This 1 TikTok Video Increased Purchases 900%

Nathaniel Treichler runs Sleazy Greetings, an ecommerce store that sells funny and rude greeting cards 🤪

He recently had this video go viral on TikTok (921k views in 72 hours)…

• Shoutout to Sophie and Ben! Hope your day is filled with love, laughter, and sleaze. 😉

Nathaniel writes about the impact that video had on his business…

our Amazon sessions, clicks, and purchases for the “Congrats” card featured in the video increased by roughly 900%… One hundred units sold out within a few hours.

The card featured in the video sells for $4.99 + shipping.

So they sold about $500 worth in the first few hours 🤑

But Nathaniel says “sales could have easily been much higher”…

At the time the video popped, we did not have enough followers to link our website to the TikTok profile page. I believe you’re able to link your website once you reach 1,000 followers, which we didn’t earn until later that day. So for the first 6 hours, nearly 300,000 potential customers were forced to leave the app to search “Sleazy Greetings” in their browsers to find our store. *Ouch

Also, we didn’t link the correct product from our TikTok store to the video nor was it even listed to the TikTok Shop. The only place to buy was on Etsy, Amazon, and our official website. *Double Ouch

That viral video came after some trial and error on TikTok 👇

Our first videos did very poorly. We filmed anything and just published it without a real plan or overall message. In addition, our content was not edited well and took far too long to get to the entertainment.

Here’s an early video that only got ~200 views…

• Not all of our cards are naughty! Here’s a cute card to give to your special someone ☺️😍

Then Nathaniel researched successful TikTok pages and noticed that reaction videos often did very well.

So…

I hired a team and decided to film reaction based content with one singular theme that’s easy to convey within 3 seconds – “react to this card.” Our products are naturally funny, offensive, divisive, and sassy – this can make for great content.

So our team started walking up to strangers on the street and asking them to “pick a card” out of a random box and give their unfiltered reaction. The box approach added a touch of mystery – I can thank ChatGPT for that idea.

😕 The first video along those lines didn’t do great…

• Breaking news: Mother’s Day cards declared the official currency of kids everywhere

That’s likely because the intro wasn’t catchy enough.

The first 3 seconds of the viral video had a much better hook…

​​“Pull a random card out from this and I wanna get your immediate reaction.”

You can read more lessons learned from Nathaniel here 👈

My main takeaway from his experience is the value of persistence and experimentation.

The first TikTok video for Sleazy Greetings was posted in November 2021.

They posted 100+ more videos, trying a bunch of different formats, before posting that first reaction video in May of this year.

They then posted another ~50 reaction videos before their big viral hit 📈

Essentially, they followed Mr Beast’s famous recipe for success…

All you need to do… is make 100 videos and improve something every time

100 videos, 100 blog posts, 100 whatevers.

Persist and experiment, and you’ll eventually hit on a winner 🚀