How Valentines day brought in ~$5k in 24 hours
Valentines day brought in almost $5k in 24 hours WITHOUT running a sale or doing any ppv. Here’s the marketing strategy that made that happen 💕:
The holiday context
Holidays are a wonderful opportunity to do something fun and different. They’re great inspiration for fun themes, or sales, or services that aren’t available year round. It’s a great time to get your creative marketing juices going!
The only problem is: that’s exactly what everybody else is doing lol. Everybody does special things on the holidays. That makes the holidays ultra competitive. Sometimes I forget a holiday is even coming up until I start seeing subscription sales and notifications on OF, Twitter, Reddit — they’re everywhere.
Valentines day in particular felt like a big challenge — how do you stand out when everybody & their mother is running a sale?
I began brainstorming marketing opportunities with these two goals:
Make a lot of money (duh)
Make fans feel good emotionally
NO sale on the subscription price
NO ppvs
I know, I know - sounds borderline impossible to have a meaningful holiday without doing a subscription sale or ppv but… I was feeling ballsy. I hate doing sales - and this year I’m trying to do less of the things I hate :) (We can all thank my therapist for that)
The result? The paid page brought in nearly $5k in 24 hours. No sale on the subscription price. No ppv.
The marketing plan
I was brainstorming with my bff with this core principle: how do you make people feel really good about being your fan?
Thinking back to the relationships I have with people who chat often, a few things came to the top of my mind:
Fans feel good when they feel special.
PPVs don’t make people feel special - they know that video wasn’t really made “just for them”
Fans like when they feel like they’re “different from other fans”.
A lot of fans can tell when a mass message isn’t written just for them
What if…we sent an incredibly casually written mass message, offering something for Valentines day “for them only” and never even advertised it on the wall. What if it was something that “only they” could buy? What if we made it feel really exclusive and not something that’s publicly available? What if we even told them that we’re not advertising it elsewhere?
Maybe that would make them feel special 👀 (spoiler: it did).
Now…it’s Valentine’s day, right? Today is a day where singleness is emphasized. Loneliness feels compounded. Not necessarily the sexual side, but the romantic side. The intimacy. What if we could connect with fans on an emotional level for Valentines day?
We ended up selling valentines day video chat lunches/dinners for $500 per chat, with the option of mailing them a custom Vday gift package with a starting price of $1k.
I know, those prices are high. I know, it sounds crazy. But it only took 4 people to make nearly $5k. That’s it. When you price something crazy high like that, it’s true that very few people will buy. BUT, you only need a few people to make a big difference in revenue.
Takeaways
Holidays are indeed a great opportunity to do something unique and interesting. However, keep in mind that everybody else is doing the same thing too!!
A lot of people choose to run sales, but, honestly I hate doing them. I rarely find the decrease in subscription price is worth the increase in conversion rate. Plus, mentally I feel like sale-customers are more demanding.There’s something about the lower price points that seem to impact the quality of fans that come through.
Experiment with doing something that feels more intimate and exclusive, you just might be surprised what people are willing to pay when they feel special 🙂 and honestly, they deserve to feel special. We are, after all, selling a fantasy.
Good luck out there <3
Kelly