When I hear your plans, I think they sound great. What I would do myself would be to have the email input field already on the first page, just inside the blue area in which you offer the free trial version. So when they submit their email address, they will then jump to a "have received your request for a trial" page, where you tell the visitor that he is soon going to get an email, and when he confirms the subscription, he will get the link to the free trial download.
What I am assuming here, with 1000s of downloads, is that you do not want to manage all those emails by hand. So you need an autoresponder, like AWeber or GetResponse or something like that. These, can, of course be tricky to set up, but once up and running they are immensely helpful. I am assuming also that you have understood the value of having a list which you may continuously sell to. Perhaps you want to plan for two email lists, so that you can switch them over once they buy your product.
Since you have a WordPress blog, it should be easy, if you just have standard widgets, to use a plain text widget to paste in the html or javascript code that you get from your favourite autoresponder. The tricky part is just to produce that piece of code in the first place, so that it integrates perfectly with your blog and works flawlessly with all major browsers (on pc: internet explorer 6 and up, firefox, opera, safari, and chrome; on mac: firefox, safari, opera)
Just to give an example: I am using on my own WordPress blog a piece of code that took me several days to develop. AWeber has recently upgraded to a new "fancy" layout editor for forms, which is not ideal. In any case, when I was finished with the form and tested it, I found that it (both the javascript version and the html version) worked on all browsers that I mentioned above, except for one of the explorer versions. So I had to develop my own code to make it look nice under all circumstances. (But maybe GetResponse's layout system for their forms is better?)
In any case, feel free to take a look at what I did (I have signup forms both on the home page, and on every post page (at the end of each post). Note that I am interested in testing, so my two forms, although virtually identical in how I integrate them, have separate names, so that I can easily see from which form they signed up. That way I can get to know the "sales" value and "conversion rate" of each form.
Re2> Asking For an Email Address Before Allowing A Visitor to Download
Hi clarge,
>>Great great looking website you have.
Thank you. Very kind of you!
>> Thank you kindly for the advice. Not positive what an autoresponder
>> is just yet, but I'll look it up. If an autoresponder can send an email
>> to a visitor with a link back to a downloadable item, then that's teriffic!
>> I'm still not sure whether to require email validation before allowing
>> the download. It would really stink to kill the momentum built up over
>> the last six months by requiring someone to jump through hoops in
>> order to download a trial software package. We'll see.
An autoresponder is a piece of software that either runs on your own computer or runs on someone else's computer or website. The systems that I previously mentioned (AWeber and GetResponse) are software systems that are designed to manage professional email lists of large groups of people. The idea with an autoresponder is that one can prepare any number of emails in advance, and then program it so that the emails are to be sent out regularly (each day, every other day, once a week). These emails can then educate the subscribers, and gradually build a relationship with them, so that they will trust you, your company and your products. And then they will buy from you.
The work of setting an autoresponder is not easy, as I previously said. Not only does one have to integrate the form fields into one's website's design and code, but one must also prepare a number of emails ahead of time, so that the marketing process can be as automatic as possible. (and, in your case, the first email in that series of emails would be the one where the customer could download the trial.)
In any case, the work involved in setting up an autoresponder to take care of the downloads is, as I see it, only a small part of a bigger marketing plan. The most valuable thing for most email list marketers (those who use autoresponders to their full extent) is not to sell some quick $5 product, but to market more expensive products.
Thus, many marketers even give away for free small ebooks or software programs, so that they can get potential customers on their lists. As the saying goes, "The Money Is In the List". And when THAT is done (i.e. when they have a list full of potential customers, all of which are interested in the same niche), then they can later sell more expensive products in that niche (ebooks, ecourses, or software, etc.) for $47, $97, $197, $997, etc.
So what I am saying is this: even if you don't want to take the whole step now with a full-featured autoresponder system, you might want to think about it for the future. Think big! :-)
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