Well, that didn’t work.
How UserMuse’s Advertising Revolution Came Crashing Back to Earth
If you missed our post on “How to Achieve 100% Conversion Rate” you can find it here.
Yeesh…this is embarrassing.
Yesterday, you may have come across our announcement that we had cracked the 100% conversion barrier for an advertising campaign. For one glorious day, careful planning and bold vision were joined together in holy matrimony.
Alas, this union was not to last.
UserMuse dared to be different. We dedicated our entire ad budget to winning over a single person — one who happened to already be a customer. We poured everything into making our one-woman audience convert, and by God, we succeeded. In an industry obsessed with scale, we dared to be precise.
The bad news: we decimated our site traffic in this single-minded pursuit of perfection.
Not running any marketing whatsoever turned out to be a net-negative for our customer acquisition strategy. While our much-publicized 100% conversion rate was indeed groundbreaking, we now see it wasn’t all for the right reasons.
What Happened?
In the interest of better understanding yesterday’s debacle, we want to share our initial conclusions about where things took a wrong turn.
We forgot about volume. We thought conversion rate (the % of people who saw our ad and then signed up for UserMuse) was the one true God, and it gave us a little bit of tunnel vision. In hindsight, we should have paid more attention to how many visitors came to the site.
We overestimated Lacey’s organic reach potential. We probably shouldn’t have assumed that Lacey would tell at least 20,000 people about UserMuse to offset the dip in traffic from resetting our ad budget to $0.00.
We ignored our marketing team’s advice. Not only that, we fired them. I admit, I cringe now as I recall their tearful pleas to keep their jobs. But no use crying over spilled milk, I always say. Experience is a tough teacher, and boy was class in session yesterday.
We under-appreciated the scalability challenges. It turns out that our vaunted audience of one (Ao1) strategy would cost us over $4.7M per day to get the same reach we were used to. Somehow, the math made sense at the time, but we now believe the approach is untenable from a cost perspective. Our miscalculation couldn’t have come at a worse time.
So many what-ifs come to mind now. What if we gave Lacey even more money? What if she used the money instead to take out ads on UserMuse’s behalf, instead of pocketing it? What if we just need to be patient and it’ll all work out? The innovative marketer’s work is never done.
It’s also tempting to ask what would have happened if we had instead split the ad budget among two, or possibly even three people instead of giving it all to one person. That’ll probably be among the first things we try next.
You can still sign up to become an expert for hire on UserMuse of course. Just because we’re working out a few marketing kinks doesn’t mean we’re closing up shop.
Onward and upward!
