Improving sales with 3 characters and a misspelling

This thread is funny and depressing at the same time. So a guy found a way to improve his sales be significant number. Tons of people respond with "yeah, but it wouldn't work for <i>me</i> - I hate it". How is this even relevant? Clearly you are not his target audience. He has data to back up his approach, while you have a precious little of an opinion.<p>It's not about <i>you</i>, it's about <i>customers</i>.

Nice email trick. I personally hate when I can't easily find pricing online though.

If someone misspelled something in an email reply, I would just assume they had a misspelling in their automated response form letter. That would make me think much less of the company. I'm glad it converted better for you, but I'm guessing that another variable changed at the same time that actually made the difference.

<i>The idea behind it was to let the people know that I actually wrote the email to them, and this was not a form email or a machine sending it to them.</i><p>I know my opinion generally runs counter to general thinking here at hn, but I find this technique unacceptable. There are plenty of ways to be successful while being totally forthright and honest with your customers that you should never have to resort to tricks like this. If I found out a vendor did this to me, I would never do business with them again.<p>When I was younger and more foolish, I once did something like to this. I made 1000 perforated postcards to send to local businesses with a simple "anonymous" survey on the tear-off asking about their software. Except the tear-offs were not anonymous at all. Every single postcard had a slightly different return address. By slightly altering the positioning of 6 different items and recording it in the data base, I had enough permutations to uniquely identify who returned the card. I could then call on those who needed what I had.<p>I thought it was pretty slick until my partner refused to participate. He said that my hack wasn't worth the hit to our reputation if anyone found out. He also thought we should earn our business without any tricks and establish excellent relationships with our customers.<p>It took me a while, but I understood his lesson. This hack seems eerily similar.

&#62;Previously I had<p>&#62;Subject: About your pricelist request for Klein SDK<p>&#62;Body: Dear John Doe, I saw that you...<p>&#62;<p>&#62;I changed it to<p>&#62;Subject: Re: Klein SDK pricelist request<p>&#62;Body: Hey John Doe, I saw taht you...<p>-<p>Without the "Re:" the second subject line is still much better than the first.<p>Without the misspelling, the "Hey" gives a very different tone to the "Dear".

Ok... maybe he's right, but I'm suspicious about his methods. He's writing about his tools that they're "going for between $200 and $500.", then "This technique raised my sales from about $400 a month to $900 a month" and then that it raised the sales to $1500.<p>So basically he went from ~1.3 to ~2.6 then to ~4.3 sales a month. If he really measured the response, he should take the samples from at least one year (otherwise it would be season-dependant). He made changes in 2 steps - that means at least 2 years. So to me it looks like either:<p>- he improved the software over that time, his tools got more recognition among developers, standard business growth occurred, or<p>- he did nothing about his business or software, crisis and other events affecting sales didn't happen, world has been a controlled environment for a couple of years and 4 sales per month are statistically significant...<p>- or... Am I missing some option?

Wow. So, I didn't send you an email, and then you send me an email with the indicator "Re:" which traditionally (well, in the last few years of email history) means that you are responding to my email... which I didn't send.<p>Sorry to be a purist, but I consider that a misleading subject line, which is one of the indicators of spam.<p>Yes, traditionally, RE: meant "in regards to" and was a standard header on memos to denote the subject (watch Mad Men if you don't recall memos). But we all know that nowadays it is the changed subject line of an email response in a thread... which is why it gets the attention the author mentions.<p>Sure, we all have to do whatever we can to get noticed. But maybe I'm the only one here who thinks that there are ways to do this without "overloading" the RE. And please don't say "ah, but his is Re, while Outlook uses RE, totally different!". Because it's not.<p>As a test, try something other than RE: Try using "Subj:" or Oh, one more thing re: price list or any of the other countless ways one can get attention in a subject without "fooling" the user.<p>The mispelling, though, is not a bad touch.

I always walk away from "request price" sites. Somewhere online is a site that respects my time enough to tell me what they charge without demanding my personal info, and I'll search a bit and find there instead.

An increase in sales from $400 to $900 a month is compelling evidence that these annoying tactics produce good results? Color me unconvinced.<p>Requesting a price quote is a deal-breaker for me. And if I got that email, I would just assume that he couldn't take the time to spell things correctly in whatever he used to generate the mass emailed "reply" - not that he typed it by hand himself. Why would that make more people want to buy software he had developed?

Perhaps not having an easy way to purchase your software lead to more people buying it, in 2002 (thought I find it hard to believe). I find it even harder to believe, though, in 2010.<p>$200-$500 is not a lot of money for a developer tool, or for a business purchasing said tool. So putting an obstacle in front of someone seems rather pointless. Of course, I suppose it depends on the tool. But if I didn't think it was worth the money I wouldn't buy it anyway. And if its nature leads to lock-in--well, once someone's gotten over the hurdle of "Is this tool/company worth sticking with?" I wouldn't exactly want to give them another chance to reconsider.

"1. Do not put your price on your website. Put a "pricelist request" page, and let your customers fill out a bit of information about themselves."<p>What? Does that really work? As a developer whenever I encounter something like this I'll immediately leave the website and never come back.

I personally like the approach that JetBrains takes. There products are also developer-targeted and not-necessarily cheap.<p>They handle this by showing the price, allowing you to download a 30-day trial, and then sending out an email soliciting feedback once your trial is about to expire. The email comes from an account that is easily recognized as jetbrains, but instead of 'sales@jetbrains.com' or something similar, it actually appears to come from a person (i.e. john_smith@jetbrains.com). This email could still be autogenerated for all I know, but I certainly felt a more personal connection than the usual "do not reply, this email was autogenerated" stuff that I normally get.

Max, I usually like your stuff, but I disagree 100% with this one.<p>I'm currently evaluating software DRM wrappers for a client. They're ready to spend 5 figures on the software, so it qualifies as an expensive developer tool. I've spoken with 15 vendors in the past 2 weeks.<p>Any vendor with no pricing was immediately tossed out. No pricing listed says to me that you're price discriminating, and nothing pisses me off more than being overcharged because my client is a big fish.<p>The only exceptions were companies like Flexera, who have to be included in any such report. But if you're a no-name vendor that I Googled into? Forget it.<p>Also, a misspelling in the email subject says you didn't take the email seriously. I already don't like you. Maybe you can overcome this, but its an uphill climb.<p>Comparing this to an automated response is silly. If I got an automated response from a vendor selling expensive software, after I've taken the time to fill out their form, forget it.<p>I know you have data which appears to support your conclusion, but correlation != causation. Its equally possible your site rose in Google rankings, word of mouth spread, or you got lucky that month. $1500/month (3-5 sales at the price you stated) isn't a large enough sample to be drawing conclusions from, and an automated letter is the wrong control group.<p>Summation: you're sacrificing a good first impression to account for a non-issue. Don't send automated emails, and don't do this either.

This sales strategy works for higher-end (read: pricier) stuff. It will not work too well for less-pricy stuff, impulse buys, or purchases where the buyer is looking to make a quick decision.<p>Usually when I see a "contact us for a quote" I already know that they are trying to price their product (to me) based on how much they think they can get out of me. Meaning, if I am rich, the same product is more expensive to me than if I was a poor bloke. It's a form of market segmentation, pricing is definitely more of an art than science.<p>Either way, this means it's a "high-touch" purchasing decision; meaning I probably have to go and and forth with some sales guy to reach some price. If I'm not in the mood for the hassle and I'm looking for an impulse buy, I'll immediately forget this site and move on.

We often do something similar -- I usually try to find at least one detail about a site that wouldn't work in a form letter and work that into a personal follow-up. On sign-up people first get an automated mail, but then we (for paid accounts) always do a personal follow-up.

Okay, so the "RE:" was a very very nice addition. Did you ever get metrics without teh mispelling?

I'd be really careful with this. If I can't easily get the price of the product, I assume it's a few million dollars and find another product. The only way I would ever fill out a form to get information is if it was the only game in town.

Not a form letter, eh? I recall a persuasion course that intoned (as one of its 3 main tenets), "People sometimes believe what they are told, but never doubt what they conclude."

Read your spam folder on gmail sometimes - there are lot of tricks. Re: or even Re:Re:, female's names, ridiculous names, and unimaginable subjects. They're trying really hard.. =)<p>Another quite obvious thing - put misspellings in your ad-words list.

I find that writing an email is a good way to let people know you wrote an email.<p>Several unethical sales tricks.