Before I got into iPhone apps, I’ve been making money online for a very long time (since 2002 maybe) selling developer tools. Developer tools are typically high priced, going for between $200 and $500.
The purchase process is different for the consumer, since it is certainly not an impulse purchase, other options will be compared, and settling on a particular developer tool means learning an API, which is a form of lock-in. When a customer buys a developer tool from you he is marrying you. And he’ll do some research to make sure you are the right one.
I never optimised my developer tools business. I never did any of the newfangled marketing tricks everyone knows nowadays – in 2002, you put up a website and added your site to download.com and that was it. Well, I did, because that was all I knew. But over the years, there were two critical techniques I discovered that basically was the difference between success and failure.
1. Do not put your price on your website. Put a “price list request” page, and let your customers fill out a bit of information about themselves. These are high priced products, people will not close your website because they have to wait a little.
2. Ask people if they want to be contacted using an opt-out button. Then after automatically sending them the price list, personally contact them and start a conversation with them. This technique raised my sales from about $400 a month to $900 a month
I successfully used this technique for a while. When I sent the follow up, I had a reply rate of about 40%. Then I discovered a simple trick that drastically improved my reply rate and increased my income to about $1500 a month.
Previously I had
—-
Subject: About your pricelist request for Klein SDK
Body: Dear John Doe, I saw that you…
—-
I changed it to
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Subject: Re: Klein SDK pricelist request
Body: Hey John Doe, I saw taht you…
—–
The idea behind it was to let the people know that I actually wrote the email to them, and this was not a form email or a machine sending it to them. Adding only the “Re:” gave me about a 60% conversion rate. Adding the “Re:” and the “taht” increased my reply rate to close to 75%. And made me $600 more a month every month after that.
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Nice “customer engineering” trick!
What about the “Hey” part? I think that’s also something more informal that people appreciate. Dear is also a symptom of spam.
Oscar – it’s not really just about the 3 characters. That’s just sensationalist headlining. It’s about changing the email so that people are SURE it was actually written by someone directly to them, and is not an auto-generated marketing email.
correlation = causationQ.E.D.
@max Thanks for the explanation. I’m going to apply it for my own emails and see how it works for me.
Oscar: Tell me your results when you do so, I’d be interested
nice tip – it amazing how small optimization techniques that at face value dont really make a difference, can actually yield good results.
Your article is about the power of being personal in customer relations. However, you chose to be a little tricky, both in the title of the article (as some have mentioned already) and in the conversation with your customers.I am not sure I have a good feeling about it.
Simon: I don’t think it’s being tricky. The consumer benefits by being able to discuss the product with the developer. I do not know why so many of them have such a hard time simply sending an email to talk. Using this method, a conversation is started, and I get to explain how exactly the tool can be used for what they want.In the end, they get a tool that works, someone to help them get it running, and I get my sale.
Just FYI, I’ve been responsible for making buying decisions for companies — occasionally for large-ticket items — as well as for my own business, and in both cases I almost never do business with a company that refuses to put their pricing online, out in the open.For one thing, I’m not interested in haggling with a sales person, nor am I interested in paying more than some other guy who haggled better. I want to get a job done, and I want the right tools for the job, and forcing me to correspond by email is a barrier to getting the job done.To get me to actually jump through such hoops, the product or service would have to boast a feature list or some other advantage that completely overshadowed the competition.This is one of the things that I like about, for example, abmx.com for rackable systems, versus other vendors.
Personally, I kind of think that’s sad. It works, and congrats on finding and using it, I have nothing against doing it. I just tend to _completely_ write off a company that has blatant spelling errors in relatively high-profile emails.Granted, making the email _not_ look like it was generated is important, and can be difficult. I, and several others I know, respond well to more informal emails than to “business” emails, as it generally means the company / emailer is more likely to respond if emailed. Spelling errors don’t make things seem more informal to me, they just make it seem like the other person doesn’t _care_, or can’t click a spell-check button.* sigh * I guess I’m more alone in this than I expected
sorry, but i really, really hate it when there is no price on the site. it is just annoying and whoever invented that should be tarred and feathered! In every real life store, there is a price on stuff, so please add it to your online “shop”, thanks!
Hey max – this is really interesting. Did you properly a/b test this (no offense intended)? One version with that new subject line and no misspelling and one version with that same new subject line and taht misspelling? Also, what was the sample size. This is a *huge* move you were able to achieve. Awesome, and thanks for sharing!
Matt: This is not properly ab tested or scientifically certain. It was my subjective observation of what happened during my experiments with optimizing this part of the process. I observed a clear difference, but I did not properly measure the difference.The sample size is not too big : I get about 30 emails a month. The time period for the tests were pretty long though – I’ve been doing this for quite a while.
Wow, great stuff. I’ve also seen people put”Sent from my iPhone”manually into an auto generated message (not from an iPhone) with the same effect. Hope it helps
thanks for the response max. I force myself to calculate margin of error on all A/B tests, because until your percent improvement exceeds the margin of error, you really can’t derive anything from your results. Luckily, you’ve achieved a huge improvement: 15%, so even with 100 samples (3 months of testing for you), and at a 95% confidence level, your margin of error is ~9.8%. Winner winner chicken dinner!
אינטערעסאַנט אָבער װאָס איז מיט דעם בילד?
Really? Honestly, I don’t think I’d go with the company that included typos in their professional emails. The RE makes a difference, I’m sure, but my first reaction was that the typo made it look more scammy.
Careful. The “don’t show your price” mantra is a double-edged sword.Imagine someone who either really has no time for games, or is under pressure to put something in a budget. If you are spending your own money, you will *usually* (but not always) jump through hoops just to get a good price. But if you’re budgeting for somebody else’s money? Government funding? EU funding? You really don’t care. What you do care about is whether you can put the price in RIGHT NOW and not tomorrow, because the deadline to submit your application is tomorrow.If you think this is a convoluted scenario, a word of warning — I have ignored companies a number of times just because they didn’t have clear, easily-accessible pricing that I could budget. Their competitors got the money.
regarding price lists, I agree completely with thaumaturgy. Unless it is an extremely compelling product, if I can’t find pricing information, I’ll overlook it.Regarding email conversations – I was in a discussion with a sales guy about an expensive product not too long ago and he insisted on discussing details by phone. While I understand that he wanted a more “personal” discussion, I personally don’t really like telephone calls and prefer email. Phone calls are slow and distracting and need to be attended to right away (and are difficult to multi task), while emails I can think about, ignore temporarily if I’m busy, or write while I’m doing something else. So, like with your personal email strategy, but would probably be put off by lack of pricing information.
fs111,You say “in every real life store there is a price on stuff”. This is false. Walk into any decent jewelry store and look for prices. When you are finished, go to a high end restaurant and look at a menu. Prices will not be there. Same thing for high end car dealerships.
Interesting that so many people are advocating not playing games with the price, but statistics show that 75% of people looking online are in their own way playing a game. I also hate the saying that perception is reality. NO! reality is reality and not showing pricing for proprietary product creates a higher bottom line profit. Also purposefully misspelling word in subject lines produces a higher response rate.The results are reality. So the minuscule group of people you are losing who end up buying inferior products based on having to put forth some sort of effort to learn about a product is probably a good thing to recognize. These are the people you don’t want as clients. Read 5 minute manager by Tim Ferris and he has an entire chapter on how to get rid of these customers. Major drag on resources and time in the overall scheme. And I truly find it hilarious that somebody says they quit working with a business when they find a follow-up email with a typo. This points to someone who is too focused on the small and is probably not going up any ladders soon. The business leaders I correspond with daily aren’t excessively obsessed with typography, punctuation or sentence completion. Must be they are more interested in results. They would be excited about this.
I think there are other ways of achieving what you did with more sophistication.The pay per click affiliate market was the first to implement this from my understanding and that is auto inserting information that is auto gathered.We already have two people from {insert-city} using our tool, so be sure to join and forum where you can find and post help!orJust so you know, our site isn’t best viewed on your browser {insert browser brand + version}, so if you have any issues with it, feel free to contact me.or something of the sort.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1122328
-;; I am really thankful to this topic because it really gives great information `-,
Max, regarding the "no prices" policy: did you use to have prices on your website, and then took them down?
Hello would you mind stating which blog platform you’re using? I’m going to start my own blog in the near future but I’m having a difficult time selecting between BlogEngine/Wordpress/B2evolution and Drupal. The reason I ask is because your design and style seems different then most blogs and I’m looking for something unique. P.S My apologies for getting off-topic but I had to ask!