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.
Last year, I started to run these 2 promos at craft fairs: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!