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. 

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: 
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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!