A few weeks ago I received a handful of emails from a small, cool boutique hotel chain advertising their big promo to give away free hotel rooms for New Year’s Eve. They’d “opened the floodgates” on October 30 and let people sign in to win one of 500 rooms in various cities across the globe.

As soon as I got the email, I knew that the hotel, with all its good intentions, was setting itself up for a potential marketing disaster. This kind of campaign where you ask potentially hundreds of thousands of people to sign into a website all at once is a dangerous proposition.

You’ve really got to be prepared before starting such a campaign. Its is only a great idea, if the whole experience is smooth. You generate excitement and goodwill around your brand and put the company in front of a lot of eyes.

Prepare for the web traffic

The hotel chain presumably thought it was ready, but I am guessing that no one (particularly a hotel that probably never sees this kind of traffic spike) really contemplates what the strain on the servers is going to be like.

At 14:00 CET on the appointed day, the competition “opened” - and crashed the entire website immediately. It was not possible to sign in. Social media channels filled up with anti-hotel comments. The hotel busily tried to do damage control but it was in vain. People were irritated that they could not even get a last-known working page or use the regular site to book a room... for over an hour.

The price of a lousy user experience

The bottom line is that website performance is priceless. In this case, people were disappointed, disillusioned and felt lied to, which caused both financial and reputational damage. But this technical collapse was both foreseeable and avoidable. The hotel forgot that this campaign wasn’t just about giving away some free rooms! Taking shortcuts and not fully vetting technical solutions behind a website - and keeping it moving - is not only part of doing business but lies at the heart of satisfying customers. You may never realise this until you end up with a catastrophe on your hands, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

Take heed!

Any business that normally gets a stable and moderate amount of traffic is going to experience unprecedented traffic levels when they launch a unique, extremely popular marketing campaign. Having the right technology deployed - including a caching solution - ensures that visitors to the site don’t end up angry or frustrated. Before launching this kind of crazy-traffic campaign, make sure you’ve thought through the technical implications. If you don’t, you may end doing your brand more harm than good.

 

By Hildur Smaradottir, Director International Marketing at Varnish Software. 

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