OSBC: Downloads to Dollars
The Downloads to Dollars panel was moderated by Larry Augustin and the panelists were from XenSource, Vyatta, Eloqua and OpenSpan. (And one of them used a lot of JBoss stories.)
The dilemma here is that companies want to offer free software downloads as a lead to a customer but downloaders don't like registration forms. "It's not the open source culture." So the trade off seems to be how much information you can or can't ask for in exchange for a download. One of the speakers says that asking for contact information cut their download numbers in half! The general advice seemed to be to make sure it's an equitable exchange of value at each step. You don't ask for a ton of information at the start - "Create value at every step." For example, offer additional documentation in exchange for contact information.
The other advice that people offered was to think about downloads as a means to an end but not an end in of itself. Downloads can give you global awareness, brand, adoption but not necessarily all downloads will convert to customers. So just aiming for a higher and higher download number might not help you meet your goals. Along with that you need to figure out what category of downloaders you have - many of them might be able to help you with global awareness but might not be potential customers. You will need to provide them different things and treat them differently. You don't want to pester the technical blogger with daily phone calls trying to sell him a product but you do want to get him the latest version of your software.
What do you think? Are you willing to give up contact info for free software? Are you willing to give up even more information (like the fact that you are a technical blogger) to help them interact with you appropriately?
Maybe I’m missing something, but wouldn’t it be sufficient to offer a prominent, well-made “Enter your email address here to join our announcement list” textbox? (and have multiple lists if you want to say different things to the technical bloggers than to the enterprise IT staff)
Unless the company wants to contact people who do not want to be contacted, I don’t see how anything more intrusive could be helpful… But maybe I’m missing something.
As for my specific predelections, I’m very happy to join the mailing lists of musical groups I value, I would generally join announcement lists for software I use (although it’s not always that obvious, so often I forget to), and I would simply enter a fake (or temporary, if necessary) email in any form that required such before letting me download something.
Requiring contact info to recieve a download is more or less pointless, as it’s trivial to submit false details if you choose.
reply to Jesse:
Correct, I absolutely hate giving away my real email address and even worse my real world address. I will always use a fake address if they want an address and there’s no physical shipping involved and will always use a webmail based email address (preferably an anonymous one) when an email address is required for something.
I have been burned before where I’ve been deluged with spam and junk mail when my details were sold on.
This annoys me. If someone is interested in service, you’ll here from them. They won’t just forget about a product they find valuable (and need help with).
One of the things I like is places which make the information optional. I’ve filled in the optional info, when I was actually interested in hearing from the company — especially when they framed it as a “we consider this an equitable trade of information for software, but if you don’t, here’s the direct download link”.
It’s also affected by the value of the software. Sun’s operating system and compilers, for example — yeah, I’ll fill out contact info for that, because I recognize that it’s a quite substantial bit of software that they’re giving me in return. A small utility that I’ll use for five minutes … not so much. And registration forms for hardware drivers annoy me; I’ve already paid the company for the driver by using their hardware.
Also, I suspect that the numbers get skewed a bit, by people doing multiple downloads (or not). I know that I’ve downloaded PuTTY a couple of dozen times in the last three years, just because it’s easier to downloaded it than carry around a copy. If they wanted me to fill out a registration every time, I’d carry around the copy instead.