".  If you don't support this then you are making a foolish mistake.  If you simply don't want to offer support via email because your company doesn't like email (i.e you want to offer a discussion forum instead) then you should have an autoresponder that replies to mail sent to this address that says "Please get support from this web page: insert_url_here".  A lot of companies don't even have bounce backs sent -- these emails just go into a black hole and the customer's assumption is that the company just doesn't care.

Conclusion

You should now have a better understanding of why people don't register software.  What looks on the surface to be very, very simple is actually a complex, multi-step process that is affected by how busy people are and their own frailties.  If you don't take into account these issues then people don't register your software and pay for it.

© Copyright 2002 The FuzzyStuff. Last update: 5/15/2002; 12:50:54 PM.