Email marketing

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours sending direct email to potential customers with two aims, to gain more knowledge about their ideas and to see if any of them would sign up.

As this was a first stab, rather than going after our key segment I thought I'd try asking members of a secondary market what they though of the site (rather than going for a hard sell).

Did it work? Well of the 56 emails I sent, I've so far had three replies with helpful comments and suggestions but no sign ups. I've also had an extra 50 hits (compared to the day before) on the website (measured using google analytics).

As a quick thank you to those who replied, here are a few links, Ethereal Events, Paul Deacon and Plans and Presents.

Twitter: Open Your Diary

Well like everyone else I've decided to try twitter as a way of promoting my business, see OpenYourDiary as the user ID. I'm a little concerned that I'll spend more time reading than promoting.

We've got our first sign up and they like us

Well, we've had our first business sign up to OpenYourDiary and in a rather excited manner we could not help but write to them and ask what they thought about the sign up process, getting services set up and linking to the booking forms.

They like us and have made a couple of suggestions as to how we can improve the booking interface, the main suggestion being adding the ability to add a question / form field specific to each service.

We've gone beta!!!

We've done it, we've launched the first version of OpenYourDiary.com to the main production webservers. We are both very excited and rather nervous.

We've designed and tested the application ourselves but it is only when software goes into the wild do we find out if what we have built is what our (potential) customers want and need for their business. We'll also be exposed to the black hats so we'll discover if we've made the gates strong enough.