Cousin said:
2poor,
Thank you for your reply, I will pass your comments on to our web
developer and marketing
I am not in any position to change our existing registration process,
but I can only try to reassure you that we intend to keep the
registration process going, as this is our only way of generating
leads.
Susan and John have already said it very well for me, but I have a couple
of thoughts to add.
In my opinion, foisting more unwanted e-mail on already spam-weary users is
a lousy way of generating leads. Most users will resent it. The bulk of
your e-mails will go unread--dismissed and dumped as spam. My guess is that
those upgrade leads you mention in your other post came from people that
would have elected to receive your e-mails.
Me, I'd adopt CDCheck's model. Just been there and done the registration
thing with them. Very nice. Pick a user name and a password and give an e-
mail address. That's it! You have the *option* of receiving e-mails from
them. I had my free personal license (valid for version 3.1.x.x) in a
couple of minutes, without the hard drive serial crap.
I opted not to receive e-mail from them. Why? Because I prefer to go to
their website when I feel like seeing what's new. I don't know if the
CDCheck people are going to e-mail me anyway, but I can tell you that if
they do send some, I'm far more likely to read theirs than yours.
Let's compare. CDCheck has me using their software and periodically
checking out their website. I feel good about the company and I feel good
about recommending their software. PagePlus SE, on the other hand, is
currently uninstalled and sitting in a CD layout awaiting burning. That's
probably the last I'll see of it, and I have no plans of downloading any
more of your software.
The only necessity for it being the way it is, is that if we
didn't then you could "register" our software just by knowing the
registration code from someone else, so we would not get the lead.
It's not good for you guys who change hardware a lot, I know, but
re-registering with the same email address for your new hard drive
will not result in two entries in our database, we obviously filter
out duplicates.
I only touched on this in my last post because I thought it such a no-
brainer.
Do you really think it's better to inconvenience and piss off potential
customers--losing downloads and goodwill--all for the sake of tracking down
a handful of people who would rather go jonesin' for a reg key than hand
over a throw-away e-mail address? C'mon, it doesn't make sense. Those
"leads" add up to nothing but dead ends.
You say the software is mine to use for as long as I like. I say, fine,
give me a reg code that's not dependent on the health and availability of
my current hard drive. You say we can't trust you not to share your reg
code. I say, then why should I trust that a few months down the road
another reg code will still be available to me? You say, you'll just have
to trust us on that. I say, based on what?
As Susan (the workhorse of this group) has already stated, word of mouth
will bring far better leads than a few scavenged e-mail addresses.
