How to Use the Holidays to Sell More Books

Tags

Amazon, book marketing, holidays, marketing, Written Word Media

Written word media recently published a great post with ideas on how to take advantage of holiday marketing trends to sell your books. With Christmas fast approaching, I figured this is a great time to have a look at the main points:

1. Between mid-November and early January, everyone loves to shop

From early November through early January, everyone is in a buying mood, so this is the perfect time to sell more books. Here are a few noteworthy dates within this range that are significant online shopping days, with ideas on what tactics and messages will resonate with customers:

Info by Written World Media

Image: dailyfinance.com

2. Focus on Amazon

Focus on Amazon – over half the shoppers will use it for their holiday shopping. Emphasize links to your books on Amazon. Your prospective customers will already be shopping on Amazon, so make it easy for them to purchase your books by being where they are (on Amazon!)

3. Focus on Mobile

The majority of online traffic is from mobile devices and this trend will be highly evident this Holiday. Last year, Amazon announced that “nearly 60 percent of Amazon.com customers shopped using a mobile device this holiday. Mobile shopping accelerated as customers got later into the shopping season.” Target announced that “Mobile traffic made up 60 percent of Target.com traffic November through December.”

So, make sure all the emails you send are mobile friendly. Do not send traffic to your website if it is not mobile-friendly. Send them to Amazon instead. Even if your site is mobile-friendly, sending the majority of your traffic to Amazon over the course of the Holiday season may be preferable due to the stats above.

4. Facebook turns expensive

Photo: hubspot

There are peak times in the year when advertisers are flocking to Facebook Ads in droves—even more than normal. During these peak times, there will be more competition for ads, and you’ll pay more as a result. Big brands spend a lot, raising the cost of Facebook Ads for everyone. This not only causes a surge in costs, but also creates a problem of deliverability. This past November and December, the Facebook Ads community was flooded with complaints from small businesses unable to even spend their budget.

As a result, your Facebook ads will become more expensive as you compete with big brands for the same audience. You can mitigate this by:

• Monitoring your campaigns daily and reducing budgets when you see ROI decreasing.
• Targeting your ads to your own fans and lookalike audiences.
• Move your Facebook budget over to other book promotion services. See this year’s Call to Arms results to see which book advertiser offers best value for money.
• Use inexpensive holiday gift guides like this one from N.N. Light.

5. Use your Newsletter

With Facebook ads prohibitively expensive, you can use your newsletter for some free exposure. Email marketing is more effective during the Holidays because shoppers are looking for deals in their inbox. As shoppers are in a buying mood, they expect emails as a primary source of research and inspiration on what to buy. So, don’t be afraid to send emails over Holiday. Send up to two emails a month in November and December. Focus their content on your products (your books!). Readers are looking for ideas on what to buy and now is the time to put your books front and center.

If you haven’t got a newsletter list, you can always use book promotion services that leverage email marketing to capitalize on customer’s receptiveness to emails. Again, See this year’s Call to Arms results to see which book advertiser offers best value for money.

For more information, sources and stats, see the full post on the Written World Media.