What sets a successful book retailer apart from one that will quickly fail? One of the most important aspects is maintaining loyal customers who keep coming back to purchase again and again. Building that type of loyalty is challenging though. Many large online and brick-and-mortar bookstores offer the latest books at significant discounts and seem to sell every book under the sun. In order to compete, you need to build a strong personal connection with each customer. Here are a few book promotion ideas to generate interest and establish loyalty.
Top Three Book Promotion Ideas
1. Create a personalized online library.
Creating a personal connection helps book retailers (and other retailers) build loyalty and increase repeat business. An automated customer communication and marketing solution tracks and stores each customers' interests, preferences, personal information and history. It keeps track of customers' purchases and which pages they visit on your site. This enables you to provide automatically personalized messages, promotions and book suggestions that customers are likely to be interested in.
Since you know everything each customer has purchased and looked at, you can automatically create a personalized library for each customer. Your automated solution will send out emails and promotions with recommended books to add to each customer's library. This type of personalized marketing increases email opens and book sales, boosting your ongoing revenue.
2. Offer exclusive social media offers and contests.
Social media marketing and promotions is another way to stay connected with your customers. It's also effective for bringing in new potential customers. You don't have to waste time manually managing your social media posting. Automate the promotion and marketing process to save hours of time every day. Create a week's worth of posts and schedule them to go out automatically over time. Automated social media management tools also track interaction so you can see which posts perform the best with your fans. See how many likes, retweets, shares and comments your messages got so you can optimize future posts.
When you're creating social media messages, try to build interaction. Contests, discounts and exciting promotions are very likely to be shared and interacted with on social media. "Share your favorite book with us on Facebook and receive a 20% discount on your next book order." "Post or tweet a photo of your favorite reading nook for a chance to win a signed copy of the author's latest bestseller!" When people are getting an exclusive deal or contest entry that is not available to all customers, they will be more likely to follow you on social media and purchase more often.
3. Host exciting events.
Events are a great opportunity to build customer loyalty. They give you a chance to connect with customers in a very different way and keep them interested. If you have a bricks-and-mortar bookstore, hold events in-store: book signings with featured authors, charity events, live readings and more. If you just have an online store, host webinars (such as a cooking class by one of your featured cookbook authors), real time question and answer chats with authors and so on.
Promote these events with automated emails, text messages and social media messages. Also, advertise upcoming events on your website on a "calendar" page and on your homepage. Messages for the event are easily automated to save you time.
Try these book promotion ideas for free with marketing automation!
Marketing your books doesn't have to be challenging. Sign up for a 14 day free trial of our all-in-one marketing automation solution to make your marketing more efficient and less time-consuming. If you want to see how to create a successful automated marketing campaign for one of your book promotion ideas, check out a demo by our friendly team.
