How can a vendor of Software tools make the process of trying out their software as easy and stress-free as possible? Of the millions of people who visit red-gate.com every year to browse our tools; only around 10% of them click a “download” button. Of those that do, only around half of them actually complete the download process, and only a certain percentage of those will go on to install it and try it out. An ongoing challenge for us is to find ways to maximize the number of people who actually give our software a try.

This is a challenge we felt particularly acutely when launching the latest version of SQL Prompt. Approximately 250,000 people had tried out previous versions of SQL Prompt; it is one of our most widely used products. Many loved it but many others, due to various quirks in its behaviour, felt that it didn’t work sufficiently well. We assigned some amazing people to the task of creating a completely new version of the tool, with a different architecture. They’ve succeeded in transforming the product.

How could we get the large number of people who’d tried SQL Prompt before and been a bit disappointed to try it again?

The desire to allow people to try out our software with the minimum of hassle has been core Red Gate value, right from the moment Neil Davidson and I founded the company. The main goal of our website is to allow people to work out whether the software is for them, as quickly and accurately as possible.

For the past 9 years you’ve been able to visit our website and, after filling in a form, download a fully functional version of our software. The form has been shortened over the years, with the advent of analytics rendering it unnecessary to collect ‘marketing information’. It currently takes about 1 minute to complete and requires you to submit a name, telephone number, email address and, optionally, a password. This information has been used in two ways. Firstly, we’ve used it to engage with potential customers, to encourage them to actually give the software a go, and to help them make it work. Secondly, it provided the opportunity to instigate a longer-term relationship with customers, via our newsletters. The latter strategy has been very successful and over 300,000 people now receive our Simple-Talk newsletter.

Here is the old download process for SQL Prompt (which is still in operation for many of our other tools):

1. Click on the download button

2. Get an explanation of the process

3. Provide your email address

4a. Enter a few Details, if you are a new customer

4b. Enter your password, if you are a returning customer

This is the first part of a process of having a part of our website dedicated to our users.

5. And then you get your download

Even though this process is straight forward and hundreds of thousands of people have successfully negotiated it, we could not help but think that it was ripe for improving. This information gathering causes a large drop out rate; a significant percentage of people don’t want to provide any details about themselves and would rather not try the software than do so.

If our goal is to help our customers work out, as quickly and accurately as possible, whether our software is right for them, then what is the best route? Is it better to gather the information that allows us to engage with them but causes some people to abandon us before trialling? Or better to let people download without much opportunity for engagement?

Sticking to our conviction that we needed to get SQL Prompt 4 into as many hands as possible, the team decided to make the download process much simpler: you hit the download button and get the exe:

Obviously this represents the lowest possible “barrier to entry” for the person wishing to try out SQL Prompt. The downside is that it’s a tool with a lot of different options. Often people who’ve found it to be quirky initially have changed their minds once we’ve helped them adjust the options to suit them; if we can’t engage with them how will they discover this?

Early signs indicate that the new download process still has a significant drop out rate, although it is smaller than the drop out rate for our normal process. Why do people hit download, get the exe and cancel? We’re tracking the steady state results with interest. Will more people or less people end up licensing the product due to the short, low engagement process?

We’d love to hear other peoples’ views on this. Are you the sort of person who’d sacrifice the productivity you might get from using a tool on the altar of privacy? Or do you find the option of a dialogue with support, or sales, invaluable to the tool assessment process?