How A Half-Broken Halloween Promotion Smashed Revenue Records | Hacker News Reader

How A Half-Broken Halloween Promotion Smashed Revenue Records

kalzumeus.com

170 pointsbjplink38 comments

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...

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.

I was mostly referring to the use of email as a medium to reach signed-up but otherwise unengaged users.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

'Your Mom' is one of the best customers on the web. I always keep that in mind.

This is super valuable advice. One of the biggest issues I've seen in the technology world is forgetting that we are (often) not the target customer or the largest moneymakers.

There's a kind of minimum barrier of entry to interact on the places we like to hang out (knowledge, interests, etc), so a lot of people tend to get used to everyone being at that level of intelligence/tech savvyness. Then you launch a product that any "tech" person would easily be able to navigate and use, but someone who still mixes up which one is the mouse sometimes might still have some problems with it.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Awesome - hope you enjoy it. Email me if you have any questions.

Thanks! I'm reading it now, actually....

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

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).

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.

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?

[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.

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.

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.

Direct (paper) mail?

I might consider that for AR, but at $30 LTV the economics of mail are just punishing.

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).

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

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.

Facebook? I actually see some real, relevant, and useful ads there. And there are a ton of teachers there, avoiding working on their lesson plans.

Tried it. Paid $200 to get three sales of $30 software. Nearly tipped a virtual cow in frustration.

Just curious but was that on a CPC or CPM basis? I've always theorized CPM based advertising on Facebook is useless since the page gets reloaded so often.

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