In older mail order/marketing books (1980-ish) you’ll often see authors recommend that you accept postdated checks. Give buyers 30 days to try the product. If they don’t like it, they return the product, and you destroy the check.
Well the authors of Take Cover have adopted this exact strategy in a high tech way.
Prospects are encouraged to download the PDF and take 7 days to read it. If they find it useful, they’re asked to pay $10. Of course because you try-before-you-buy, no refunds are accepted.
I’ve always wanted to try this strategy.
According to Robert Cialdini, author of the infamous Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, this is know as the law of reciprocation. You give something first, and people feel obligated to return a greater favor.
Plus, becuase it’s initially free, it takes a lot of the strain off the marketing. You can make great usage of your traffic.
So I e-mailed Matt to find out what this experience has been like so far.
Here’s what he told me…
Q) When did you launch the site?
A) We released Take Cover and on August 7, at the end of a marathon session of getting the book itself typeset and polished, getting the website put together, and getting the backend sales software working. And by August 7, we don’t mean some time in the afternoon after a fine cup of joe, maybe a nice garden salad. It was only technically the 7th because midnight had long come and gone, without even an apology. That makes the book about 3 weeks old.
Q) What prompted you to choose the read-first-pay-later strategy versus the traditional pay-first-read-later model?
A) Well, several factors colluded to make us try this distribution method. During the initial phase of starting the company, we explored some of the methods used for selling digital content. One feature we desperately wished to avoid is Digital Rights Management–technology that restricts what your customers can do with your content. We are philosophically opposed to its intent, and practically opposed to its administration.
We both have technical experience–we’ve been following DRM, and have heard that DRM often makes for unhappy users. Our favorite example of this is the completely unnecessary FBI warning on DVDs that you can’t fast forward through. Almost the only folks who don’t have to suffer through that worthless message are the dreaded pirates the message tries to scare. The first thing they do when ripping a DVD is remove that warning! Yar!
Next, we started investigating eShops–online shopping cart providers. Surveying the available web hosts and the shopping cart software they offered was even one of our early ideas for a book. It got so boring that we felt guilty even expecting someone to read a book on the topic. Many of the shops were downright stinky. Not all of the carts support selling digital downloads, and those that did presented another problem: easily distributing updates to the book.
Some books are naturally living creatures who evolve and grow as the world changes and research broadens. Text book publishers love this. They get schools to buy hundreds or thousands of new copies of a slightly updated version of the same book–at $100 a copy. Well, in our view, it takes a lot of updating before a book looks sufficiently different to warrant reselling it to the same customers. When our readers buy a copy of the book, we want them to benefit from the comments and suggestions they might have contributed. Shelling out more cash just to see a book that reflects your recommendations just doesn’t seem fair.
We also wanted to avoid the complication of maintaining a shopping cart that lives independently from the rest of our website content (e.g. FAQs, excerpts and samples, weblogs, &c.). We don’t want our readers to register with a shopping cart just to pay for a book that they will be downloading, and we don’t want to lose the flexibility of providing a different webpage for each book that we write. Selling electronic books in the electronic equivalent of a tiny catalog or brochure just doesn’t make sense to us. We wanted to be able to present lots of data in an organized and flexible format, but at the same time be able to give instant gratification to our customers.
Clearly we could have worked around a lot of those limitations. But then we read an old advertising book called ‘Scientific Advertising,’ by Claude Hopkins. It spends a considerable amount of time discussing the benefits of free samples and try-before-you-buy campaigns. It was this last detail that made us think, hey, what if we let people download the book and pay for it on an honor system.
We also like the way Amazon let’s you get a peek into the contents of many of their books. Well, this is kind of the next step, assuming that overall sales are not injured. Folks like Cory Doctorow already kinda do this–you can download most of his books online from craphound.com for free. Heck, you don’t even have to read his short stories–he’ll read many of them to you if you listen to his free podcasts. He mostly makes money on the physical books. We don’t do physical books, but perhaps his lesson might still apply.
To be honest though, there was one reason that may have been more important than all the others. The honor system meant that we wouldn’t have to spend another 4 hours setting up a shopping cart before we could start selling the book at 2am. Sleepy eyes crave quick results.
Q) How are you currently advertising the site?
A) Interviews like this are the most entertaining advertising mechanism! We really enjoy sharing what we’ve learned about starting and running a business. We like the opportunity to talk about our books like Take Cover in the context of how they came to be, not just what they can do for you.
We started out expecting to use Google AdWords as our primary advertising strategy. We’ve definitely had some success generating traffic this way, but the exposure we had on iwillteachyoutoberich.com generated a monstrous spike in traffic by comparison.
Of course, we know that interview traffic isn’t coming to get our product as much as it is to check out the site. Still, we like the attention: every bit counts. An added side benefit is that we received some excellent suggestions from around the world. Targeted advertising probably gives a better kind of traffic sales wise–and we may be cranking up our ad budget in the future.
Studying the search terms and popularity has given us some good ideas on adjusting the book or adding content to the website. For example, many people researching the rent vs. buy question really want a calculator to just give them the answer. We suggest that they read Take Cover first, as calculators leave out a lot of detail. But the fact that they want a calculator tells us we’d better give them one.
John’s been putting the finishing touches on a cool javascript calculator that gives an unbelievably precise view of what owning a home can cost directly compared to an apartment or some other rental. It’ll be posted to the site shortly; those interested should definitely check it out at takecover.movingavg.com/calculate.html. Playing around with the calculator boggles even our minds–and we wrote the book. We suspect that the calculator might generate a little word of mouth. It’s fun trying to squeeze some extra money out of a house or rental by playing with the different inputs. Fun at least for personal finance sickos like us. If you know any frugality addicts, send them our way!
Having just read your Desperate Buyers Only e-book, we’re excited about trying some of your techniques. The Marketing Survival Guide is especially relevant to our efforts, so we can’t wait to see how your advice pans out.
(Alexis’ note… I love flattery!)
Q) Your overall results so far (saleswise)?A) When we released Take Cover, we certainly weren’t expecting to become millionaires overnight. And we haven’t. We’ve sold less than 20 copies of the book so far, and received about as much feedback. The feedback has surprised us the most, as it’s generally thoughtful and relevant. Several readers have even suggested a move away from the honor system and to a more traditional pay-first or free-sample system.
Those nay-sayers might be right, but we aren’t willing to give up on the honor system yet. Since we’ve been tracking it, we’ve seen about 160 downloads of the Take Cover book. Clearly a lot of downloaders have not paid or written to let us know why they decided not to pay. These aren’t great results, but we think we can improve it. If not, we’ll consider a more traditional approach–even if it is a bit less satisfying to world improvers like ourselves.
We’re amateurs at advertising over the Internet. We’re learning as we go. Since this is a bit of a side job, we’re also somewhat limited on the amount of time to put into it on any given day. Our general thinking is to focus on generating traffic to the site, and then start playing with different sales approaches. Once we know that we’re reaching our target audience, we can optimize the sales mechanics.
- Matt & John
Moving Average Inc.
Although Matt says they’re not making millions, my synopsis is that they’re doing pretty damn well, with an 8% conversion rate (160 downloads/20 payments).
- The $10 price tag is reasonable enough that people will buy without flinching.
- They’re getting valuable feedback, which can be used for additional e-books. Perhaps for backend sales.
- And they’re able to take full advantage of the traffic they’re receiving.
Mmmm… Matt and John might have turned us on to something really hot. I don’t know about you, but I’ve just added one more project to add to the pile!
Pioneer and get rich,
Alexis Dawes
P.S.- Please show some love for these newbie authors (who willingly gave up some great info) by purchasing a copy of their e-book. And have a good karma-filled weekend!
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