People Love Free Stuff
It’s hard for me to believe that we ever thought it would be difficult to give away 1,000 tshirts. On September 10th when we launched the promotion, all 100 shirts we made available were claimed within two and a half minutes. That’s one tshirt every 1.5 seconds. I was well aware that people love MailChimp, but it was amazing to witness in that way.
For the sake of comparison, I’ll tell you that when we announced Freemium pricing on September 1st, I recorded 425 tweets containing the term “mailchimp”. On average, that’s one tweet mentioning MailChimp every 3.5 minutes, and it was the highest explicable one-day tweet volume we had seen up to that point.
A few days later on September 10th when we began giving away tshirts, I recorded 244 tweets mentioning “mailchimp”. Free tshirts literally created more than half the amount of buzz as our announcement of a new pricing model. Pretty amazing when you think about it.
Fulfillment
To state the obvious, it takes a lot of time and numerous pairs of opposable thumbs to pack 1,000 t-shirts. So when we started seeing tweets from people getting impatient that they hadn’t received their shirts yet, we got the whole office involved. Below, Mark from Marketing is camped out next to our catered burrito lunch. If you ended up with some inexplicable grains of rice or a few shriveled black beans in your package, just think of it as a holiday bonus!
Paul the Unicorn Intern even helped out! Even though he had zero opposable thumbs to contribute to the cause.
The real hero in all of this is our office manager April. She developed what you might call a rather special relationship with the employees at the post office down the block. Apparently they have a rarely enforced rule that you can only mail fifteen parcels at a time. And since April was a “chronic offender,” she had to endure dirty looks and lots of attitude while spending hours at a time standing in line, sending her fifteen parcels, and then standing in line again. But it was all for you, dear customers!
Pro tip from Co-Founders Dan Kurzius and Ben Chestnut: “We stuck our business cards in with a some of the packages to get feedback from people.”
I Wish We Had…
1. There are a few things I think we could improve on or do differently in the future. I would like to have some sort of “remaining t-shirts” counter that actually refreshed its numbers in real time as folks filled in the form. Since the tshirts were repeatedly being claimed within minutes of tweeting that they were available, I think it would have been reassuring for people who were trying to win one but weren’t having any luck.
Kind of an affirmation that yes, we really are giving away tshirts and no, this is not some kind of exercise in frustration or just a hoax. Ultimately, a counter would have added an additional element of credibility for those less familiar with the MailChimp brand.
2. Another thing that we didn’t do the first time around but implemented with our winter promo was using the Google Analytics URL builder to create custom links each time we tweeted that shirts were available.
Since the link that the Google Analytics URL Builder spits out is a long beast of a thing, I ran it through eepurl.com (our in-house URL shortener) to get a short, sweet, custom link that I could then tweet and track.
3. It would also have been a good idea to start collecting email addresses of people interested in hearing about tshirts and other MailChimp swag in the future. Particularly when the form was turned “off” and basically just lying dormant.
We did this for our winter promo, but I wish it was something we had implemented earlier.
MailChimp Is a Social Monkey
Some related posts you might be interested in checking out:
I’m glad you guys are seeing so much success from this campaign, as it is well-deserved. While I realize it may be perceived as a bit self-aggrandizing on your part, I feel you should mention the quality of the shirt design in influencing the success. I was lucky enough to win one of the first-round shirts a few months ago and the quality of the design, not to mention the physical material, was the primary reason I tried to win a shirt in this most recent contest. I applaud you for being considerate enough to reinforce the quality of your primary, virtual product through a physical medium.
That being said, I do understand the frustration many twitter users felt while trying to win the most recent shirt. Your idea of a “remaining t-shirt counter” is a good start, but I wonder how effective it would be while concentrating on rapidly, and correctly, completing a form. While I was also fortunate enough to win a shirt on the most recent contest (many reading this are beginning to hate me now) I was mildly panicked that I would incorrectly complete one of the form fields, get an error message, and consequently lose my chance at a free shirt because too much time had passed. I suggest dramatically reducing the requirements of the form as well as adding a real-time counter.
All in all… great product, great shirt, great company. win-win-win.
i’m just glad my Ecampaign manager company has a sense of humor.
oh, and works really well.
The shirt from last year fit a little tight for a large but MailChimp fits just right! Thanks a bunch!
(get it? bunches of bananas? well, back to my day job)
Incredible concept, you folks have a winning concept that I would expect will be imitated soon if it has not already.
The counter is easy enough, the PHP already knows how many are available, and must know how many are left since it shuts off after a certain number have passed, so it shouldn’t be hard to implement. Also, maybe a timer that can calculate how long it took and how fast they went. It would be cool if when you get the “We’re all out for now” page it shows something like “Wowza! We blew through 50 shirts in 2 minutes! That’s X shits a minute!” Or something like that.
Another thing to consider is to package your shirts ahead of time. You already have the shirts, know that they are all going to go out, and the packaging of them is pretty redundant. Package them ahead of time and slap address stickers on them. That way you can use the extra time you save to slip a little piece of paper in there with some personalization, like addressing the person by name, thanking them, and telling them what number out of how many shirt they have. Write another PHP script that uses a regex replacement on a template that gives them some cool stats, and just print them all out, slip them in, and go.
It would be cool to give them some technical info, sort of flex your muscle at them, show them the kind of stats they can expect from using your service. Nothing too complicated, but something that shows you mean business, like the number shirt they have, how fast their batch sold out, maybe geographical distribution of the winners of that batch, cool little stats like that. Would be easy to cook up in PHP, and you could use PHP to create a PDF of all the pages to be printer (all the winners of that batch), download it, print it up and slide them in. Literally no work, and since you have them packaged already, you are actually SAVING time, while making the experience personal, and interesting.
My two cents..
great news on your campaign success
your shirt designs are “uber” cool and the quality ace and the very viral nature of running a freebie or competition is a great customer focussed element and is what sets MailChimp apart as normally companies could not afford to lay out that manufacturing expense at the start – but I guess you guys have worked out that the ‘lifetime value’ of the customers you have far outweighs the initial costs on front-end and if so I applaud your wisdom, knowledge of business economics and marketing – it would be definitely worthwhile for future Twitter t-shirt giveaway releases to have a ‘stock counter on Twitter’ which auto counts down/adjusts numbers you have available – keep any opt in form simple – 3 fields max, make it dead simple for the internet masses………But I love the whole MailChimp logo, the great value blog articles/posts, the insightful video tutorials for newbies getting to grips with your service
the brand integrity and vision shown by co-founders Dan & Ben – great job guys but I have not upgraded my account yet or got my own MailChimp t-shirt posted to me in the United Kingdom
Can I get a FREE T-Shirt if I promise to make some more blog comments?
Best Wishes
Mike
Best of all: it feels good! Mmmmm….
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Thanks for sharing what you learned in the
“I Wish We Had…” section. Great advice and techniques.
I want a Unicorn intern.
Great advice about to cover the bases when you start a social media promotion.
Brilliant concept and awesome execution. Well done.