Special Offer With Stickers & Buttons

Get More Patrons Special Offers
#1

I kicked off my Special Offer yesterday and wanted to share what I’m doing and appreciate any tips or tricks that may help out.

Product
I am a guest speaker at a school and at the end of the class, I asked if anyone wanted some stickers that I had and they loved them! So then I asked my patrons if they wanted stickers or buttons and one suggested both.

  • Stickers for the $3 tier
  • Buttons for the $10 tier.

This is what I went with but I’m seeing it’s a little trickier as Special Offers aren’t really setup to do this.

Design
I came up with 4 unique logos based on my company logo (retro style) and did a survey to have my patrons select one. There were only like 10 votes (out of 200+ patrons) so I mass emailed them through Patreon’s messaging and got more votes. This is the design that got the most:
Spring%202019
I wanted to have the date on it to make it a more special “limited edition” design. I advertise this as a “one-time-only design” type of thing.

Special Offer Wording
It was difficult to come up with limited wording for the special offer so this is what I ended up with:
16%20AM

Production of Products
Did some shopping around and here is what I ended up with.
Stickers
printrunner.com
2 inch circular stickers for $0.11 each.
Free shipping

Buttons


1.5 inch round buttons for $0.48 each.
Free shipping
(Note: After ordering they gave me a link that includes a $10 off coupon to save you even more money.)
If you use that link then that would bring the button cost down to $0.38 each.

Promotion
Using similar colors as the design for the stickers and buttons I came up with a new banner for:


youtube.com/markmoeykens
twitter.com/bigmtnstudio

Then I created an image I can easily post on social media:

SpecialOffer
SpecialOffer.png800×600 166 KB

I plan on changing the “NEW!” to a countdown of days left when I repost.

I posted this everywhere else:
Twitter
YouTube Community
LinkedIn
Wordpress
Facebook Fan Page
Tumblr
Blogspot
Live Journal
VK
Instagram

I also download a spreadsheet from Patreon of all patrons and filtered out the active patrons and sent an email to the rest (about 400) and thanked them for past support and told them about the special offer I’m running.

Next Steps and questions
I’m not sure when I should repost with a countdown again.
Should I make a video and put it on youtube? I have almost 25k subscribers. I’m not sure what to say.

Thanks, everyone!
Mark

5 Likes
#2

Very cool @mjmoeykens. I recently spoke with another creator who was looking to have different types of offers for different tiers. One thought, and what we agreed would work well for him, is to run multiple special offers campaigns, a couple of months apart. In your case, in the future you could offer a sticker the first time, and the button the second time. I do think your patrons will really appreciate getting both :slight_smile:

I look forward to hearing back from you about how things went.

2 Likes
#3

Also, updating your cover photo with Special Offers info is a pro move. Well done!

4 Likes
#4

OK, so here is what I did and the result.

When I say “Posted”, I mean I created social posts for Twitter, YouTube Community, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Those are my biggest social media outlets.

Schedule of Actions
Day 1: Feb 3 - Special Offer Started

Day 3: Feb 5 - Posted Proof of Button

Day 4: Feb 6 - Posted Example of Patreon Benefits

Day 5: Feb 8 - Received the buttons! Posted Picture of them.

Day 6: Feb 9 - Posted Example of Patreon Benefits

Day 9: Feb 12 - Countdown Post

Day 10: Feb 13 - Posted Example of Patreon Benefits

Day 11: Feb 14 - Posted how I came up Special Offer design

Day 13: Feb 16 - Posted “Last Day!” Image

Day 14: Feb 17 - Posted thanks to all new patrons

Results
20 New Pledges
3 Upgraded Pledges

My Own Analysis
I don’t think I would say this was a success. Maybe I did it wrong or perhaps I’m just not that good at selling. Or maybe my market is driven by something else. I’m not entirely sure so any constructive feedback is definitely welcome.

The reason I don’t think this is a success is because I normally get about 7 new pledges a week. And this falls in line with my normal rate. So nothing has really changed except now I have the cost of products, shipping and time.

From what I’ve been noticing, I seem to get a bigger response from the projects I produce. That’s what my audience wants. So maybe my next Special Offer will be to release a pack of projects or something. I’m not sure. I have to think about it and talk to my patrons.

This was definitely a good learning experience.

And who knows, maybe all the publicity from the posts will have a long-lasting effect which I can’t really measure just yet. We’ll see.

4 Likes
#5

Thank you for sharing your whole process and what you thought of the results. It’s really helpful to have such detail—that’s a great way for all of us to help each other decide what marketing pushes are worth the effort.

2 Likes
#6

Another problem I’m running into is getting the address of existing patrons. I’ve turned on the address option on my tiers.

Problem
When an existing patron adds their address, I still can’t see it. Not sure why. I submitted a ticket and never heard back.

If Patreon doesn’t fix this then I will have to personally contact about 150 patrons and get their address to send their gifts. :frowning:

I would definitely hold off on Special Offers until they can fix the address problem. It’s just too much work for too little benefit.

1 Like
#7

Contacting everyone in a big bcc email was pretty easy for me. Those that didn’t do it, like, whatever, they miss out. And if someone ever hits me up for it, I have their sticker just in case. I wouldn’t stress about it but send an email and make a post to those patrons. Not everyone has their Patreon email notifications on. Those who don’t respond to emails probably don’t care too much about the physical rewards—which is cool!

1 Like
#8

I might take that step next. A Patreon employee saw my post here and got support to email me. They informed me that I need to tell my patrons that there was another step my patrons had to take after adding their address.

So I sent another message to my patrons and about 20 more have added their address. 120 have not.

I think I’ll send out a BCC like you suggested. Is there an easy way to do this? I was going to export a CSV and copy all the email address from there.

Thanks for the suggestion!

1 Like
#9

Yea just open the CSV, select the email column, copy, and paste in the BCC portion of your email.

1 Like
#10

I’m currently doing a special offers for my account where I’m also making custom made stickers for anyone who becomes a patron of my channel. Here’s what the stickers look like:

Patreon%20Patron%20Sticker
Patreon Patron Sticker.png1600×1200 1.08 MB

Patreon%20Honorary%20Patron%20Sticker
Patreon Honorary Patron Sticker.png1600×1200 1.33 MB

The thing is is that these are not stickers where you mail them, but stickers that you can post on your blogs or websites (sort of like blog buttons) and you get to show off your support of Rabbitearsblog by posting them on your blog.

Check out my Patreon account for more details and let me know if I’m doing this special offers thing right:

1 Like