TrialPay Report Shares Software Marketing Best Practices for Acquiring Customers

Mountain View, CA (PRWEB) August 26, 2010

TrialPay, the leading provider of online payment and promotions, today released its 2011 Customer Acquisition Report, the first in a series of free software marketing guides that aim to help software companies benchmark their marketing practices against others in the industry and uncover new, creative strategies to boost revenues. The best practices recommendations are based on an extensive quantitative and qualitative survey of software vendors of all sizes and across consumer and small business sectors (excluding enterprise software).

Customer acquisition is usually the largest variable cost in software companies’ budgets, and TrialPay's research shows that smaller vendors are spending over 50 percent of their revenues to acquire customers. This means that even small changes in the effectiveness of their marketing practices can reap large rewards.

A few of the successful customer acquisition strategies detailed in the report include:

1. Use specific keywords to attract people searching for the free version of your software.

One successful strategy is to create search engine optimized Web pages to attract consumers looking for free versions of your software. Each product should have a page optimized for the keywords that consumers use to find “cracked” versions of software like: keygen, serial, crack, patch, free, and unlock.

List the name of the product and the version number on the page, in the title of the page, and at the top of the HTML of the page to increase relevance and ranking. One company found that this keyword-based SEO approach ranks its product pages as the top result in search engines when people are looking to get its software for free. Visitors to these pages discover that they can in fact get the software “for free” by using an ad-funded payment method. For added incentive, they used messaging that explains the dangers of downloading illegal software that could contain malicious code.

2. Help customers “steal” your software.

One software developer makes it easy for prospects to steal older versions of his software. He places key generators for older versions on illegal file sharing sites like The Pirate Bay that use methods like bittorrent or warez. Price-sensitive users think they are cleverly getting a deal by finding a way to get a free version of the company’s software. Once they use the software, many choose to buy the latest version.

3. Think beyond software when trying to reach your core customer segment.

One vendor was able to reach its core market by building a content website and newsletter around its segment’s common interests, which had nothing to do with its software. The company offers casual games software, and the majority of its customer base is comprised of women. The company surveyed its customers to ask them about their likes and interests, and it turned out their customers number-one interest was house cleaning – something utterly unrelated to its product. So the software vendor created a website and newsletter all about house cleaning, which included tricks and tips, how to use cleaning products, how to save money on cleaning, product reviews, etc. and website visitors and newsletter subscribers exploded. As the company promoted its games alongside the “house cleaning content,” software sales took off.

4. “Retarget” active prospects.

Retargeting can be a very cost-effective way to convert relevant prospects. This technique gives you repeated ad exposure to the most viable prospects. Retargeting is a form of online targeted advertising that presents ads to prospects that have previously visited your site, but did not make a purchase. This technique involves ‘cookie-ing’ site visitors and then using a third-party ad network that is able to read these cookies (and hence, identify these people) in order to serve targeted messaging.

For more tips and to download the full research report, please visit: http://trialpay.com/go/software_research_tips

About TrialPay:

TrialPay makes merchants more money by presenting their online consumers with relevant promotions before, during and after transactions. TrialPay’s transactional marketing platform uses the efficiencies of the Web to pair online shoppers with ideal offers at every stage of the purchase process. With TrialPay, everyone wins: shoppers get a free product or virtual currency with every purchase, advertisers acquire new customers on a pay-for-performance basis and most importantly, online stores make more sales from their current traffic.

TrialPay works with name-brand companies across many industries, including software, social apps, retail, online services, e-books and more. In four years, TrialPay has provided 60 million registered users with compelling payment and promotions options at more than 10,000 sites including Facebook, Gap, AVG and Playfish. TrialPay holds key patents spanning alternative payment methods for products, services and virtual goods sold online. For more information, please visit http://www.trialpay.com.

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