Marketing and Business Support for Bookstores- A Case Study
Off the Beaten Path is a bookstore located in the mountain town of Steamboat Springs, Colorado that we began working with in August of 2023. They came to us looking for marketing and general business support. As always, we kicked off our working relationship by taking a deep dive into their marketing goals, which were:
Increase online sales by 20%
Improve team systems and accountability
Improve email design and campaign performance
Improve website seo and design
Optimize marketing campaigns to maximize sales and event attendance
Over the course of the last year Off the Beaten Path has increased their online sales by 35%. We helped them to accomplish this by working on each of their other goals. When we first started working with them they did not have an event, social planning or project management tool, as a result most of their campaigns were incomplete or not directed towards a specific goal so they did not see the success that they were looking for. We implemented the use of an event calendar, set up Asana as a team project management tool and established templates that would allow them to fully plan out social media, events and email campaigns.
It took about 3 months to fully implement, train and refine the use of these new programs and templates. Once the team had insight into all of their marketing efforts they were able to create more cohesive campaigns to support their goals in addition to being able to distribute work more evenly amongst their team. The simple act of having insight into who is doing what, where, when and why was a key to achieving their goal of optimized marketing campaigns. Off the Beaten Path now has a robust event calendar that sells out 90% of the time.
Another factor that helped to increase the brand’s online sales was overhauling their email marketing system. We first began by performing a basic cleaning of their email list (if you are not familiar with email hygiene best practices check out our blog on the topic). We then went through their website and added strategic sign up opportunities to drive newsletter subscriptions. This simple edit to their site generated over 1,000 new email subscribers in the last year.
We developed a new subscriber nurturing path, which funneled all new subscribers through a multi-email journey that welcomed them to Off the Beaten Path, provided the subscriber with an opportunity to share their feedback via a survey, and invited them to join the book club and become a member (upsold the customer). After implementing this series, we saw general open rates increase by 8% and link click throughs increase by 5%. The last change we made to Off the Beaten Path’s email strategy was to implement a monthly newsletter that provided their subscribers with insight into all of the events, sales and staff picks that they had available to them for the given month. This has served as an opportunity to continue to nurture their customer base and increase online sales.
Off the Beaten Path has been an exciting client to work with because they have a team of highly knowledgeable, creative and talented people who simply needed the systems and marketing strategy direction to see success. If this sounds like your team, give us a call to see how we can help your business.
