- the email went to 5670 people (all the customers from 18 months for whom we had valid email addresses).
- 31% (1802 people) choose and downloaded an album. This is an amazing response rate, almost unheard of in the direct mail business.
- 270 albums were chosen at least once for download (out of 304 albums, so 89% of the catalog was downloaded)
- the top choice accounted for 2.6% of the total, while the top 10 choices accounted for only 17.4% and the top 20 was 28.5%. This indicates that our customer base has a wide variety of tastes and Magnatune's current success is due to the breadth of its catalog rather than one or two standout artists.
- the top 10 "free download" choices were: Lara St John, Ehren Starks, Falling You, Drop Trio, Da Camera, Jami Sieber, Magnatune New Age Compilation, Beth Quist, Magnatune Electronica Compilation. Compare this to the top 10 purchases this month at http://magnatune.com/info/stats/best_selling_this_month - notice the similarities, but also the differences, such as more compilations downloaded for free.
- sales increased by about 50% for the month following the free offer,
as you can see here (week 2004:39)
(note: the dip in sales
the week of 2004:41 was due to a Denial-of-Service attack against us
which took a few days for us to stop, after which sales spiked up
again)
- a spreadsheet showing the detailed choices from the free album download is available here: http://magnatune.com/info/images/freedl.csv
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