It’s NCAA tournament time, women and men. Sixty-eight teams are whittled down to just one, one heartbreaking moment at a time.
You have a veritable plethora of new products. What stops you from creating a tournament bracket of sixteen new items, and then for fifteen days you pit those items against each other via email marketing … rank order them based on predicted volume or just assign random seeds, whatever you want. Schedule the matchups, one per day, on March 24 / 25 / 26 / 27 / 28 / 29 / 30 / 31.
- Day 1 = #16 vs. #1.
- Day 2 = #9 vs. #8.
- Day 3 = #13 vs. #4.
- Day 4 = #12 vs. #5.
- Day 5 = #15 vs. #2.
- Day 6 = #10 vs. #7.
- Day 7 = #14 vs. #3.
- Day 8 = #11 vs. #6.
There’s your first round. The items that generate the most sales for that day advance to the next round. Schedule these matchups on April 1 / 2 / 3 / 4
- Day 9 = Day 1 Winner vs. Day 2 Winner.
- Day 10 = Day 3 Winner vs. Day 4 Winner.
- Day 11 = Day 5 Winner vs. Day 6 Winner.
- Day 12 = Day 7 Winner vs. Day 8 Winner.
After Day 12 you have whittled the field down to the Final Four! It’s time for the semi-finals. Schedule these matchups on April 5 and April 6.
- Day 13 = Day 9 Winner vs. Day 10 Winner.
- Day 14 = Day 11 Winner vs. Day 12 Winner.
Now we’re down to the Championship! Schedule it on April 7, the day of the actual Men’s National Championship Game.
- Day 15 = Day 13 Winner vs. Day 14 Winner.
The whole thing will last you two weeks. During those two weeks, you feature sixteen new items, with the best sellers being featured three or four times. Maybe the #16 seed will upset the #1 seed, who knows? Your customers will decide.
What is the downside of doing this?
P.P.S.: Somebody will tell you not to do this … “people will just buy items and return them to game the outcome.” Yeah, there probably are five customers who will do this. Now you have a data attribute to append to your “customer data lake” to make sure you never spend money marketing to those customers again.
