BOOKTOPIA

CLIENT

Booktopia is Australia’s leading online bookstore with an annual revenue of $165 million in 2020. It’s a repeated member of the AFR/BRW’s Fast 100, having featured on the list a record eight times.

OVERVIEW

Since 2019, SBM has worked with Booktopia on the development and design for the creative of their annual Christmas catalogue and assets.

Booktopia planned on releasing an annual Christmas catalogue, targeting people buying books as gifts at a time when consumers usually spend, whilst increasing brand awareness in a traditional media channel Booktopia otherwise wouldn’t have exposure in.

SBM developed strategy, creative key visuals, talent photography and art direction, and distributed its Christmas catalogues, ensuring that the business found the right customers.

Project Details

Creative

SBM guided the creative direction for each campaign aesthetic, targeting traditional yet slightly ‘booktopian’ Christmases. Each unique, yet developing continuity across the series.

Insight Led

SBM took a unique approach to planning the targeting for the upcoming Booktopia catalogue distribution, leveraging historic Booktopia sales data and combining it with category data that identified positive purchase behaviour for books. Data provided by Booktopia consisted of sales at a postcode level for the last 18 months. SBM took this data and allocated it across our Distribution Territory (DT) by assigning postcode sales proportional to the number of residential dwellings in the network. Third-party data on book buyers allowed us to target a segment of 3.2 million Australians who are 1.3 times more likely to purchase books than the average shopper and spend 1.7 times more in the segment. Book buyers are more likely to be part of other premium segmentations and are more likely to be mature across both families and singles/couples.

Communications

Despite being an online retailer, Booktopia was able to reach a larger number of online book buyers through a catalogue delivered to audience homes using traditional print-based marketing services. These ultimately drove online sales and awareness. The catalogue is an example of print and digital working in partnership as a solid and dependable way forward for Australian retailers to maximise their market exposure. “Reaching the right audience was really important to us. Thanks to SBM, we were able to find more likely book buyers and reach them for a fantastic result throughout the campaign. Website traffic, session length, new customers and order value all rose year-on-year and compared to the six weeks prior to the campaign.”

Results

Following the success of the campaign, Booktopia remains committed to the power of catalogues to contribute to its online book sales.

Additional 25K transactions → A 78% uplift year on year for the campaign
24% uplift in direct website traffic → Week on week, at the time of catalogue drop
20% uplift in new customer sessions → Week on week, at the time of catalogue drop
17% increase in sales value → Compared to the 6 weeks prior to catalogue drop
27% uplift in orders → Year on year for the campaign
11% uplift in average order value → Year on year for the campaign
15% uplift in orders → Compared to the 6 weeks prior to catalogue drop