Dealing with Free and Lite Version of Competitors
We are new to the software field and have been launched ~4 months = 8 sales so far.The conversion rate is 0.5 %.Product is priced around $25-$30
We are in a market with lot of competition,in fact the competitors are very old and if you Google with the product name of around 3 competitors Google instant will complete it with various version numbers and more.We also face competition from several free products that has limited capability many offered as a Lite Version from competitors.
The competitors ( a few )offer a Lite Version with Limitations,they have got many Facebook fans using this strategy.
How we tackle this -We have the best features,best performance,best support :)
So where are we going,any advice will be very much appreciated.If you can please share information how your sales were in the first months and how it grow.
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*We have the best features,best performance,best support* - According to whom? – Karlson 12 years ago
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@Karlson According to our customers and we have tried out everything.Personally – James 12 years ago
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As a statistical measure you have a problem: 1. You personally have bias. 2. The number of customers you have is not significant enough yet to compare to others. And without getting into specifics of what your product is Have you tried offering a Lite version of your product? – Karlson 12 years ago
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@Karlson We have not tried yet.And Karlson,we know to look from the perspective of all types of users we know our product is the best,No doubts.Our customers include businesses and normal people – James 12 years ago
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*we know to look from the perspective of all types of users* - I don't doubt it the only problem is psychologically you still don't no matter how much you try. This is why real surveys and studies use large pools of people to provide a more objective perspective. Besides you might want to clarify your question since as it stands it's not a very good fit for the Q&A form of this forum. See [FAQ](http://answers.onstartups.com/faq) – Karlson 12 years ago
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And just as an example consider that employees of your competitor might be your customers too. What do you think they would have to say about your service? – Karlson 12 years ago
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@Karlson After Launching our product our number 1 competitor posted on their Facebook page a poll asking users to vote on a list of features we offered but they don't :) – James 12 years ago
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James, would you care to reveal the name of the website, please? – Hans Fremuth 12 years ago
2 Answers
If you have 8 customers and a conversion ratio of 0.5%, then you are only being viewed by 1600 people, or 400 people a month. That seems rather low. Mind you, so does a conversion ratio of 0.5%!
You therefore need to do two things:
Increase Traffic You need to get more people coming to your website. Start an advertising campaign with google ad words, put some adverts in targeted newspapers/magazines. Persuade some sites to write reviews of your products, persuade some bloggers to start using your software and talk about it on their blog. Start a referral scheme, offer commission to any site who refers visitors to you that result in a sale.
Increase Conversions You say that you offer "the best features,best performance,best support" yet only 0.5% of visitors are believing you and buying your product. Find out why! Doing this may be tricky. One way may be to offer a free demo that they need to register an email address to download. Follow up with an email asking them to complete a very simple survey about what they thought of the product, and why they chose not to buy it.
You may also wish to look at your website and make sure you are really pushing the key features of the product, and also making it as easy as possible for users to purchase or at least try your software.
Unless you've got deep pockets you need to get conversion rates up.
Can I ask, do you also have a "free" version of the product which lures customers in with limited features in the hope that they upgrade to a paid plan.
You should be aiming to get a conversion rate of around ~50% from unique visitor to free account and of those around 5-10% signing up to paid plans. Using those figures, and calculating future traffic projections you'll be able to see if you have any chance of hitting revenue levels in a decent time-frame.
Quite simply you can have the best product and support in the world, but you're dead in the water without revenues. You need to increase traffic fast, get those conversion rates up. With old established competitors you'll struggle on organic search so free inbound marketing along with ppc (if you have the budget and it commercially stacks up) will be critical.
