Bedsheets and Cheese, Statistics, and 360-Degree Marketing

I love cheese. I even say as much on my Twitter profile. And while I’ve become increasingly bad at doing it enough I love sleeping. So when I noticed that the statistical correlation between death-by-bedsheets and cheese had been calculated I grabbed a big ol’ hunk of Gruyere, slipped between the sheets, and … thought about 360-degree marketing.

The coincidence of a web site devoted to nothing but stupidity in how statistics can be made to say anything getting major play on the Internet yesterday and me writing about bedsheets and cheese today is just that; a coincidence. So too is it a coincidence that yesterday was the day that Hubspot, one of the players in that article about how statistics can be manipulated, became a public company.

To Kim Gjerstad I say don’t worry; cheese and bedsheets didn’t make me think more than peripherally about you or MailPoet.

But MailPoet’s Kim Gjerstad isn’t done explaining the importance of statistics in 360-degree marketing. Here are three more mostly-unrelated statistics from Gjerstad’s 360-degree marketing presentation at WordCamp Europe 2013:

• After a year, and 200,000 MailPoet downloads, the MailPoet team thinks 20,000 people were using MailPoet
• 12 months in, MailPoet was cashflow-positive … and that’s fast
• a converstion rate at or above 5–6% is great, and you’ll never see the 20% rate you’re probably thinking you should have … for anything

Kim’s first statistic in that list is a sort of re-hashing of things he’s already told us; gross statistical numbers are useless, and the information provided by WordPress’ Software Repository leaves quite a bit to be desired. But Gjerstad’s second and third points are remarkable, as Kim reveals the kind of numbers covering MailPoet’s success that very few software or any other executives would share, and that numbers measuring success don’t always make sense in any conventional way.

That last point is important. As you build your business process — as you think, build, and grow — you need to be flexible enough to process things that might not make sense. It can be a tall order; contact me here if you’d like to chat about it. Let’s talk especially if the phrase “conversion metric” makes your skin crawl.

Statistics, bedsheets and cheese. They’re almost as disconnected as agile development and reality. And yet, somehow, their intersection is the place where business process gets built.