Our Black Friday deal TANKED!
And I don't mean it didn't got as well as we hoped... It fell well and truly flat on it's face!
So we decided to write an article about it :)
The article explains what we did, what we expected, why we thought it would work and then analyses the reasons why we think it didn't work.
Check it out and let me know what you think: https://www.project.co/black-friday-failure/
Did you do a Black Friday deal this year? Did it work? Was it successful for you? Can you spot any other reasons that ours failed?
I'd love to know your experiences and learn from you too! Comment below...
a tl;dr here would be awesome
Yeah sure, best thing to do is scroll to "The Post-Mortem" section of the article. It's just a few bullet points where we analyse what went wrong.
Could you post the few bullet points here?
Sure, I didn't realise a tl;dr was so in demand but I'll certainly add one:
After 4 days of the promotion our result was…zero! That’s right. Unfortunately, zero accounts signed up for the offer. We had a small handful of people express some interest but we didn’t manage to get any to cross the line.
Clearly this was extremely disappointing – but, as the saying goes, you either win or you learn, and this was certainly a learning experience!
Of course, there’s no way to be 100% sure about the exact reasons why the promotion didn’t land. But, now the dust has settled, I think the reasons are likely to be:
The RemoteFriday offering also tanked! There were a variety of reasons for this, as you can see from the email in the article.
Well, first things first, it’s clearly a disappointing result. But, as I’ve written many times, the road to success is always littered with disappointments. I’m a big believer that you need to try things to see whether they work, and be honest enough to admit if they don’t.
That is a bummer! We ran a Black Friday deal for hrpartner.io this year - the first "sales" deal we've ever run, and we were blown away by the response. We signed up more paying customers for the one week of the promotion than we had in the previous 5 months!
Our deal was 50% off our standard pricing FOR LIFE! It was eye watering for me to agree to that but my co-founder, who is in charge of marketing, stipulated that it had to be a pretty damn good deal to get people over the line. She was totally right.
We even had customers who previously were on the fence and thinking that we were too expensive, or waiting for their next year's budget to clear immediately jump on board and pay for a subscription.
I never thought a 'sale' would work for a B2B 'enterprisey' software like ours, but I am now a convert.
I was glad to read about the success you had with AppSumo, because that is our next big marketing push. We've been in discussions with them and are setting up for our AppSumo LTD early in 2020. I learned a lot from your blog post on it, so THANK YOU for posting that. Fingers crossed that our will at least be a fraction of the type of response you got.
That's awesome @Devan - Great result! Lovely to hear this! When you say for life. Was that a lifetime deal? At 50% off your annual or monthly price? Did you feel that was worth it from a revenue perspective or did it cannibalise your pipeline? We did AppSumo but I only ever plan to do that the once and I did it at the start of the projects life so we didn't have existing customers paying while we were offering others such a hugely discounted deal.
In hindsight and following a bunch of feedback on here and elsewhere after releasing this article it would have made much more sense for us to have a simple discount offer.
Great to hear about your success. I checked out your site as well, looks great!
Thank you Matt! Yes, it was a lifetime deal. Time will tell how that plays out on our bottom line, but so far it has been good. I was worried about the extra support load with the new customers (at a thinner margin), but so far the new users seem to be a LOT less support intensive, so that is a good thing.
I don't know that we will do many more sales outside of an annual Black Friday one. I don't want to set the expectation that we are a 'discount HR' system as our pricing is already lower than most of our competitors.
We expect the AppSumo deal to be a one off thing for us as well. We just want to see what the response will be like, and also the types of customers it might get us. Once again I am worried that a lifetime deep discount may bite us later with added support load, so fingers crossed that we get good customers who don't need to contact us as much.
That's great news. I hope the AppSumo deal goes well. If I can offer any advice as a past AppSumo deal please let me know. happy to help :)
How many of those free users are actually active? I'm gonna make a guess and say that it sounds like you targeted this offer to users who had signed up, presumably to check you out, but weren't tempted by the AppSumo promotion.
The AppSumo deal was 10 users for a lifetime at $50. Whereas this Black Friday deal was 3 users for just a year at $65. The offering is so much worse – if they weren't tempted by the first, why would be they be tempted by the second offer so soon after? I really would avoid any more long term discounts for a while, it does run the risk of devaluing your product.
Yes you're essentially right here. We saw this as a way to give another chance to people who didn't decide first time right but would like to use the software. We've also made a lot of updates since the AppSumo deal so I know there are many people who have asked for certain features that we're planned at the time. I also agree about devaluing our product, we don't plan to do many discounts but we saw this as an experiment worth trying. We live and learn :)
Do your customers normally sign up for more than one user? As from what I can see your Black Friday deal would only be a deal to new customers looking to sign up for more than one user. If it was just a single user then no saving were to be made.
I wonder if the message of deal was not clear as I guess the norm for Black Friday is just to offer a straight up discount of 50%/25% Off etc.
Good luck with your project
Yeah this is a great point. The fact that we didn't offer a simple discount most likely made the deal more confusing or less obvious for people. And, as you say, it needed to be a multi-user sign up on an annual plan so we definitely reduced the size of our achievable market.
Many thanks @iainfreestone :)