How A Half-Broken Halloween Promotion Smashed Revenue Records

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...

Our email newsletters are incredibly reliable sales generators. If we felt we could send them every day, we would.<p>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 <i>will</i> 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.

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.

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.<p>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.<p>How much time is $5 really?

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.

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

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?