Have A Laugh – And Get More Customers!

Earlier this week, I received an enquiry on a 3 letter domain from a digital agency. As per normal, I had a look at what work they had done for clients in the past.

One of their recent projects was for a florist that operates five retail outlets in Sydney and Melbourne. On behalf of their client, they put together a viral competition which was backed by an adwords and email marketing campaign. The end result was apparently very successful. Apart from a sizeable raise in revenue, the florist business increased their mailing list by over 35,000. Top effort!

This reminded me of some of my earlier eCommerce experiences back in the early 2000’s. My wife and I ran an online florist and gift business, and one of our achievements was building a mailing list to just over 16,000 (unfortunately they weren’t all customers though!). When I think back on it, we were early pioneers of viral email marketing! No Facebook or Twitter back then. We ran all sorts of different competitions to bolster our mailing list (and sales). We tried everything – and obviously some were more successful than others. 🙂

One That Worked Was A Jokes Competition

One of the really fun campaigns we did was a “Jokes Competition”. From memory, we had three decent prizes, and a couple of minor ones. We encouraged people to submit a joke that contained “flowers or florists”. We updated the page on a daily basis, and we encouraged readers to rank them. If you can excuse the pun, there was a lot of “cross-pollination” from people who asked their friends to vote! Upshot was that our mailing list grew like bamboo!

These were some of the winners. Hope you enjoy and have a laugh. Please note that there is some adult content involved!

Two friends, a blonde and a redhead, are walking down the street one Friday afternoon, and pass a flower shop where the redhead happens to see her boyfriend buying flowers.

She sighs and says, “Oh shit, my boyfriend is buying me flowers again”. The blonde looks at her in amazement and says “What’s the big deal, don’t you like getting flowers?”

The redhead says, “Oh sure, but he always has expectations after giving me flowers, and I don’t feel like spending the whole weekend on my back with my legs in the air”.

The blonde replies, “Don’t you have a vase?”

An extremely shy guy has just finished his last Self Esteem Enhancement session. His counsellor told him to go out and do something really bold. So he goes to the local pub carrying a bouquet of beautiful red roses. He spots a beautiful woman sitting alone. After an hour of gathering up his courage he takes a deep breath and walks over to her. “Er, um, hi, I’m John. I bought these roses hoping they would put a smile on your pretty face.”

She responds by yelling, at the top of her voice, “No, I won’t have sex with you tonight!” Everyone in the bar is now staring at them. Naturally, the guy is utterly humiliated. He lets the flowers fall limp by his side and slinks back to his table wondering where he went wrong. After a few minutes, the woman walks over to him and apologizes. She smiles and says, “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you. You see, I’m a graduate student in psychology and I’m studying how people respond to embarrassing situations – that’s why I said what I said to you. The roses are really beautiful”.

He looks down at the roses and then back to her, and as loud as he can yells, “What do you mean $100!?”

The two elderly men were talking, and one said, “Last night we went out to a new restaurant, and it was fantastic. I really recommend it.”

The other man said, “What’s the name of the restaurant?”

The first man knits his brow in obvious concentration and finally says to his companion, “What is the name of that red flower you give to someone you love?”

His friend replies, “A Carnation?”

“No,” says the man, “You know, the one that is red and has thorns.”

His friend says, “Oh you mean a rose?”

“Yes, yes that’s it,” the first man says.

He then turns toward the kitchen and yells, “Rose, what’s the name of that restaurant we went to last night?

Two old women were sitting on a park bench outside the local town hall where a flower show was in progress. One leaned over the other and said, “We never have any fun these days. For $20.00, I’d take all my clothes off and streak through the flower show naked!”

“All right, you’re on!” said the other old lady.

The first old woman took off all her clothes and completely naked ran through the front door of the town hall. Waiting outside, her friend heard a huge commotion inside the hall, followed by loud applause. The naked old woman burst out through the door followed by a cheering crowd.

“How did you go?” asked her friend.

“Fantastic!” she said, “I just won $100 as first prize for the Best Dried Arrangement!”

A man placed some flowers on the grave of his late father. When he was heading back toward his car, his attention was diverted to a lady kneeling at a grave. The lady seemed to be praying with such profound intensity and grief. She kept repeating, “Why did you have to die? Why did you have to die?”

The man approached her and said, “Excuse me, I don’t mean to interfere with your private mourning, but this demonstration of pain and grief is more than I’ve ever seen before. Can I ask who it is that you mourn for so so deeply? Is it a child? A parent?”

The mourner took a moment to collect herself, then replied, “My husband’s first wife.”

Hope you enjoyed these! If you have any “domain” or “domainer” jokes, I’d love to hear them.

Ned O’Meara – 9th September 2016