ISV Kaizen

This is not my habit to copy posts from other sources but this time I couldn’t resist. The info below seems to be very useful for any ISV and everyone who deals with sales copy writing.

Here are 7 ways to use numbers to increase the selling power of your next promotion:

Original source: www.technicalcommunicationcenter.com
Author: Bob Bly

Numbers gain attention, arouse curiosity, and add credibility to product claims.

1 - Make percentages look larger.

Taking percentages out to the second decimal place makes them look bigger, because there are 2 extra digits.

Good: 230%
Better: 230.47%

2 - The magic of 2,000.

When you have 2,000 or more of something, you can legitimately say you have “thousands.”

Good: 2,100 subscribers.
Better: thousands of subscribers.
Thousands sounds better because it could be anything from 2,000
to 999,999.

3 - Almost/over.

When you want to make a number bigger than it is, compare it to the nearest round number using the words “almost” or “over/more than.”

Good: 17 years of experience.
Better: almost 20 years of experience.

Good: 21 years of experience.
Better: more than 20 years of experience.

4 - Use credible numbers.

The rule of thumb is to use the round number when you are talking theoretically, and the odd number when you are presenting hard data.

Theoretical: “Make $100,000 as a professional massage therapist.”
Hard data: “Last year Henry earned $100,287.45 in his massage therapy practice.”

5 - Do not write numbers as words. Use numerals.

Good: Seven ways to reduce PC down-time.
Better: 7 ways to reduce PC down-time.

6 - Write fractions as whole numbers rather than percentages.

Good: 30% of wine bottles have cork rot.
Better: 3 out of 10 wine bottles have cork rot.

7 - Use the largest unit of measure possible to make a number sound big.

Good: 25 years of service.
Better: A quarter of a century of service.

When we think about affiliates we usually consider them as webmasters or newsletter owners who put affiliate “Buy Now” links on their websites or plug them into e-mail newsletters.

The on-line affiliates can reach only a fraction of potential users of your software products. There are many prospects who cannot be reached by on-line marketers because they spend just a little time on the Web or don’t trust on-line sales copies.

In the same time, there are many people who could recommend your products offline: on conferences, presentations, user group meetings, etc.
But long affiliate links with personal code are useless in this case because they are hard to remember. The prospects will hardly follow the affiliate link. They will likely go to main product URL and will order from there. Thus the affiliate won’t receive the commission for that lead. This is bad.

If you use Plimus.com for managing your affiliate program then there is a way to help your affiliates to sell offline.

Setup a discount coupon and assign it to an affiliate. The affiliate may give that special coupon code to prospects and they will apply it on your website when ordering the product.

There are two obvious benefits:

• The prospects will be able to purchase product with discount. So, this coupon will make the affiliate’s recommendation more valuable.
• The affiliate won’t have to share an affiliate link. He\she can simply refer prospects to the product website and give them the discount coupon code. Every order with that coupon will be counted as affiliate’s lead and s\he will honestly receive the commission for that order.

Also, on Plimus you can setup the coupon to completely absorb the discount value and it won’t be deducted from affiliate commission. This will also inspire your affiliates.

I hope this idea will help you make you affiliate network more profitable.

If you’d like to sell our help authoring tool Dr.Explain offline by using this approach and to get paid then join our affiliate program and request for your personal coupon.

This is just a few facts from the history of our product, Dr.Explain. I feel a bit nostalgic for that time of big dreams and hopes. Now it’s just a business.
I think these facts could inspire the new rising startups.

Initial design specification for the first version of the Dr.Explain was made in two hours and fit in just two pages: several screen prototypes and a paragraph of text explaining the conception.
The pilot name of the Dr.Explain project was ‘Catch&Doc’, like ‘Cats-n-Dogs’ :-).
Development of the first version took 7 months in part-time mode (nights and weekends).
Most of code was taken from CodeProject.com. In the next years it was overwritten almost completely :-).
Development of the first version delayed my Ph.D. work defending for about a year.
The first version of the Dr.Explain was released July 23, 2005.
The price of the first version was $50 (US).
The first order arrived on 7′th day after official release.
Most of first users came from Clarion developers community.
I left my day job to start the company after 4 months since initial release of Dr.Explain.

Could you disclose something interesting from your product’s history?

If you have ever released an update of your software product then you likely faced the problem of notifying your existing customers about the update. In this post I’d like to give a simple yet very important advice how to notify your customers properly.

Releasing the upgrade is a very important task. After several months of development and testing you may get tired and miss some important details on the final stage - distribution and official announcement.

Here is a list of the most common issues that may happen during the release and reduce the effectiveness of your announcement:

• There is a bug in your software
• There is a bug in your setup utility
• The download link is broken
• Your server is unexpectedly down
• There are typos and mistakes in your announcement text
• … or else

You must detect the possible unexpected problems and fix them before all your customers have received the announcement message. The trick is easy - send your announcement by portions.

The first pilot portion of your mailing must be sent just to a few customers, about of 100-150 contacts. Those users must be as different as possible: from different countries, with different operating systems, corporate and home users, old clients and newbies, etc… Usually the first mailing to such small yet contrasting group of users allows detecting the possible issues in your release or notification. In the same time you won’t be overwhelmed with support request from thousands of disappointed people.

Wait for about a day for possible problem reports and initial feedback. If everything is OK then you may send another portion of mailings to about 5-10% of your customers. Wait for another day. If everything is OK this time then continue sending your announcement by portions of 15-20% with pauses of several hours between each session.

This simple approach will allow you to:

• quickly detect the possible problems in your release;
• keep the majority of your customers happy and properly informed;
• save your support team from the sudden hurricane of the bug reports;
• keep your mail server work load stable.