We have a lot of friends on myspace. At least I consider 7955 a lot. We’ve reached this number without ever adding anyone ourselves. Meaning that all those are people requested to be our friend. It’s a lot of friend requests to deal with in my opinion, but a necessary evil of being on myspace I suppose. (Another reason I love Facebook. No friend requests!) All these friend requests seemed like an untapped gold mine of potential sales. Couldn’t we be directly marketing to these people? They want to be our friends, so they should want to buy jars from us right? With that in mind I set up 150 one time use coupon codes and started messaging users after I accepted their friend requests.

FAIL…as of this posting not one person has used their new friend promotion code. I would have thought maybe a few people would have taken advantage of it, but 0% return??? Something isn’t right. Now I wonder what’s my next step? Should I offer a steeper discount?  What’s the number that people can’t refuse? How low do we want to go?

I’m not sure if I want to abandon the experiment or keep upping the ante. While it’s not incredibly time consuming, it is repetitive and quite tedious. Not to mention never ending, since we get a dozen requests a day. So begins the struggle of balancing what number of sales are worth this project’s time? How deep of discount will we need to offer in order to get people to respond and is it worth offering the discount to get the sale?

What do you think? How good of deal would you need to act?