Clarifying Our Discount Membership Promotion

Clarifying Our Discount Membership Promotion

on Apr 20th 2011 with 11 comments

Hi everyone,

I’m sure you would have noticed the $0.99 membership promotion we ran yesterday.

Tuts+ has never tried Promotion of a membership in this way before. Ever. We are not internet marketers so we are still learning and still make mistakes. We didn’t know what would be received poorly and what would be taken positively.

In proofing the post I wasn’t as thorough as I should have been. I wasn’t clear that it would default to a regular $19 membership after the first month. Naturally, this caused anger. To make sure nobody is adversely impacted from this I will be individually emailing those who were fortunate enough to get the offer. If they don’t get the email then we’ll happily refund them.

There was some confusion around the discount code. There was only the one code for all of the sites, but it had many uses. It ran out very quickly, in 3.5 hours. Again, this was the first time we’ve ever done something like this, and there was no way to tell how popular it would or wouldn’t be. There’s a high likelihood that we’ll do this or something similar to it again, but we can be confident in saying the same mistakes wont be made again.

I’m sorry for any confusion or disappointment that was caused by this, we’ll know how to better handle it next time.

 
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Hi, I'm Aaron, the Tuts+ Associate manager, I work with Skellie and all of our amazing editors so we can bring you great tutorials regularly, and I need to stop playing World of Warcraft.  

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  • http://ps.fluxtuts.com Abhimanyu

    I am sure that those who got the offer would understand.. No problem Aaron, it happens. :)

  • k

    No worries! I understood, it wasn’t that difficult.

    I’m just annoyed cause it ran out so fast :p. Do the deal again soon ok!

    -k

  • http://esaitchkay.net Steven

    Wow! I can’t believe I didn’t know about the 99cent deal D:

  • Miroslav

    Well, I’m tried to get the deal but lost too much time in banking and billing action, so I decided to pay 9$ and start downloading of tutorials. Sooner or later I would be payed for premium membership. Those limited deals works great, and you definitely should start this again. But most of all I can’t wait to see html/css coding the complete website tutorials, such of them design-an-innovative-portfolio-site-using-alternative-uiux and design-develop-a-complete-website

  • http://www.graphiics.com Graphiics

    Oh! discount wow !

  • http://www.ghuj.com Jeba

    I had grabbed the offer.. I got the update via Facebook.. btw it was pretty obvious that it was for 1 month.. and those greedy ppl who thought they would get it for longer than that probably should be ashamed.. so much effort these guys put in making these tutorials..

    • http://desaindigital.com Jeprie

      I’m also pretty sure that it was written clearly, $0.99 membership in the first month. And of course it means regular price next month.

      • Seb

        No, it wasn’t.

      • neil bloodtitan

        The fact they ran this post shows it wasn’t clear.

        One price the first month doesn’t mean the price changes for the second month unless that is clearly stated. You might say it was clearly implied, but that’s not the same thing. Clearly implied is not the same as clearly written.

        That said, anyone getting upset over so trivial a matter has more pressing matters in their life they should deal with. It’s a good value for $9.00 a month. People pay so much more for cable, which offers very little information and education and matters little to their careers, and gives them many channels they don’t even watch (simply because people are too stupid to write their politicians and demand a la carte service and cable reform).

        PSDtuts.com is great. Even the grumpy editor is.

  • http://www.fallingsquirreldesign.com Jordan Wiedbusch

    I was one of the lucky ones it pick it up and it was a tab bit confusing. I figured though that there was not way it would always stay at .99, you guys do to much work just for a dollar. Going to enjoy my month and see how it goes.

  • Sean Lee-Amies

    To be honest if we’re honest with each other, everyone expects an organisation to get something wrong sooner or later, however, we also expect not to know about it and to be lied to.

    It’s very reassuring that you’re being up-front about the situation and responding quickly to the situation.

    Good job :)

    P.S. I will be purchasing premium membership soon I’m just waiting until I have enough time to dedicate to learning the tutorials ;)