New Mail Server Up and Running

We send a lot of email at BitsDuJour - and when I say a lot I'm talking millions of email messages a month. It's a big task, fraught with problems, and we're happy to say we've just completed taking a huge leap forward in switching to a new hosted solution.

We know some of our fans had problems unsubscribing from the old system - and that was to do with the way we had one list on our site, and one list in our email service providers. These lists needed constant syncing, and sometimes requests to unsubscribe would get lost.

Now with the new system we have one list on our site and unsubscribe requests are processed instantly!

Not only that - take a look at this screenshot from our new admin control panel:

It's rare that sites that send the volume of email that we do get a spam complaint rate of 0.00%. The bounce rate, meaning the number of times an email is sent to a bad email address, is almost never 0.00% either.

We're really happy that means we're continuing to send the email that people want to receive!

While we're talking about green lights BitsDuJour also scores a green ranking on the Web of Trust. If you like what we do then please cast your vote and add a comment.

Daily Deals Weekly Email Changes

This week we've made some changes to our weekly daily deals emails that go out. From now on the day of the week that you receive the email may have changed. You'll always receive the email on the same day going forward. We've made the change to reduce delays on sending the emails.

If you want to change the day you get the email you can unsubscribe and resubscribe on the day you want to receive the email.

BitsDuJour Email Problems Resolved

For the past few days, if you've been subscribed to Bits Du Jour you may not have received your usual daily deal email. We were the victim of some pretty heavy spam attacks which ground our mail servers to a halt. We're happy to report that the holes are now plugged permanently and normal service will now resume.

Successfully Promoting a Daily Software Deal

At BitsDuJour.com we promote software written by a wide variety of developers. We run a 24 hour discount on the software and some developers see a huge uptick in their sales for the day, but some don't, so why do some promotions work, and others don't?

The first answer is down to the software, great software sells, and poor software doesn't, but you can help your chances. We've seen that a discount of 40% or more creates a change of perception in the mind of the customer, moving the promotion from "interesting" to "must have". Given that we run the deal for only one day the large discounts really help to push the sales through in a short time.



We get asked time and time again by software vendors running promotions with us about the best way to help promote a one-day software deal. The answer I always give is that the first and best place to promote is with your existing customers.


The fact of the matter is that if you send out an email to your existing customers saying you have a one-day sale with us, and ask your existing customers to tell their friends and families you will get more sales. In some cases much more. Existing customers have already made the decision to purchase your software, and if you ask them then more often than not they will be keen to pass on the good news about a product that they already like.

However, there is often a little hesitation in doing this. The savvy developer thinks "Hey, I could do this all myself, and I wouldn't have to pay a percentage of the sales to BitsDuJour".

Yes, you could set everything up to run the promotion and mail them. However the fact of the matter is that setting this up will take a significant amount of time on your part, and we have all the tools you need to run a successful promotion for you, RSS, notification emails, a professional write-up and layout, so either you pay in your time, or you pay in your percentage of the sales.

Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) don't set up and run their own daily deals. I monitor a lot of discussion boards and I can count on one hand the number of times I've heard of people doing this themselves. So if you resign yourself to the fact that you're not going to, then why not run a promotion through us and promote to your existing mailing list. In many cases ISVs never email their customers at all
so yes we're getting a cut, but a cut of sales that would have never existed.



One last point. We have offered for some time now a way to place all our daily deals on your website, totally seamlessly branded with your pages. If your store generates a sale we give you 50% of the commission. So if you set up a store, and promote your product directing people to your store you'll get back half of the commission that you pay to us, which is typically 30%. So basically that's only 15% that you pay to us *after* the discount and any e-commerce fees are applied.

Put another way, if your product usually costs $30 and you ran a 50% off promotion you'd pay us a little over $2 per sale for all the professional features and tools that you need to run a daily deal promotion. I hope that's finally a strong enough argument for why you should promote to your mailing list as well.

Details on our partner stores are here:
http://www.bitsdujour.com/partnerStoreInfo

Again thanks to all of you who have promoted with us.