In our first case study, Andrew Gibson, the head of development at Jellypie Software talks about how Jellypie Software used The Software Update Wizard to help them market their product 3D Box Shot Pro more effectively.
In this article I’m going to outline some of the things we were able to achieve using a little known feature of the Software Update Wizard called the Campaign Manager.
This is a feature that www.powerprogrammer.co.uk don’t really push on their website. It’s like a really nice secret tucked away in the software that’s perfect to use as a marketing tool to increase demo conversions. Putting it simply, it gives you a really easy way to sell more software and enhance your marketing efforts by sending sequences of HTML pages from your site directly to the customer using your demo.
First we started off by integrating the Software Update Wizard into the 3D Box Shot Pro code. This was a really simple process. The Software Updates Wizard ships with some of the best technical documentation we've seen. In the demo we wanted the campaign manager to display a different page from our site every time a customer started the demo.
3D Box Shot Pro is written in C++ with MFC. All we needed to do to get it working was to add the following line of code in response to the user clicking “Yes” on a dialog which appears when the program starts:
ShellExecute(NULL,_T("open"),_T("wuwstub.exe"),_T("http://www.3d-box-shot.com/SUW/campaign.txt"),NULL, SW_HIDE);
This calls a file calls a tiny .exe file called wuwstub.exe (that you need to install in the same directory as your application) and feeds it the URL where our campaign.txt file is located on our server. campaign.text that looks like this:
*CampaignOriginator=3D-Box-Shot-Pro
Campaign=3D-Box-Shot-Demo-Promo
URL=http://www.3d-box-shot.com/SUW/001-demo-tutorial-video.html
URL=http://www.3d-box-shot.com/SUW/002-feedback.html
URL=http://www.3d-box-shot.com/SUW/003-like-us-on-facebook.html
URL=http://www.3d-box-shot.com/SUW/004-bughunt.html
URL=http://www.3d-box-shot.com/SUW/005-bonus-material.html
URL=http://www.3d-box-shot.com/SUW/006-bloggers.html
URL=http://www.3d-box-shot.com/SUW/007-design-service.html
ShowFrom=2004/09/01
ShowTo=2034/10/20
MaxShows=50
MaxPerDay=600
This script simply tells the Software Update Campaign Manager to work through a list of URLs and displays one these when the application is started and calls the Software Update Wizard. This results in one web page popping up on the user desktop if they response “yes” to the following dialog which appears every time the demo starts:
The Software Update Wizard will work through the URL’s in a loop starting from the first when it reaches the end. This will carry on while the customer is using the demo. You can also apply URL=<END> if you only want to display each of the pages once.
To get the Software Update Wizard working with our demo was really easy. All we had to do was add wuwstub.exe, winstaller.exe and our license file to our installation script. We use Inno Setup to make our install files and it was really simple to add the Software Update Wizard redistributable package (wuwinstaller.exe) to our installer. This just required the addition of the following line to the [RUN] section of our installation script in order to get it to install silently:
Filename: "{app}\wuwinstaller.exe"; Parameters: "/S"
wuwinstaller.exe is a really small file of around 276k. Running this at install time only adds a short delay to the time it takes your application to install.
The first thing we wanted to do was offer demo customers the chance to view our “Getting to Know 3D Box Shot Pro” Video on youtube. This would also give customers with an aggressive software firewall (such as Zone Alarm) a good reason to allow 3D Box Shot Pro to access the Internet. After this, assuming the customer gives their assent, the Software Update Wizard Campaign Manager would give us as many chances as we needed to increase demo conversions. Putting it simply, we wanted more people who tried the demo to buy the product. We didn’t want this approach to be a hard sell. Rather the approach would be to try to overcome some of the obstacles that might stop someone buying our product.
Tutorial Video
It’s a sad fact of life than hardly anyone ever reads the documentation that ships with a product. People will rather struggle on with an application and give up if they’re can’t figure it out rather than ever getting around to reading the manual As all software developers know, users tend to ignore documentation! Video’s are different. People will watch them if given the opportunity. A tutorial video has the dual function of showcasing the software running and showing them how to complete tasks that may not be immediately obvious. Our “Getting to know 3D Box Shot Pro video has lead to a significant reduction in support request. After watching it people just seem to “get” what 3D Box Shot Pro is all about.
We put a fair amount of thought into how to present the video via the Software Update Wizard campaign manager. The first major decision was not to make the video auto-play. While this might sound a little counter-intuitive, this was primarily because YouTube does not reliably count auto-plays as video views. As the number of views plays a significant part in the YouTube search algorithm, if auto-plays were counted, it would be simple for people to spam YouTube by placing videos on multiple pages of a high traffic website. As 3D Box Shot Pro is a very visual product, YouTube is actually a very important part of our marketing plan. People tend to search for tutorial videos on YouTube with “how to do” type searches ranking very highly in terms of frequency.
As we weren’t going to auto-play the video, we knew we needed to supply instructions on how to play the video. There are still people on the planet that aren’t familiar with YouTube. We needed to make sure that they understood exactly what they needed to do to play the video. We also wanted to make sure that they could play the video at 720P resolution and knew how to play it full screen. We also made it clear that the video had an audio track and that speakers should be switched on. In essence we wanted to make it as easy as possible for anyone to watch the video.
In terms of the page delivered by the Software Update Wizard campaign manger, we didn’t want it to look like a standard page on our website. The page had one specific function to serve and we didn’t want to dilute focus. As the campaign mangers opens a new window in the user’s default browser, we did have some design considerations to bear in mind, as it was not possible to predict if the users browser would open maximised. In order to display the video page we created some really simple HTML in order to display our YouTube tutorial in the middle of the 1 column, 3 row table:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<title>3D Box Shot Tutorial Video</title>
</head>
<body>
<table width="100%" border="0">
<tr>
<td><img src="../3d-box-shot-images/jellypie-logo-small.png" width="170" height="51"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><iframe title="YouTubevideo player" width="574" height="353" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/MzsXK0RFTrM?hd=1?rel=0?fmt=18" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><img src="images/Video-Annotations.png" width="667" height="159"></td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
You can see the page here:
http://www.3d-box-shot.com/SUW/001-demo-tutorial-video.html
Once this page was created we used it as a template for all the other promotional pages that we added to our campaign manager script.
Feedback
Once we started thinking about ways to use the Software Update Wizard campaign manger we found it difficult to stop. One thing that we knew we were keen to try was to getting some additional feedback from people using the demo. Feedback keeps products live, help with development and inspire ideas. As 3D Box Shot Pro is still a relatively young product (version 1.2 has recently been released) feedback would be of crucial importance for the development of the product. After a lot of thought we decided that the best way of getting feedback was to offer a reward. People generally like rewards and need something to inspire them to give out a working email address. We opted to offer a free license to the person that provided the best feedback on a weekly basis. Everyone that submitted feedback would also be emailed a 10% discount coupon.
You can see the page here:
http://www.3d-box-shot.com/SUW/002-feedback.html
Facebook
We also wanted people to like our company Facebook page. This would be a straight forward request for people to like the page and the page itself would contain a Facebook “like” button embedded in the page via an IFrame. We obtained this from the developers section of the Facebook site: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/
The key benefit to demo users would be to stay in touch with developments at Jellypie Software. Our reasoning would be that if they were using the demo and enjoying it they would be more likely to click our “Like Button”. It turned out that we were right and simply offering people the opportunity to like us resulted in significantly more people liking us on Facebook. Sometimes just asking is enough! We also used this page to showcase one of the ways 3D Box Shot can be used to provide additional marketing options by showcasing the Monitor template.
You can see the page here:
http://www.3d-box-shot.com/SUW/003-like-us-on-facebook.html
The Incredible Bug Hunt
We also wanted customers to report problems to us. Getting feedback from customers is never easy. Some studies on the subject suggest that you will only be contacted by 1 out of 100 customers who encounter an issue with your software. The plan was to once again offer a free license to customers that found a new bug in our software, as the SUW campaign is only shown in the demo.
You can see the page here:
http://www.3d-box-shot.com/SUW/004-bughunt.html
Bonus Material
Like any company selling software online, one of our primary goals is to increase sales. To this end we wanted to use the Software Update Wizard Campaign Manager to make a direct call to action to get people to buy 3D Box Shot Pro. As an incentive we also highlighted the fact that when you purchase of the full version of 3D Box Shot Pro, you get access to a range of additional goodies.
This is how we did it:
http://www.3d-box-shot.com/SUW/005-bonus-material.html
Bloggers
If you can get your customers to write about your products without asking them then great! However, in reality this doesn’t happen often (at least not with our products). One simple rule of marketing is that if you don’t ask, you won’t get. We decided to attempt to get our customers to promote our product by asking them directly.
We did it like this:
http://www.3d-box-shot.com/SUW/006-bloggers.html
Design Service
We’ve been offering a design service for many years, designing everything from Software Boxes to Websites. This became a little bit sidelined when we redesigned our website for the launch of 3D Box Shot Pro. As 3D Box Shot Pro assumes that you already have the graphics for your designs ready made, there are always some people that would find some professional help useful when it comes to packaging design.
You can see the page here:
http://www.3d-box-shot.com/SUW/007-design-service.html
These are just the ideas we’ve implemented at the time of writing this article. One of the major benefits of the Software Update Wizard Campaign manager is that campaign script is simply an online .txt file. You can modify the campaign, tweak and test, without any changes required to your application .exe file. This makes it possible for your marketing to become much more dynamic and flexible, as it no longer depends on rebuilding your application and installer every time you want to change or modify something. This level of flexibility pays dividends rapidly as it makes it possible you to become more adventurous and experimental with marketing.
Within a couple of weeks of implementing the Software Update Wizard in 3D Box Shot Pro, we began to notice the difference. The number of people liking our Facebook page increase dramatically. The number of views on our YouTube videos continues to rise steadily. People starting sending us feedback for suggestions, willingly supplying their email addresses. This allowed us to build an email list of people that tried the product and liked it enough to send us feedback. Some people just need an extra nudge to remind them of a demo product they have installed. In some cases, emailing demo users can convert them into customers.
Overall, the using the Software Update Wizard was a big win for us. It allowed the demo to work much harder as a self contained marketing machine. Thanks to the campaign manager it now does this perfectly. The demo now provides additional traffic to our YouTube channel, generates quality feedback on a regular basis, increases the number of likes on our Facebook page, brings in extra design work and occasionally gets a blogger or two to write about us. This in turn drives extra traffic to our website, generates more downloads which result in more sales!
Bear in mind that the campaign manager is just one element of the Software Update Wizard! It’s also a full functional software update system allowing us to fully automate updates to 3d Boxshot Pro! Maybe we should write a case study on that as well!
Andrew Gibson
Head of Development
Jellypie Software
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