I got completely duped by the special offers. I held a Special Offer for people who signed up during a 2 week period. I had 1100 patrons and was able to add 88 more people during the offer. When I went into the ‘Benefits’ Section to find out the details of all the people who benefited from the Special Offer - there were 1188 people listed!! It includes all new AND existing people. What’s the point of that?
The point of having a Special Offer is to attract NEW patrons, not reward previous patrons (in my opinion). Wasn’t that the idea behind having special offers?
Yeah I had this issue too and there’s no way to remove people from that list without hitting complete either and no parameters to setup inside the special offer on who it should be applied to. I hope they fix this in the future. It’s currently making more work than needed for those with large amounts of patrons. Luckily I have a much smaller pool so it wasn’t hard to work it out on my end but yeah not a great experience.
If you follow what Patreon posted about this, getting existing patrons to join higher tiers is another purpose.
In any case: Special offers are currently linked to tiers, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that everyone in that tier is eligible for the special offer. Keep in mind how many people you could annoy, not doing that. If I’m a loyal patron in that tier I don’t get the reward just because I didn’t sign up in that 2-week window? I might not be too happy about that.
But sure, having an option to limit the special offer tracking to new patrons only is certainly something Patreon could think about.
ooooh, yeah, if they are paying for something, the actual code makes the new patrons and old patrons get the same stuff, so yeah, is either intended or not, still a bad part of the special offer tool.
as always, first try to check if there is everything good, and be sure it will be implemented as you intended.
everything needs some tests, of course, and we need to test anything that is new.
not saying that the actual tool is bad or it should work as it , but still was not the thing we actually expected
Because not everyone wants to fullfil something extra for an entire tier and only want to do something for new patrons. An entire tier isn’t always doable and making a whole new tier that is limited isn’t always a smart idea. Not sure how that’s hard to understand xD everyone is different, has different limitations for such things and options would be great so we can have more control over how it works.
First of all: Let me reiterate that I already agreed to the usefulness of an option to apply special offers only to new patrons or patrons switching tiers. So there is no disagreement about that. Just because I am asking questions, doesn’t mean I wouldn’t agree or stand for an opposite view for example.
Now back to your question:
A blanket statement was made, that special offers would not be interesting for creators with many patrons. No specific reasons were given for that. The only “variable” given so to speak was the number of patrons. I don’t see the logic, so I simply ask for clarification.
One of the main points of a special offer is of course to get more patrons. This is mainly done by creating an artificial scarcity. You can’t join anytime. You need to join NOW within this 2-week window for example or you will never get that special thing.
Any creator can offer such a thing. It might be a different thing if you have 10 patrons vs. 10,000 patrons, but it should be possible for any creator. Especially since a creator with 10,000 patrons is already doing this anyway. They are mass-delivering tier benefits regularly. So nothing is stopping them from temporarily adding another such benefit to a tier, which can be fulfilled to a lot of people at once.
So that is my logic and it does lead me to the conclusion that special offers can be useful for creators with ANY number of patrons. The goal of getting more patrons through special offers is desired and possible with any number of creators. The “variable” of the patron count might affect the choice of the special benefit, but it does NOT exclude creators just because they have a lot of patrons.
Hello @brianchristopher, @Temrin, @henkeiusagi. Thanks for the great feedback. I wanted to echo some of the thoughts that @TypographyGuru shared, which speak very well to our thought process as we were building this tool. Running a Special Offer can really influence your new patron acquisition, existing patrons increasing their pledge amount, and even retention of your existing patrons who were otherwise thinking of canceling (who doesn’t like a little extra surprise?). The reason the benefits tracker creates special offer benefits for every single patron that pledges to a special offer tier is so that all fulfillment scenarios are captured. You can choose whether to actually fulfill the benefit or not, based on what expectations you’ve set with your fans, and the amount of work it is for you to fulfill the benefit.
That being said, this is a beta version, and we’re relying on your collective feedback to improve this feature, so we deeply appreciate you all taking the time to share your experience and frustration with the offer fulfillment process. Please, keep sharing! Cheers!
I can understand all the uses and reasons for sure. Options would be great. Even a “remove” button on the tracker would help a lot so that we can organize things in a clearer way for us on the backend when we do have limitations on a specific offer.
Think about it this way: if I’m your patron joining the day before the special offer, I’d be pretty frustrated and feeling duped if I didn’t get the special offer being at the same level.
Companies have sales all the time. You can’t go to the car dealership and say, I want the sale that came out after I purchased mine. That’s not how they work anywhere.
yeah is still beta, and well, this idea is something really interesting, yet we need to check if our creations are suited up for such type of things.
as a small creator here i have to admit this would either give me more patrons, but at the rate i do my works by now, i cant really rely on this implementation, but i do love the idea, and wish this one gets full at the start of 2019
besides being beta, would be really neat to see somethings like
limiting on who can join in that offer, like what we have with the tiers already. [“in the next week, the first 100 people who join in this offered tier, will have special stuff” sort of things, limiting the time and/or people who can join there]
make explicit that they will receive the same or just a few more / less stuff than “X” tier
allow or dont allow the “extended offer” though the payment of which they are paying for
or
ask if they want to change to one similar tier or cancel the pledging on the month`s end
allow or dont allow people who havent paid when joining and leave before the payment gets near [saying that cuz i am still deciding if i have to change to Pay up front, but i sure need to, tho?]
send reminders that they can join after the pledged offer ends to another similar tier.
these are but a few ideas, we could do them but if the tool allows for doing this , it could be really appreciate the time saved that could do for us in general
well, before i cant say that was on the creator fault, if you join is up to you,
tho, if the creator has it, and you didnt saw it, after still is open, and it cant be transfered , then yes, i would be frustrated as creator and patron too
as creator i personally could say “i could give you some extras, but be sure to join the place where you could socialize with your patrons and send me a msg”
either way, if we have an option that allows us to change people to tiers, then creators could use that in a bad way.
as the patron side . but of course it would be infuriating, bcuz you didnt knew where exactly are the options or info on where the offers are.
Technically that‘s absolutely correct—but manwhorepodcast wasn’t talking about what the patron can or can’t do, but how he/she would feel. Pointing out how sales are being done won’t change how patrons feel about this.
This feels like perhaps it was just poor decision making in terms of what tier you’re placing your special offer reward at. For January I’m going to run a special offer at my $10 tier, which already has quite a few members pledged, but the idea is to make it an even more appealing upgrade for people in my $1, $3, and $5 dollar tiers then hopefully RETAIN those who do increase their patronage when they see how much value is at that $10 tier.
Obviously this becomes tough when you have a lot of patrons in your higher tiers but I feel like rewarding those current patrons in that tier is just a valuable as getting new pledges and upgraded pledges. I feel like if I was an existing Patron in the special offer tier and I didn’t get the reward, I’d be pretty disappointed. Extremely disappointed even.
I’m a simple man, but I think sending a message of “your money isn’t as valued as new money” is the absolute wrong message to send to a strong existing membership and would actually encourage me to NOT be at that tier in case you decide to run another special offer in which I would get screwed out of getting more for that same amount of money. Why should I stay at that tier when I could drop down and wait for the next special offer? Maybe I need more information, but to me the current way the special offer system works makes perfect sense.
All of that said, I am never against additional versatility to a function like this. If people think there is added value in creating flexibility with a “new members only” check box, that’s cool, but I would never, ever, not even once, contemplate hitting that check box for fear of alienating people who have done nothing other than already support me at the tier they found the most value at.
I didn’t use Special offers last year but I did run a special offer (before it was available as a thing via patreon) by offering enamel pins. And I am not swimming in patrons but I did this offer for all new patrons but ALSO ALL my previous patrons up till the end of 2017. All joining up to march in 2018 had to join at $5 or up to get the pin. I factored this in and knew that it would basically leave me out of pocket that month for ordering the pins. But the whole point to me is it was a gift and one I wanted to give AND of course attract new patrons. What’s good is that most of them stayed too.
I’m planning on doing two this year, one next month and hopefully in the form of a limited edition print.
I can see the benefit of having “only new & upgrading patrons” as well as all patrons as an option for Special Offers. For example, I love the idea of doing a Special Offer for all my patrons during a holiday season or special occasion. But if I’m trying to encourage new patrons or current patrons to upgrade, I’d like the ability to reward just them. So of possible, can we have the option of including all or just new/upgrading?
not a great experience.