In case you weren’t paying attention, we ran a number of promotions on our website this Christmas, that we wrote about pretty extensively here.
One of these involved refunding one in every 100 customers who purchase a magazine subscription from magnation.com. We did this for the last few weeks leading up to Christmas and it went absolutely swimmingly… scores of happy customers have responded with pure delight to the news that the cost of their subscriptions has been refunded to their credit cards.
The second—the person who buys the most subscriptions gets them all for free—also went well, albeit somewhat differently to what we’d expected. A bit of an experimental promotion, and one that we were never really sure how it was going to pan out.
We blogged about the difficulties of setting up the terms and conditions associated with this offer and trying to protect ourselves (somewhat!) while still making it a fun and interesting promotion. So as to keep us from the mercy of some rogue magazine fiend with a black Amex, we decided to limit it to 30 subscriptions in total.
When you consider that the average sub we sell (across the whole site, mainly imported air freight titles) is $100, then this still adds up to a pretty hefty sum. Then, in the case that two people BOTH took out the same maximum number of subscriptions, we specified that we’d give the prize to the person who got in first.
Did we see a rise in the average number of subs taken out? It’s hard to say. Christmas is an absolutely mental time in the magazine subscription market and when you’re a small, growing business like we are it’s hard to compare one month of the year with that same month in the year prior with any degree of certainty. What’s sure, however, is that most people bought one or maybe two subscriptions. Many of our customers bought three or four subs and a mere two people bought five.
That’s right—the winner of this promotion bought a mere five subs (albeit expensive ones, totalling around $NZD1500).
The feedback we had from many of our customers while we were running this offer is that they would have considered having a crack and taking out as many subs as they could possibly afford… were it not for the fear that some mag hoarding tyrant might swoop in at the last possible moment and take out hundreds of subs, leaving them mag rich and cash poor. Of course, this was never really a possibility due to the terms and conditions stipulated above… but this, nevertheless, this was their fear and it is rarely our place to dispel the irrational fears of our customers.
And so for us, did this promotion make good business sense?
The truthful answer is that we really have absolutely no idea. The point here is more that we tried something a bit different, had a bit of fun and in many ways that encapsulates just about everything that we’re trying to do here.
As for the winner? He had absolutely no idea the promotion was running at all.
