ESWC06: Panel, Opportunities for 2007

The first panel of the conference was about marketing opportunities for 2007, but naturally there was some questions left over from the presentations earlier in the day.

Robert Martin of Infacta
Dave Collins of Shareware Promotions
Gary Elfring of Elfring Fonts
Sharon Housley of Notepage
Bob Walsh of My Micro-ISV (Moderator)
Phil Schnyder of Avanquest USA

Summarized questions and answers from the session:-

Q: Is email marketing still relevant?

The opinion of the panel seemed to be that it was still relevant. Avantquest maintains a mailing list of 15m people. The main problem with RSS so far is that not enough normal consumers know what it is or use it yet. Should improve now that IE7 supports RSS feeds.

Q: Tips for creating communities?

Try to make a deeper connection with your users. You could do this with newsletters, emails, blogs, forums, whatever you can use to reach your audience. It depends on the product, the market, and the user base.

Q: Plain Text or HTML for email newsletters?

HTML newsletters look better and make it easier to get readers to take action, but they can get caught in spam filters. If you suck at design, use plain text. Try alternating and monitor what works for your users. You can combine both in the same email, letting the mail client decide what to show, but if you do, make sure you hand craft the plain text version.

Q: Does policing forums drain your time?

Bob said it doesn't take too much time, you have to keep on top of it, but it's not prohibitive. The benefits outweigh the potential time costs of maintenance. Customers appreciate your contact and it can help to generate evangelists.

Q: How can you recover if you get trashed on blogs?

Use ego-searches to watch what's being said about you. If you spot something, put a positive spin on it if you can, and try to open a dialog. Try to avoid getting too emotional, stay calm. Then, don't worry, most people don't read blogs before they decide what to buy. They don't always buy the best product, and "best" is always relative. "Best" might mean easiest, cheapest, or most features. Make sure you don't get pulled into a fight. If you make your own news, Google will take care of the rest, just try to make sure your positive news ranks higher than the negativity.

Q: Is it easier to be a Micro ISV now?

Absolutely, even though there's a lot more competition. Often your competition won't know everything, and they won't necessarily do all the things they should be doing.

Q: Any advice for developing plug-ins?

Try to build partnerships with the parent company, write integration guides & tips. Plug-ins can be quite simple to sell if you can find out where the users of the parent product are hanging out.

Q: Anything coming to replace email marketing?

As with the first time this came up, everyone still quite positive about email newsletter marketing, but positive about RSS for the future. Most importantly, try to offer content in as many forms as you can. Give your readers what they want, but don't force anything on them. Spammers will always force new technologies.

Q: What's the difference between Resellers and Affiliates?

Resellers buy at a discount, and the customer buys from them. Affiliates send the customer to you, then you pay the affiliates a share of the revenue. Often resellers provide support too, and many US customers will only buy software from certain resellers. Usually the resellers will come to you.

Q: How do I set up a reseller arrangement?

You need to establish a pricing policy, look around online and find one you like. It depends whether the software is boxed or delivered online. At some stage you're going to need to have trust, just make sure you monitor the resellers and focus on the ones who are working for you. Have a good contract (look for one online), at first be strong, they will naturally ask for a lot, don't let them walk all over you.

Parting 2007 Advice from the panel:-

• Test something, check your stats, watch someone use your software. Do all the basics.
• Make sure you analyze your weblogs, using software. You should spend plenty of time on this, as you will find something on your site is losing you sales. Don't use free stuff, make sure you have access to the raw logs and use something like WeblogStorming or ClickTrax. A big thumbs down was directed at Google Analytics [this surprised me, I'd only ever heard good things prior to the conference].
• Keep up with new trends. Make use of social bookmarking, podcasting, etc. Try as much as you can.
• Vista! Make sure you test it. Software sales will go up because of Vista as users replace existing applications. This could be because they've lost the disks, they don't know how to transfer software to a new PC, because the old supplier no longer exists, or just because they want something that takes advantage of Vista features. Vista compatibility is a major feature, have a new or specific version, make it prettier, and sign your code. VMWare & Virtual PC were suggested as helpful for testing Windows Vista.
• The Mobile Phone Market. Sell a mobile version? Localization? You may have customers willing to help translate your software into another language. You obviously can't do everything you hear at the conference, but at least try something.
• Vista and Office are both changing, and Microsoft is trying to help. Get ready, it might clear out some of the competition.

Tags: eswc06 shareware micro isv