Trapped in the Marketing Machine

As a techie I confess that I hate marketing, but as a business man I understand the need for it and the value that it brings to a company. I hope that as time has progressed I've learned enough to get by. But it's a difficult dichotomy to live with and I struggle with it every day.

Take for instance the issue of requesting an email address from a user who wants to download software to evaluate. These days it's expected that a software company will provide trials of their software, and with ConvallisCRM we are no exception. Like most other companies we provide a form which we ask the user to fill in, all we ask for is a name and email address so that we know who has downloaded our software.

Now the techie part of me doesn't like those sorts of forms, very rarely do I provide valid information on them. So if I don't like providing my details why should I expect others to? Kind of hypocritical, as such we added a link at the bottom of the form which allowed users to bypass it and go straight to the download, which many users have spotted and used while others haven't. Of those that filled in the form most didn't provide proper details, but filled in their name as 'A' for instance, which indicates that I'm not alone in not wanting to provide my details.

Is it any wonder? How many times have you provided your email address to download some software to try and then found that you are caught in a marketing machine? With emails arriving regularly telling you how wonderful the software is and that you'd better hurry up and buy it because you've only got x days of your trial left. The longer you leave it the more frequent and 'bossy' they become. Meanwhile, you've moved on and have uninstalled the software as it didn't meet your needs.

Such a marketing exercise is relatively cheap, it will no doubt be automated and given that sending an email costs next to nothing does make sense, although setting up the automated process would initially incur some sort of cost. I often wonder as well what the conversion rate is like with and without the accompanying emails, do they really make a difference?

Sending such emails to me is pointless, if I'm evaluating software I'll play with it and decide whether to purchase it on the merits of the software. I'll have already decided whether I would be happy doing business with the company when I browsed their site, I wouldn't be playing with the software if I wasn't. But were they to be tracking the conversion rate, having sent me the emails were I to then buy they would no doubt attribute that decision in part to having sent the accompanying (unwelcome) emails. Hence I involuntarily validate the premise that sending the emails increases the conversion rate.

That brings me back to what do I do? I'd like to know who has downloaded my software, and I'd also like to be able to send an email asking how they are getting on and offering help if it's needed. But I don't want to insist on a valid email address which could turn some users away, whilst others would use a disposable email address. But if insisting on a valid email address and sending an email results in 50% of those left buying the software (for instance), whereas only 5% buy it otherwise, asking for the email address ends up making sense.

Ultimately, it seems to me that I need empirical evidence, to show which works best. Soon we should be in a position to test each hypothesis. I wonder that the results will show? And how many of those will be an involuntary validation of the experimental premise? Not that there's any way of knowing that.