On a Postcard

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We work through a series of direct mail campaigns for our listings sites from around November through to February and thought that we were really into the swing of them by this point. Boy were we wrong!

On Tuesday evening we mailed out around 1300 recipients (no, it’s not junk mail: these are people very likely to be interested in using our services) with a variation on the message we’ve been using this season. What we didn’t realise at the time was that although the changes were, to us, relatively minor they were far from minor to the recipients and therefore the level of interest was considerably larger than we were expecting or indeed prepared for.

First off, the bandwidth used went straight through the roof with as much traffic on the site in a few hours as we normally get over several days. It was so high that a number of people got time-outs when they tried to take up the offer. Next morning we found outselves swamped in applications and we remained that way for the next two days.

All this from an e-mail that should have had a relatively low response as it was sent out on Tuesday when Friday is normally our best day for these campaigns.

We’re about to be really brave and change another run of it to a different group but I think we’ll play safe and stage the mailing this time!

Popularity: 15% [?]

There’s been something of a move to the utf8 character code in various items of software but they don’t all implement it 100% correctly which results in some quite confusing errors in other software that uses it.

For instance, the version of MySQL that we were using for this blog on the previous hosting service was 4.0, this one is 4.1 and that’s been the source of endless hassle in moving from one to the other as Wordpress tends to use a lot of special characters and they aren’t handled correctly in MySQL 4.1.

Popularity: 14% [?]