Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Black Friday 2021 notes

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I identified a profitable segment combining app usage and sales data from the previous year

I found a particularly profitable segment of users by looking cross-referencing app usage and purchase behavior. For the Black Friday 2020 campaign we sold far more high ticket items to people who had used the app for 12 consecutive months (the size of the circles represent # plans purchased). It helped us send our most active users our best deal. (High price but high discount)

Bigger circle = more sales. X-axis is consecutive months of activity.

Spreadsheet command center

To keep track of the 60 campaigns I built out a spreadsheet to track the different offers and email template modules to include in the campaign. Different segments received personalized offers (pictured) based on analysis from our Data Science team that found the optimal offer according revenue per email sent.

Each cohort, the day of the campaign, and the sales modules to be offered to the recipients

Landing page switch led to 40% conversion improvement

Toward the end of the campaign I created an A-B test for the email click’s landing page.

You should notice that the original page is a very simple credit card page. Because we were advertising a Black Friday time-limited sale our logic was to collect payment as quickly as possible.

You will notice that Treatment version has a lot more information. It has a big hero image, some science facts, a product comparison checklist in the middle, and testimonials on the bottom. Our product & engineering team had refined and tested this landing page for peak performance earlier in the year but we had never tested these two variants against each other within the context of a holiday sale.

The A-B test showed 50%+ sales conversion improvement over the 3-day observation period for the campaign. I wished I had tested these two landing pages earlier in the campaign!

I believe that part of the reason the page performed so much better is that we only sent this page to users who never subscribed before. These people barely know what Calm is so I believe that having the extra information on the page properly educated the returning inactive users and clearly did a better job at explaining the value of the Black Friday deal that we were offering them.

Next year I’ll be sure to compare the two variants across broader audience (churned, current paid, etc.)

Original
Treatment

Treatment landing page (green line) outperformed for duration of the sale
52% improvement & statistically significant

Iterable recipe: inject data from a custom event into userProfile for email template

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An email I’ve been working on needs to refer back to information from a previous event. 

... TEMPLATE ...

Hi {{firstName}}, 

Thank you for watching {{title of movie I watched}}!

... RENDERED ...

Hi Jeff, 

Thank you for watching STRANGER THINGS!

The problem here is that the I wanted to reference the title of a video that was watched in the past within a blast email. This is not possible without saving the information somewhere in Iterable. In my case I decided to store the data on the user’s profile.

To save data from an event onto the user profile I use a workflow and the Change Contact Field node.

The event data might look like this:

{
    "eventName": "Video : Watched",
    "eventType": "customEvent",
    "email": "<EMAIL_ADDRESS>",
    "dataFields": {
        "video_title": "Stranger Things",
    }
}
  1. Create workflow
  2. Add node “change contact field”
  3. In the CHANGE CONTACT FIELD node define the data I want to save in JSON format. 
{"video_title":"{{video_title}}"}
## (You should use better field names than this) ##

Now when the event comes through Iterable will replace the template variable with the new value on the user profile and thus making it accessible on any email template.

Here I can put the saved_program_title into the subject line or email template body using the Handlebars.

Podcast generic takeaways

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As a long time wantrepreneur with a brutal commute I listen to a lot of podcasts about business, real estate, investing, and online marketing. Podcasts and books in these realms have common threads that I believe must be basic common traits for being “successful” at what doing what you want to do.

The best way to learn is to start doing it.

Most people never even try. Just start. Do little things. Get over the fear of failure. Trying and failing is better than not trying at all. Take “massive action.”

Basically every business related podcast mentions this fact.  BiggerPockets almost every episode. Grant Cardone for sure. Pat Flynn pretty regularly.

Learn from a mentor or coach.

On the Rich Dad Radio podcast Robert Kiyosaki of Rich Dad, Poor Dad pushes for people to get a coach constantly. Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income frequently touts coaching as well. Yes they have some financial interest in persuading you to use their companies as your coach but you don’t have to use them. I’m starting to think it could be valuable to me. Tim Ferriss uses many coaches to be more efficient (not a shortcut!) when picking up new skills.

Network, network, network.

It doesn’t matter if you’re an introvert. Networking can be achieved online in your pajamas through forums, social media, and Facebook Groups. Face-to-face meetings are better but the point is that building honest relationships with people is fundamental to success. 

Give more than you receive.

Serving others well (especially helping out your network) will return 100x whatever time/energy/expense you put in. Karma. Don’t give with the expectation of something in return. This is basic human kindness but I think it does take some effort.

Condominium Travel Club, Concord, CA

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I unwittingly signed up to win s free trip to Hawaii at a home show in Santa Clara in January this year. About two weeks later I start getting a phone call from the same phone number four days in a row but I miss the call each time because I had some friends in town and I was skiing in Tahoe.

Condominium Travel Club (or Condo Travel Club)

http://www.yelp.com/biz/pulaski-tickets-and-tours-concord-2

Impossible-to-meet Terms & Conditions.

http://www.yourtrip.net/CONCORD_TERMS_AND_CONDITION.html