Mar 11th, 2009
How to Notify Your Customers About Software Update Safely
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.
For my document management software, I use a combination of weekly updates and ClickOnce to achieve update nirvana. The weekly updates mean that there is seldom an epic change coming into any 1 release, and the changes happen progressively over time.
ClickOnce has the benefit that I publish the change to my server, and the application is updated automagically on customers’ machines.
Excellent hint, Tim. I agree that ‘Check for update’ feature will simplify the task.
In the same time my tip may be useful also for cases when you need to tell the users something more than just ‘We have an update’, e.g. announcing a special offer or other news . Sometimes we have to send e-mails.
BTW, Tim, the ‘Check for update’ feature doesn’t help or will even harm if you have an issue in your release.
As the release gets visible to all users in a moment, they all will download the file with issue. You won’t have a chance to fix it quickly.