Magnus Jepson » marketing http://www.jepson.no Co-Founder of WooThemes.com Wed, 20 Oct 2010 07:57:19 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 The Freebie Culture: Expectations? http://www.jepson.no/the-freebie-culture-expectations/ http://www.jepson.no/the-freebie-culture-expectations/#comments Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:12:17 +0000 Magnus http://www.jepson.no/?p=389 As a follow up to Adii’s blog post about The Freebie Culture, I wanted to share my thoughts and hear yours on what expectations the freebie culture have, and how much we should adhere to their expectations. As Adii explains in his blog post, we use freebies as a great marketing tool for WooThemes, by giving away free WordPress themes. Our latest free theme called Irresistible, has been well received by those who downloaded it, and we also made some initial changes to the theme based on the first feedback we got on our blog.

Giving away freebies is very good marketing for you site, but we at WooThemes also offer support for our products in the form of documentation, tutorials and last but not least, forum support. All our members get all this information readily available, but if you are not a member you can’t get a step by step detailed instruction for installing your theme or figuring out any problems you might have.

But we get a lot of request via comments, email and twitter for help on the themes. Are we expected to give free support and make the documentation available for free? I understand that if you see a great design and it’s free, you’d want to make it work on your own site, which in all fairness it should, and we therefore make our free themes as easy as possible to setup. But I still think that we are entitled to keep the support benefits available only to our members.

Which makes me wonder… Does it have a negative effect on some potential customers if they can’t setup the free themes because of lacking free support? Are we pushing potential customers away by doing this? We firmly believe that we are contributing back to the community by giving out free themes, but as a value addon for our paying subscribers/customers, I think that the support should be kept as a member only extra.

Do you agree that this is makes good business sense?

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