My Bits du Jour Experience
I mentioned some of this in my comments to
last week’s post, but I wanted to provide more details. Maybe my experience will help other software developers make the most of being featured on
Bits du Jour.
First, my results from
The Journal being featured on Bits du Jour:
- Sales volume – ~8X normal
- Revenue volume – ~5X normal
I have only very limited information to compare against, so I’m not sure how typical those results are. So I don’t know if the results are high or low or even average. Regardless, I was pleased. And I figure that’s what matters.
Obviously, the whole point of a sale is to increase sales volume and (hopefully) make up the discount in total revenue.
Never offer a discount to someone who is willing to pay full price.
So I hadn’t run a sale on The Journal since 2003. Over 5 years.
But then I realized: Bits du Jour’s readers aren’t my customers.
OK, sure. Some of them are. But the vast majority had never heard of The Journal.
And that’s when I realized the Big Opportunity Bits du Jour offers: Exposure. Lots of exposure.
So here’s what I did to maximize that exposure to new users, while simultaneously reducing the risk of offering a deep discount to people who weren’t price sensitive in the first place:
- I decided that I would offer (as Bits du Jour recommends) a 50% discount. Due to the vagaries of decimal mathematics and my love of prices ending in .95, it was actually a 51% discount, but let’s not be too fussy. The idea was offer enough of a discount to draw attention and to push the price down to “impulse item” range.
- I decided that the discount would be cash off the base edition of The Journal (normally $39.95) instead of a percentage off. I seem to recall that BdJ might have recommended that, but I went with it for my own reasons. Specifically, I would still be offering the various add-ons for The Journal (like Hamumu’s Prose Challenges). Those are $10 a pop, which puts them into the “impulse item” range already. I saw no need to reduce their price. (On the other hand, I didn’t sell a lot of add-ons that day. Maybe I should’ve done an all-over sale, after all.)
- The first place I promoted the sale was on The Journal’s “Discounts Available” page. I posted word of the sale there 4 days before the sale. My reasoning was that people who are interested in a discount should be told. (This was the only place on The Journal’s actual Web page that I posted any information about the sale.)
- Then I realized that besides the opportunity to promote The Journal to people who might not otherwise be interested in personal journal software, I had another big opportunity: Current users of The Journal might want to buy cheap copies for their friends and family. So 2 days before the sale I posted information to The Journal’s user discussion email list.
- On the same day, I posted information about the sale to this blog and to Guns & Magic, my writing blog. I usually don’t explicitly promote The Journal to either place (I prefer to keep my ads passive), but this was a special occasion. And maybe some of my readers, who I don’t usually think of as my customers, might be interested because of the sale price.
- My wife got in on the act too, and posted information about the sale to a local homeschooler’s emailing list she is part of. Again, not something we would normally do. But this was special.
- Finally, I sent out The Journal’s newsletter the day before the sale, with the necessary links (and encouragement).
Maybe not a “marketing blitzkrieg”, but not slacking off either.
If I had it to do over, there is one other thing I would do: I would have posted the sale information on The Journal’s front page the day of the sale.
One last word: A lot of my ideas were sparked by BdJ’s own tips. So definitely read their suggestions, as well.
-David
