Charts & Graphs & Bears, Oh my!

It’s been a month (to the day) since my birthday, and you may remember that I put out a code that was active for that day only to allow anyone to get one of my patterns for free. Today, I’m posting the results of that craziness.

The code only applied to patterns which are fully “mine” — i.e. patterns owned by Cooperative Press as part of Extreme Double-Knitting didn’t apply (except for Falling Blocks, which was released before the book). This meant, however, that all of my most in-demand patterns were free during that one day. Each customer could pick one and only one — although I don’t doubt there were people who used devious means to get more than one.

I posted only to a few places — my own Ravelry group, my Facebook page, and my mailing list. I did, however, ask people to feel free to share/forward the message elsewhere on their own. To this day I still have no idea where the posts were shared, although I suspect someone posted to /r/knitting.

I expected, given typical post/email engagement rules, that maybe a few hundred people would use the code before it expired. Boy, was I wrong. At the end of the day, the total according to Ravelry stood at 2,469 individual uses of the code. I was shocked — but also excited. There was a good chance that among all those people, there were a good number who were new to me and my work. So I emailed them all (or as many as I could) and invited them to follow me. I got a lot of happy replies and a bunch more followers/subscribers on all my social media sites.

For those so inclined, here’s the “winterishere” promotion by the numbers:

The graph above shows how many of each pattern were acquired. In the lead, unsurprisingly, was the Parallax eBook — showing that people are practical about their free patterns, since this one is actually 5 patterns in one. More surprisingly, the next most popular were Spring Willow and Severn Thicket, both mid- to low-priced patterns. The least popular was the kClub edition of 52 Pickup. I blame the fact that I have not knit a full scarf out of that pattern so it’s hard for people to visualize it.

The total “value” of all the patterns taken, if they’d been paid for, would have been $20,130.20. That’s a big birthday gift! I take solace in the fact that the vast majority of the people who took a free pattern would probably not have bought the pattern at full price. It is, of course, my hope that they will buy full-price patterns from me in the future :>

Of the 2469 people who used the code, 21 of them bought another pattern along with the freebie.

Since I sent out my email blast to the 2212 people with legit email addresses, I have gotten 132 new subscribers to my mailing list, 79 new members in my Ravelry group, 122 new likes on my Facebook page, and some new followers on Google+ and Twitter (it’s harder to see dates there).

So when I sent out my announcements about Victorian Raffia, a pattern I was finishing around the time of my birthday, I was excited to be able to tell an even larger number of people about it. Imagine my surprise, after posting around to my usual places plus a couple of FB groups: the original post is approaching 26,000 views, over 400 likes, 149 shares and almost 60 comments. But those are metrics for another day.

Well, thanks for staying through this whole post! As a reward, here’s a sneak peek on a new pattern that should be coming out in the near future. Sorry for the questionable quality of the CO and edges; the final piece will be perfect (within reasonable limits).