Adriana Iordan,
Web Marketing Manager, Avangate

Hi all, welcome to the February Avangate Digest issue!

I was thinking of something optimistic to open this editorial with and I found it. Of course, it's related to the economic downturn we're facing. The way I see it, the recession is also helping us do the things we do better and more efficiently in order to survive. This way, when it will all be over (and it shouldn't be long now...) we will benefit from an organic growth for our businesses and, hopefully, we will gain enough experience not to let this happen again. :)

Since everybody is still talking about this recession and its effects, and about the pile of opportunities it can bring to startups and smart leaders, I thought this article might be interesting for those of you who are worried about a possible drop of sales. The strategies Al Harberg is proposing in this article can help your software sales to be resilient in these times.

While focusing on generating revenues and decreasing the marketing costs (think cash flow and word of mouth marketing) you need to create products that are so great that customers will market themselves as evangelists of your company (read this book "Creating Customer Evangelists"). How can you do this? We asked directly the author of the book "Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love", Marty Cagan, founding partner at the Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) and you can read his insights in this newsletter.

To have a clearer picture of how ISVs are coping with this economic downturn, we initiated a series of surveys, the first one focusing on software companies using resellers. To receive your full report please take the survey (no more than 20 questions, so you can do it quickly, promise :).

Still down? Cheer up - after all, the future looks awesome (a lot of touch pad and screens), at least this is how Microsoft thinks technology will be in 2019.

We welcome your feedback. Share your thoughts, email me directly at adriana.iordan@avangate.com

I hope you enjoy this newsletter!

Wired news is as you may know one of the oldest technology reporting magazines out there, both in printed and online matter. Read it from time to time to keep up-to-date to the breakthroughs of science and technology and to the impact all of these may have on our lives. And who knows, maybe inspired enough by their trendsetting, your technology might one day hit their pages as well :).

The "Occam's Razor" blog is the place where Avinash Kaushik (Adriana interviewed him about measuring the success of an e-commerce website) shares his insights on web analytics, striving for simplicity and clear explanations of web insights. He is among plenty other things an evangelist of Google so if you're interested in getting the most out of your Google analytics data, this is the one piece of information you don't want to miss. Here at Avangate we have a special preference for the subject matter and of course both you and us gain a lot of actionable data out of it.

Get Satisfaction is like a huge support forum for hundreds of companies, big or small where thousands of customers express their concerns, either complaints or suggestions for improvements. So you better be there first before your customers get there because you need a Secret Weapon for your business. Plus, you can use it totally in your favor to establish trust relationships with clients, to do quick research on new ideas and to simply keep in touch with users of your software. Why not check it out?

I bet you will find at least one new idea from the articles and blog posts below:

How to Convert Shopping Cart Abandons with TrialPay
Everybody is complaining about low software sales since this crisis situation got on the front page. It's easy to figure out why. The million dollar question now is how a software vendor can increase software sales or at least keep income on the survival level.

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How to track "downloaders"?
More and more software vendors our company we work with don't track downloads and, what is more exciting, "downloaders". A Google Analytics tutorial on how to do the tracking with very little modifications for your website.

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10 steps to a Successful Business Networking Event
The post shares some ideas for a great networking event: the most important steps that must be completed to achieve the success and reputation you are targeting by organizing an event.

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Fake it until you make it?
Why do people like better to buy from bigger companies? They trust them more in giving their credit card details, It's unlikely that the company / product will disappear, It's a "warranty" for the software quality. A blog post about how big of issue are all these and how small companies can go around them.

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