The Freebie Culture: Expectations?
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?
Tags: free themes, marketing
Mar 11, 2009
It’s always a though decision; are you going to check if a person is a member first before answering a question on Twitter? Or just not answer questions on free themes? What if a member decides to use a free theme – can he get support on the paid themes but not the free? heh .. etc.etc.
I guess it all comes down to prioritizing as usual. If it’s “support” which takes a couple of seconds (ie. answering a question on Twitter which you know the answer to) then why not. If it takes away more valuable time, then I don’t know … I think most people will understand that you guys can’t go around giving out free support to non-customers. After all, it’s your day job, it’s what pays the house/food/beer
Mar 12, 2009
People will complain no matter what. So you won’t/can’t stop that.
They shouldn’t expect support on free themes. You might be discouraging them from being a customer, but in the long run, you’re probably not losing too much money, especially compared to the time spent on it (IMHO).
Mar 12, 2009
Nice post Magnus.
Irrespective of whether I think we should be witholding support resources from non-members, I do think that the people making these demands should sit back and think what they’re actually doing… In my mind, they’ve already gotten something for free – so demanding *anything* thereafter just seems ungrateful.
But I guess most people (on – & offline) have a sense of entitlement ad thus they feel that they are allowed to make demands.
Mar 13, 2009
Great post, Magnus. This is something I deal with on a daily basis because, as you know, I offer free themes and plugins. This was also an issue before I started charging for support. Some people simply don’t understand the amount of time and energy that goes into supporting a theme.
My main piece of advice is to draw a line and try to never step over it. The biggest thing is to be fair to paying users.
There will always be people that feel they’re entitled to free support on free themes. I don’t think those are the people that you’re really marketing toward because they’ll likely never sign up. The free themes should be directly geared toward those that might want to try out a great Woo theme before signing up.
I have a lot more thoughts on this, but I need to stop myself here. Anything more will warrant a full blog post.
Mar 13, 2009
I think drawing a line is a good thing to do. Sometimes it takes just as long to answer them that you can’t give support as it does to just give the answer. In those cases I think we should be fair and give them the answer.
I also get some emails like “I’m just a student and don’t have any money, can you please just help me get this free theme to work” type of emails, which again I try to answer if I can, but it is hard to not come across as rude if you say no to them. It will create some unhappy people, but in the long run I think that is a sacrifice you have to make.
Mar 18, 2009
Hi Magnus,
I’m a freelance consultant who uses wordpress to develop my professional precense on the web, get new customers and improve sales. So I might be a potential customer for woothemes. I might buy not only one theme, but as I develop my internet concepts into new sites (I have a lot of ideas!) I might come back for more themes and be a returning profitable customer for you.
Here is where the feebees come in:
My problems:
There are soo much theme clubs offering professional themes for business users. I simply don’t know where to join anymore! Being able to try your themes for free, get confident that you are a good business partner to work with and have a solid quality set of themes in the pipeline, will make me join and keep buying from you.
Only by trying your theme I’m able to see if it suits my website, if it easy to customize and if you are a good club to join.
If you react on my basic questions, I trust your club and team and know that you guys are the best to partner with. I can then join the club and never leave again. Of course I understand that you can’t afford to give free support on free themes. But if you react and point me to your forum etc (just two lines would help) I get confident that you are a good team and club to join.
Hope this helps and let me know what your thoughts are.
Runy
Mar 18, 2009
Magnus,
Once me again. Now on the “student” who wants your help to get the theme to work.
The student is probably not your target customer. He will never buy your theme nor ever join the club. He first has to finish his school!
One way to determine which emails to answer and who to give support (during your spare business hours) might be to answer the questions:
Is this a potential customer? Does he/she has a business? If student: send to forum. If not just look the website and see if it is a professional business or not. Etc. So if you have a list of criteria who your customers are you might be easily able to shift the incomming email.
You guys are very succesfull and I think you can afford to focus on your clients only or potential clients. Your community wil understand that.
Runy
Mar 18, 2009
Hey Runy,
I see your point, and you also understand that we don’t have the resources to offer free support to the thousands of downloaders of our free themes… if not tens of thousands.
If we get an email with a simple to answer question that doesn’t need follow up, I don’t see the harm in answering it and then suggesting to buy support access or join the club for further enquires.
Mar 19, 2009
What about giving the free themes away complete with a set of instructions, so people actually can get it up and running? I see that Mr. Rockstar thinks people are ungrateful if they ask for help (or demands help, in which case I agree) – but if someone loves the free theme, but can’t get it to work I actually understands why they would ask a question
As a paying member I have to say I hope most of your effort goes to your customers, of course, but as a member I would also like to receive support on the free themes, if I ever need that. A compromise could be to release the free themes with the setup instructions usually found in the member section as a Readme, the users of free themes would be happy, you would be happy because you are not bugged to much, and I guess the members wouldn’t mind as long as you are able to spend more time on them.
Mar 19, 2009
Yes that is an option we have thought about and I will discuss this with the team again. Thanks!