The Global Alarm (2019)

By April of 2018 we were selling about 2-3 overflow alarms per day on amazon. To get better sales we needed to promote our water level alarms for 2-3 years to showcase our quality to good number of buyers. Being small scale manufacturer from a small city with no funding or loan we have to support the campaign cost from our limited income sources. We have our water pump controls doing well in local markets and we also had some good industrial clients placing orders with us for our high end water pumping automations. But still we would have felt difficult to sustain campaign for 2-3 years.

The bottom line for amazon promotion campaign stood at 1 sale for every 100 rupee spent. From day 1 of April 2018, we started our campaign at amazon in auto targeting mode at rs100 per day. To get more data on search terms and keywords, enhanced it to rs200 in second week. Order frequency had increased. But I was not sure of many things like, our actual sales were much better then auto-campaign reported data. Question was, what else is giving us more sales. Nevertheless I was happy, at that stage we needed sales more than the knowledge. Simply put, we were hungry.

Raised campaign spend to 300 per day in may got 95 orders, in June got 138. Put together we sold 293 devices 1st quarter of 2018. where as bottom line stood at 240 for quarter. This boosted our morale, now we wanted to check manual campaign also. So I went through amazon seller central sessions to learn more about promotional campaigns. But needed to focus more on production. So hired an amazon SPN (Service Provider Network) associate thinking that their expertise will help. After observing their work and methods for three months, I realized their expertise is actually is in "acting smart". Terminated SPN contract and spent winter of 2018 tinkering with manual campaign parameters.

By April 2019 we had both auto and manual campaign running at rs300 per campaign per day. At 18000 rupees per month bottom line stood at 180 sales. But our sales were 2-3 times higher then benchmark. We were cruising along and our goodwill has started to rise as sales numbers grew faster. Our overflow alarm rating stood at 4.3 with hundreds of ratings and we were expecting to close 2019-20 with good figures. But destiny had other designs. Distant December 2019 news soon turned into dread. Starting from China, then Italy, Europe and then almost everywhere. It was "yumraaj" - Crona. Further - Alarming Effects of Crona.