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Mr Snowflakes 2011

Spread the festive cheer!

By Elliott Draper, posted on 20/12/2011

Last year, myself and Kat Neville of Capra launched a festive mini app called Mr Snowflakes, that allowed you to send Christmas ecards to friends and family. Kat has a great write-up of how we’ve improved things this year, which is well worth a read. The biggest change I think in terms of getting people to use the site though, is lowering the barrier to entry and not requiring signup of any kind. In fact, we chose not to allow it - you can create a card, and send it, the recipient receives it, and the creator also gets an email so they can retain the link. There is no sign in, no “my created cards list”, it’s massively simplified, and I think it makes a lot more sense this way - the response has been brilliant!

The core functionality is the same, with a lovely new spruce up in terms of design. The drag and drop functionality, for those interested, is made very easy using the jQuery UI Draggable module. We simply save ornament positions when you stop dragging, and we define an area for the bookshelf so we can trap when you place an ornament back on the shelf.

For the technical types, Mr Snowflakes is a Rails 3 application backed by MongoDB, hosted on the always brilliant Heroku, using SendGrid for emails, and we’ve switched to using the astonishingly gorgeous Gauges for analytics - the “AirTraffic Live” view to see people coming on to the site from all over the world is incredible.

It’s also given me a great chance to play with marketing and promotional tools. I’ve been using AdWords for a while, so there weren’t too many surprises there (except for the CPC dropping through the floor the last few days, and giving me 10x as many clicks as I was seeing before for the same budget). However Facebook Ads was where the real interest for me was, mainly because their advert creation process gives you access to some brilliant data as you filter out certain segments and demographics. It’s very interesting to be able to target certain ads at only certain people (for example, people that have liked Christmas on Facebook), or indeed to run multiple ads slightly tweaked for their target audience. It’s a very powerful tool - albeit one I’m still clearly getting used to, as the click-through-rate for my ads combined on Facebook for Mr Snowflakes is a meagre 0.051%, whereas on Google AdWords it’s a much better 2.8%.

How about more stats? Well last year we launched on December 7th, and had 57 uniques (136 page views) on that day. After that the traffic trailed off dramatically, with only half the days between then and Christmas achieving unique visitors in double numbers - pretty disappointing. In total, there were 242 uniques in December 2010, with 411 page views. This year we re-launched on December 9th, and had 95 uniques (284 page views) on the first day. Since then we’ve had really solid numbers, predictably increasing as we get closer to Christmas. As of right now, we already have 696 unique visitors this month, with a total of 1387 page views. While still modest numbers, with limited ad budgets and marketing exposure, I’m very pleased with the gains we have made this year in terms of visitors.

I hope that everyone has enjoyed sending cards using MrSnowflakes so far this year, and it’s not too late to keep sending them of course, even when it’s too late to post a card, you can always send a beautifully customised ecard!

And don’t forget to like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter, so that we can let you know when we relaunch for MrSnowflakes 2012!

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