[jawns]

Just wanted to say that for a company blog post, this was really great. It's data-rich, it tells a compelling story, the site has a solid visual design, and the multiple calls to action were well placed and didn't detract from the post.

I don't know this industry niche well, but I'm guessing Rafflecopter is a chief competitor. I think if they see this blog post, it'll rattle their knees a little :)

[line-zero]

I agree. At the end of the day, it breaks through the clutter to bring to the table clear goals of disruptive innovation to empower diversity and grow the brand. It takes a holistic approach to leverage organic growth, helping us think outside the box and shift major paradigms. They're clearly taking a proactive approach to push the envelope -- and I'm going to reach out to them today, because there's a sea change in the business, and we need best-in-class professionals like this to streamline our survival strategy. With that kind of sustainability and synergy, it's a win-win for everyone!

[80]

Definitely felt my blood pressure rise as I read this. Good job!

[w4]

I couldn't help but read this in Patrick Bateman's voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3gQJMMlt_E

[jawns]

Mea culpa, I used too many buzzwords. Thanks for the reminder. I don't want to become that guy.

[psycr]

Grey's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice"

[giarc]

I agree. It was one of the few posts that I read in its entirety. Small blocks of texts with plenty of graphics kept me interested. If I see a large wall of text, I usually read 20% and move on.

[mst]

I was a little bit annoyed by them calculating the ROI without including the internal costs of writing copy etc. - any ROI calculation that regards staff salaries as a sunk cost is going to be basically useless.

[notahacker]

Since the promotion was targeted at their existing audience, the bit that annoyed me was they didn't estimate the amount that audience would have bought over that period even if they hadn't had a promotion to respond to. I have no doubt it would have been lower, but it looks from the graph at the bottom like JewelScent's weekly revenues were pretty substantial anyway, and the run up to Valentine's Day should have been a bumper week for them.

The flip side, of course, is they also don't guesstimate future revenue from new customers attracted by likes generated by the promotion, or from increased engagement (or revenue lost because people made purchases they were going to make anyway but at a 10% discount, or because they were annoyed by the promotion and unsubscribed). Even direct marketing often is more data alchemy than data science :)

[stevenkovar]

ViralSweep Co-founder here,

The $13,000 figure is only applied to the new customers they picked up with their promotion, based off of current LTV figures JewelScent has.

Your second question raises a good point, which is hard to substantiate either way given the youth of both JewelScent and ViralSweep as companies (i.e.: we'd need more data and more time to know for sure). The priority for both companies is to deliver a great experience for our customers; the needle will continue moving in the right direction if we can continue to do so. It's easy to get bogged down analyzing data whose impact is dwarfed by executing on the 'Big Picture'.