Prosumer Software Vendor Converting Pirates to Customers

NO WAY TO MEASURE IMPACT OF PIRACY AND PREVENTATIVE MEASURES UNSUCCESSFUL

A leading provider of content creation software with annual revenues of $50M estimated that it had $100M lost to piracy. Marketing, communications and creative professionals use the software to create compelling multimedia content across a wide range of industries. Pirated versions of its applications were ubiquitous on the web and easy to find—so much so that the support team was fielding an increasing number of calls from users that did not exist in the customer database. With tens of thousands of consumer and professional users worldwide, the company needed a scalable solution to reach, educate and convert pirate users into paying customers.

While the company believed that there was a tremendous license revenue opportunity from pirated use, it had no way to track or measure it, and was not convinced that the conversion strategies adopted by larger vendors like Microsoft and Adobe would work for the company.

It deployed simple licensing to strike a balance between streamlining the activation process for customers (and keeping support costs down) and protecting the application from piracy. Yet this approach limited its ability to slow the pace of pirated software adoption because illegitimate license keys were widely available from crack groups The company created blacklists of these keys which grew longer and longer, and calls to support increased as users struggled to activate their software.

Through these calls, the company learned that many of these users thought they were using paid, legitimate software. They had paid their money to sellers of pirated software and illegitimate license keys, but not to the company or its channel partners.

The company also monitored the availability of pirated software on the web, but its takedown efforts were resource-intensive and forced them into a game of “whac-a-mole” where new sites quickly replaced the ones taken down.

These “preventative” strategies of blacklisting and takedowns weren’t working. Having seen that other customers had achieved conversion rates as high as 11%, the company chose to deploy Piracy Response and see if it could monetize piracy and convert pirates to paying customers.

TAKING A TARGETED AND AUTOMATED ECOMMERCE APPROACH TO COMPLIANCE

The Compliance Intelligence platform identifies the unlicensed use of software and creates actionable intelligence to generate new license revenue. In-application messaging builds on this platform by providing dynamic, highly targeted in-application messaging functionality. This enables software vendors with a high-volume transactional model to cost effectively reach, educate, and convert unpaid users. Working with Revenera experts and license compliance analysts, the company created targeted in-application response campaigns based on specific demographic and behavioral profiles of the unlicensed users to convert unpaid users to paying customers. Following ecommerce marketing best practices, these campaigns were tested and optimized with the support of the Revenera team. Because the company also has larger organizational users of its software, it was able to segment those users out of the in-application response campaigns and conduct direct compliance outreach activities.