Tools for promoting your product releases

You’ve done it. After weeks, months, maybe even a year later, you’re ready to release your new product to the world. All the sleepless nights, long weekends, and hard work all lead up to this moment. You’ve built up your social media presence. You have built an email list that makes email marketers jealous. You’ve re-written the title to the release blog post 100 times, being sure to get the tone just right. It all leads up to this moment, when you press ‘Publish’, and announce your product to the world.

Blog post published…now what?

At Easy Digital Downloads we’re constantly releasing new versions, new extensions, and new content. We employ a mixture of social media engagement and email marketing to make sure people are aware of our changes, releases, and tips on running a successful eCommerce site.

Maximizing Social Media

Social media plays a huge role in how we announce new products and releases. The problem is, with Twitter specifically, depending on what time you share your post, you could be missing a large number of your followers due to the time of day in their local timezone. There are plenty of services out there to schedule Tweets, but at Easy Digital Downloads we use Post Promoter Pro to handle this within our publishing process. (Full disclosure, the author of this post is the creator and developer of Post Promoter Pro).

The premise behind Post Promoter Pro is we can schedule our Tweets for the next few days and weeks to make sure we reach the largest number of our demographics. The best part, is it’s right in your WordPress admin, as you write your post. No need for external tools or services. Everything is right there at your fingertips and part of your publishing flow.

This plugin has helped us gain a large amount of traffic and conversion, without the need for remembering to share our content at a later date. It also includes custom Google Analytics Campaigns, so if you’ve configured your site to record transactions into your Analytics, you can see how the social media impact is having on sales.

You can read more at PostPromoterPro.com.

Email Marketing

Some of you may be reading this article via an email we sent you. This is one of our other means of reaching out to customer’s when we announce new products, versions, or helpful content. Email marketing is more than just junk mail. While social media is a broadcast means of reaching your customers, email marketing is targeting your higher conversion customers. These are people who have actively requested to receive your updates. The Easy Digital Downloads mailing list is powered by Mail Chimp, and uses some of the more advanced features to keep you all updated on what’s happening in the Easy Digital Downloads ecosystem.

You can read more in our article about using Mail Chimp to super power our product promotion.

We use a combination of sign up forms and the Easy Digital Downloads Mail Chimp extension to subscribe both potential and current customers into the correct lists so we can be sure to get the most relevant information in front of them.

When it’s all configured and setup, we’re able to see specific details about individual customers to help measure conversion. Here’s just a sample of some of the type of information we can get in MailChimp:

These are just some of the tools we use to help get new products, versions and guides in front of our customers, and with them, we’ve noticed an significant upturn in our traffic and conversion alike.