This store requires javascript to be enabled for some features to work correctly.

Pickles turns 10! 10% off all orders, 15% off $50+, 25% off $100+. Freebie with every purchase. Ends Mon 4/1. See details

Freebies at Renegade led to my best sales yet

Freebies at Renegade led to my best sales yet

I wanted to follow my own advice from my last blog post about sales funnels and try to get even more top of funnel customers at Renegade last weekend. 

Last year, I started to run these 2 promos at craft fairs:
1. Free card with any purchase with an IG follow
2. Subscribe to our email newsletter to win a $30 gift card raffle

At Renegade last weekend, I was even more generous with a free card:
1. Free card with an IG follow
2. Subscribe to our email newsletter to win a $30 gift card raffle

(This was also opportunistic; I ordered 10,000 cards in the wrong paper stock last year (.........yes. but I'm ~300 away from selling out! Woohoo!!!) , and it doesn't matter toooooo much direct to customer but I can't send them to our stores because it's so unprofessional to send mis-matched paper with my other correct paper stock, which means I'm getting rid of them at an insanely slow pace. So I used those as freebies at Renegade.)

I meant what I wrote in my last blog post; my new mindset for craft fairs is really more about leads than sales. Because of this new goal, I opted to save lots of $$$ and share a booth (10'x5' space) instead of occupying my own 10'x10' space, which I've have at the past Renegades I've attended. Because of the smaller space, I knew I'd be able to show less product, fit less people in my booth at a time, and therefore expected my sales to be much lower.

But Renegade was crazy.

And not only was it crazy, guess what— It was my best one, sales wise :)

 

Here are sales at Renegade SF in 2015, 2018, 2019 summers. Last year's was slower for most of the vendors I talked to, not sure why. You could also say that I have a lot more product and more of a brand presence and that's what led to more sales this year, but I definitely expected sales to be way lower with half my usual booth size!

This is all to say that while my freebie card w/ IG follow offer did gain me hundreds of new followers (yay, broke 5k!) and hopefully they will turn into customers, it also attracted more people to my (half-size) booth in general and I got more sales. 

What I thought it would be vs what it was: 
 .  

The idea that people are more likely to buy from you when you give them free stuff is actually psychologically proven, called "reciprocity" (here's a Forbes article).

Next week, I'm going to share a graph of all my craft fair sales!

Leave a comment