

How A Half-Broken Halloween Promotion Smashed Revenue Records - bjplink
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/11/01/how-a-half-broken-halloween-promotion-smashed-revenue-records/

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bryanh
Once again Patrick has made me think twice about what I can and should be
doing with my webapp customers. These show-and-tell type posts are worth a lot
more than face value...

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arn
I don't know. I appreciate the transparency of it all, but my take away was
that his halloween sales smashed revenue _despite_ his promotion efforts, not
because of them.

Looking at the promos, it looks like he got 15 (mini site) + 15 (email) sales,
which appears to be around $700+ in revenue. Percentage-wise it seems notable,
but in absolute numbers, I wonder if the time could be spent better in other
ways.

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michaelfairley
He smashed in sales because of all the other ways he's set himself up for
success. Patrick has a multi-pronged approach to his business, where even if
some of his efforts fail he can make a pretty buck.

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dminor
Our email newsletters are incredibly reliable sales generators. If we felt we
could send them every day, we would.

Do yourself a favor and build in link tracking/image load tracking to your
processes as soon as possible. The historical data is valuable when
determining how frequently to email an individual. Generating as few spam
reports as possible is important, as these _will_ cost you time and money.

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jswinghammer
Do you have a staging environment where you can test changes like your SSL
change? Is there a way you can incorporate a QA cycle into your larger
changes? Waiting for lower sales and traffic months is one way but it seems
like you want an environment that mimics your production environment as
closely as possible to work out issues like this.

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patio11
BCC doesn't have a staging environment, owing largely to being cobbled
together with bubblegum from back when HTML written in Notepad was cutting
edge web technology for me. I also use a lot less testing than is considered
ideal in the Rails community. Getting a staging environment is probably worth
doing, but the level of coverage with Selenium tests I would need to catch
things as obscure as "had an image delivered over HTTP on the landing page"
strikes me as not likely to have the highest ROI of all things I could be
doing.

(I've been interviewed about what I do for reliability before. The short
version is checklists and automated warnings when stuff goes wrong. I've set
up some automated things to catch issues spiritually similar to the ones
described in this post already.)

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megamark16
I have always been hesitant to utilize email campaigns, mostly because I (like
Patrick) consider myself an email newsletter hater, and I don't want people to
hate me too. But I think Patrick brings up a good point, that people will be
less likely to hate you for emailing them if they remember who you are and why
you're bothering them. I get a newsletter every month from Dreamhost, so I'm
never surprised or irritated when it shows up, because I expect it, and
they're usually at least a little funny.

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rwalling
Exactly. And the average web user does not have the aversion that we (techies)
do for email. Most people don't use RSS or Twitter so email is their primary
medium for online communication.

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patio11
This was brought home for me vividly last year. I sent an email out for
Halloween to a few hundred people, neglected to send one out in November, and
got an email from a lady in Kansas asking if I could please resend the
November newsletter because her Yahoo must have eaten it. People _like_
getting emails?! People like getting _my_ emails?!? The newsletters are
nowhere near my best writing: here's this month's holiday, you should play
bingo, here's how. But at least some people miss them when they don't get
them.

I swear, there is so much we don't know that we don't know about our
customers.

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stakent
Thank you for pointing it out again. We are _not_ our customers.

I'm now heading towards mailchimp to finish and put online my email collecting
form.

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dpcan
Next year, how about NOT running a promotion at Halloween to see if you
actually get the exact same number of purchases, and make even more money.

My guess is that people who need Bingo card software at Halloween will just
pay whatever your price is because they are buying the time they are saving.

How much time is $5 really?

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chc
I think that's the same conclusion Patrick reaches in his postmortem.

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michael_dorfman
As always, some great take-aways here-- the first of which (download and read
Rob's book) I'm in the process of doing now.

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patio11
I particularly recommend the chapter on virtual assistants. I haven't actually
used one yet but that is on the list of things to try.

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michael_dorfman
Thanks, I look forward to it.

And, come to think of it, you seem to be the perfect use case for virtual
assistants-- I imagine the discrepancy between the return you get from one
focused hour of attention versus the cost of one hour of a VA handling some
routine task must be off the chart.

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patio11
I have at least one consulting client who has projects that are essentially
unlimited billable hours if I wanted them, so an hour saved from doing
drudgery could get converted fairly easily into my hourly rate with him.
Suffice it to say that that compares quite favorably to what VAs make. (You
can get them from single digits in low-wage countries to $20 ~ $40 an hour for
higher end stateside VAs.)

I've had huge, huge successes previously with outsourcing content creation and
web design, and now that consulting has given me something of a cushion, I
anticipate doing more things where I really add value to the business and less
grunt work. I think it is highly likely that next year I will hire a front-end
developer, which is currently showing up very high on the list of "spending
lots of time for less than spectacular results" at the moment. That would be a
pretty big step though.

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ph0rque
_I think it is highly likely that next year I will hire a front-end
developer..._

Why not just use a contractor instead of hiring?

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patio11
I have someone in mind for who I'd use, and there exist reasons why I'd prefer
to hire him as opposed to having him contract, but those are not mine to
share. I might consider contracting with someone else as a plan B though.

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jcsalterego
TBH, I was hoping to hear about Minecraft's release yesterday. Someone get
Notch on HN...

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Splines
I hope so too. Regarding halloween though, I'd wager that people who bought
Minecraft over the weekend probably did it because of word-of-mouth excitement
over the halloween update (in other words, they bought it because they heard
about it from other people who were excited about the halloween update, and
not because they were waiting for the halloween update themselves).

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iuguy
Patrick, congratulations. I'll check out the book soon. I wonder if you'd get
any traffic looking at nation-specific holidays. November 5th (Bonfire Night)
is pretty big here in the UK. I'd be surprised if there's much competition,
but don't know about the search volume.

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TheSOB88
Patrick: so you got $370 from the promotions, but $6024.45 in sum? That seems
off. Where'd all the other money come from? Were people just searching for
"Bingo Cards" and bought through your normal site, or something?

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patio11
[bingo cards] is not a huge fraction of my business (4%ish) -- [bingo card
creator] (with both brand & generic intent), [bingo card maker], [make your
own bingo], [custom bingo cards], yadda yadda yadda, and then I start getting
longtail searches from about a thousand activities which cover most of what an
elementary school teacher could want in a lesson plan. Obviously, most of them
don't contribute a sale in any particular month -- heck, 80% of them have yet
to contribute a sale ever -- but the aggregate economics work out to
staggeringly efficient. This is one of my Big Ideas, see the greatest hits
section on my blog for it done to death several times over.

Every reason people have for buying bingo cards in September is a reason to
buy bingo cards in October, plus the various promotional activities, plus my
AdWord spend goes vertical after around October 15th.

Normally, my AdWords performance is constrained by inventory: I could
literally buy every click available for sale from Google for the keywords I
care about at prices which make sense to me. When I don't bork the heck out of
my conversion codes, I'm also inventory-constrained during Halloween, but
inventory levels are much higher than usual.

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stakent
Didn't you depleted prospects pool reachable by use of your current marketing
channels?

It may be the time to think about other means to reach new sets of prospects.

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patio11
If you have any suggestions, I'm always willing to hear them. But no, there is
no way to square the hypothesis that I've depleted prospects available with my
current marketing channels when the sales chart keeps going up and to the
right.

Organic SEO (and by extension AdWords) is like a river: water goes by today,
either you get it or somebody else does, but there will be water tomorrow. The
total market is far, far larger than my capability to service it. (There are 3
million elementary schoolteachers in the United States. I have 3,500
customers.)

The nice part about email is that it lets you "store water" if you follow the
analogy, since loss to evaporation is just obscene in my business. 80% of
people who signed up last October never logged in again after 48 hours from
their signup. Many never logged in a second time.

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stakent
I'm fully aware that you didn't reach substantial part of your total market
yet.

One suggestion: a means for your customer to tell or email a friend to get a
discount for both of them (by Dropbox example).

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chc
What does it mean to give someone a discount after they've already paid? Are
you paying them money?

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uxp
Some companies do, especially if the referrer has an account for the service.
This might be hard for one-off sales, but discount codes for additional or add
on software could be an option.

