Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
Free for marketing
Giving for free doesn’t sound like great business. Free is free and there’s no straight monetary gain from it. However freebies are great marketing and great marketing is something any business needs.
Obvious freebies are the trial versions. Offering a (full) version for the clients to try for a limited time is good. It shows you are confident of your product and you are sure it is so good the client trying it out will most certainly buy the actual item after the trial period is over. However trials tend to have a feeling of being forced. Being forced to either stop using the product when the most likely quite short trial has ended or being forced to buy the actual item. And as I said, the trials are often pretty short, 30 days or so. A limited time trial may even suggest not to try. Why bother if after that short time there’s no way to use it anymore? Why bother even try it? Trials are for the kind of people who are already planning to buy whatever the trial is for.
Another type of a freebie is offering a free, but in a way or another limited version. This sort of freebie marketing may take more time than trial marketing. In a way it’s much more client friendly. Limited version, which one can use as long as they want, doesn’t have that kind of a feeling of being forced. Of course it doesn’t have all the same features and all the cool trinkets as the full version, but a well made limited version gives enough working features and trinkets to make the client happy. A happy client is very likely to start to want more. And to tell their friends about the product.
This post was inspired by 37signals. They offer a totally free online version of their book Getting Real. Anyone can go and read the book on the site. And if someone feels they want the book offline, it’s available as a printed book or as pdf. Sure one can copy and paste or save each page from the online version, but that's pretty much work and may make it a bit hard to read. For their other book, called Rework, 37signals has published a free pdf of full excerpts. The excerpts are well written, very informative and interesting. The pdf gives quite much information, but also makes the reader to want to hear more.
Of course there's always someone who says they wouldn't pay for it. Most likely they wouldn't pay for it even with any other sort of promotion. Isn't it funny how this sort of giving for completely free can produce sales?
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