Christine will be receiving the fun and colorful anklet (shown below).

Every month, we draw a name from the club members born during that month. June’s drawing will be followed with July’s next week. (Thanks every one for your patience.)

It’s not too late to join for our July drawing where we will be giving away a beaded watch from our upcoming Time Will Tell line which will be part of our A.F.F. Jewelry Collection at Etsy.

Join the Rose of Sharon Jewelry Birthday Club. It’s free! Besides our monthly handmade jewelry giveaway, you’ll receive regular newsletters, special sale notices and member only discounts.

• Love our anklets? Check out the Adornable Anklets store.

• Interested in other affordable handmade jewelry? Check out the A.F.F. Jewelry collection. We’re adding new items every day!

The Birthday Club was created to encourage interested Rose of Sharon Jewelry blog readers and handmade jewelry lovers to keep in touch. Our web site is clear about what the club is – a marketing newsletter.

As a thank you to members, we give you a free (shipping included) pair of handmade earrings or,  if you prefer, a generous jewelry discount coupon during your birthday month. The only requirement is you must return to the site, “buy” the earrings (the coupon covers all costs) and provide us with a mailing address. This is pretty standard practice for any type of email marketing. We do not sell, share or otherwise use the info provided except for our basic marketing emails and you can unsubscribe immediately at any time.

We are a small partnership of women working together to market our handmade jewelry so supplying over 2,000 pairs of earrings will be beyond our budget. However, I decided that we are honorable so we should do our best to fulfill our promise. But after this weekend, I’m having some serious second thoughts.

Traffic – Yes.  Marketing Value – No?

While I do love having the traffic and many people sent thanks and wonderful comments about our jewelry, there is a dark side to this goodwill marketing effort.You see I have several Google alerts which forward me whenever Rose of Sharon Jewelry is mentioned. That’s  when I started reading less than positive messages about our club and free jewelry offering. I also started noticing that a mathematically impossible number of April birthdays were supplied by subscribers.

The word of mouth in freebie forums has been a bit ugly. I have read posts where people set up fathers and brothers and anyone else so they could get free jewelry every month. Many people thought this offer was a scam and would only receive the earring after a purchase or would require expensive postage – all untrue if they had actually read our Birthday Club enrollment message.

I’m a freebie participant too but I think I will rethink this as frankly, I’m really conflicted and upset. I am proceeding with setting up the subscriber base. There is some significant manual data entry required as our Constant Contact form was not fully implemented.

The purpose of this post is to share the important lesson of “be careful what you wish for.” Hopefully, you’ll be able to avoid the pitfalls of offering freebies as a marketing incentive.

Any thoughts? I’d love to hear some feedback.

The current Rose of Sharon Jewelry Birthday Club Newsletter can be read here.

If you would like to join the fun, you'll find a pretty pink sign up box in the right column.

Am looking forward to having you join in!

If you are a reader of my business series and have questions, leave them in the comments here (see link on left) and I'll respond to you next week when I return from vacation.