The Agile Micro ISV Blog

Don’t you find it annoying when you’ve been patronising a company for ‘n’ years and instead of rewarding you the loyal customer, they give gimmicks, widgets and other incentives to the johnny-come-latelies? Me too. After reading a post in the Customer eXperience Blog,
I came to wondering about new customer incentives and how they apply in
our world of software. It seems clear that if you operate on a model of
software purchasing, then the natural pull is to dedicate more of your
time to chasing new customers than to serving and supporting your
existing ones.

I wonder if selling Software as a Service might help turn this on its head. How could we shift the balance to making existing customers our priority?
And would we want to? As opposed to customers being ‘in the bag’, a 1
year subscription means you have 1 year in which to convince your
customer to not leave in favour of the competition. A potential
customer is someone who might have a genuine interest in your product,
or they might have a fleeting interest in your product. An existing
customer is someone who definitely has an interest in your product, the
question is are they impressed enough to subscribe for another year?

New customers are important. No-one will last long without
recognising that fact. Focusing on your existing customers will turn
your customer base into a sales tool. Testimonials will flow, forums
will be buzzing with a positive support vibe. I’ve seen support forums
full of angry questions like “Where is the support?” Not a great sales
tool.

“TrialPay – Pay By Trying Something New”

That’s what the tag line says. TrialPay is a company with a simple,
clear defined purpose – they pay you for getting customers to to try
new leading brand products.

Thanks to Mr 47 Hats for pointing me at this one.

There are a couple of ways this could work. From what I’ve read, if
100 potential customers download your product for a trial, maybe 5 will
purchase it; if you’re lucky. What if each of the 95 non-buyers were
offered a second chance? What if you could email them to say “If you
buy something else from one of these other big name companies……you
can get the product for free!” Now wouldn’t that be nice?

TrialPay works on the premise that to a company like, say, American
Express, a customer may be worth on average $1000 over their life. So
giving $49 to you as a reward for introducing them seems worth it,
doesn’t it?

Another aspect of TrialPay that I find fascinating is this – the
offers are targeted at the person and their location, and the payment
to the merchant varies accordingly. So if their web site is anything to
go by, a new customer for ebay in China might net you $5, whilst a new
US customer for Amex might net you $49. Simple eh?

But here’s the nifty bit. The monetary value of a piece of software
is almost always defined as what a customer in the US will pay for it.
I, for example, might charge charge $39-95 for my first product. It’s
not much to a US citizen, and it’s even less to a Brit (weak Dollar +
strong Pound = UK export misery). But what about the gazillion emerging
Chinese computer users, or Indian, or Brazilian? Will they fork out $40
for a piece of software? I doubt it. The fact that TrialPay targets its
offers to the affluence of the potential customer’s region means take
up rates should be reasonably consistent across locations. OK, getting
$5 for your app instead of $40 might rub, but if the alternative is
$0….

It is with this in mind that I might offer this form of payment
straight away, at least for personal sales. Probably doesn’t work for
B2B sales. I like the idea of all customers being able to afford to buy
my wares, not just the affluent ones. Maybe it’s just the raging lefty
in me.