This is the first month in review I’ve done, I thought I’d cover what was awesome, what was tough and then list key focus areas for the next month – which we’re already a week into!
So anyway, March… Wow, what a month! It was crazy. WASP Bags went more than a little nuts. With promotions in every capital city through Scoopon, WASP Bags had literally hundreds of new customers. Awesome, but oh so busy.
How busy? Well, below is a little graph showing the number of units that moved during March:
Crazy huh!?!
The Awesome Stuff
Reflecting, there were actually quite a few wins for March. So whilst it was busy, there was plenty of good stuff:
- Hundreds of new customers and thousands of people finding out about WASP Bags! This can only be a good thing for awareness and word of mouth. Whilst the bulk of these customers came through Scoopon, it was still the second best month ever in terms of website sales. So a really positive month momentum wise.
- Late February I commissioned a company to work on WASP Bags SEO. As I write this post, we’ve gone from something like the thirteenth page on Google for the best converting and highest traffic key word to the top of the second page! Awesome. With more SEO work being done now, should see continued improvement – hopefully cracking the first page is not far off…
- I received samples from my manufacturer of a new product I’m looking to introduce. The samples are unreal and everyone who’s seen them has said how cool they are. I’m really excited by this as I think this could be a great addition to the WASP Bag range.
- Had advertising appear in Tracks magazine, plus an ad and a great write up in this month’s Smorgasboarder magazine (check out pages 16, 23 and 25 – the magazine is free and online too).
- An initiative I worked on with the surf tour company World Surfaris a little while ago (check out the post I wrote about it here) has led to another opportunity, which could become a nice additional revenue stream. Too early to say much about it yet but there’s definitely an opportunity here…
- I got a lot of admin stuff set up – a proper business bank account, registered the business name and a few other things. Boring. But important.
The Tough Stuff
When you have such a large growth in customers, it certainly presents some challenges:
- For almost the whole of the month I was working in the business not on it. Customer service took up heaps of my time and Greg did an amazing job fulfilling all the orders. There’s no way I would’ve been able to do everything myself this month! Ensuring customers redeemed their vouchers correctly, answering questions and so forth took up lots and lots of time. It got a little overwhelming at times – especially as this was the first time there’d been so much volume through.
- Planning the ‘what next’. I really feel now that I’m a little unclear as to what the next initiative is. I haven’t had the time to think about it in any depth. I don’t like this feeling so looking forward to getting a bit more time to think things out.
- Doing all the other littler things that add up to a greater whole. Trying out Facebook’s new page features. Monitoring and engaging in forums, Twitter etc. Setting up thank you emails for the new customers. The infrequency of posts on this blog. All these smaller things haven’t been done as they’ve been deprioritised.
The Month Ahead
For April, there are a few things I want to focus on:
- Go back over all the various marketing initiatives done over the past 6 months and work out an approach for the next 6. Six months time will see us in October with summer on its way and what will hopefully be the busy WASP Bag season almost here.
- Decide on what initiative I want to trial next.
- Establish a routine of doing the little things. I know I need to give myself a clearer structure on what needs to be done, otherwise it will continue to not. Get done that is.
What Do You Think?
So that’s the first month in review post. What do you think? Tell me in the comments section below and also let me know what else you’d like to see covered in these reviews. I’ll do so in April’s review, only a few weeks away…
