EDELWEISS360 LAUNCHES COLLABORATIVE CONSUMER MARKETING PROGRAM FOR INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORES AND PUBLISHERS – HARPERCOLLINS AND SOURCEBOOKS AMONG EARLY PARTICIPANTS
As independent booksellers across the country shift energies to connecting with customers unable to come into their stores, Above the Treeline, the company behind the book industry’s Edelweiss+ platform, has teamed with HarperCollins Publishers, Sourcebooks, Columbia University Press, and others to pilot a new Collaborative Consumer Marketing program. The new program provides cash incentives for booksellers to include participating publishers’ titles in their email campaigns via the Edelweiss360 platform.
Edelweiss360 is a new tool that allows bookstores to efficiently promote titles and events to targeted customers via email and then track conversions to sales. The bookstore email marketing functionality completed a successful beta test last fall, and Edelweiss360 is now available for free to all ABA booksellers during the pandemic. The system integrates data from bookstore point-of-sale systems, bibliographic information from Edelweiss+, and Edelweiss360’s email marketing platform to provide booksellers with one system to create, send, and track the results of email campaigns.
Edelweiss360 Collaborative Consumer Marketing is a new program currently in beta testing that compensates indies for including a publisher’s titles in their campaigns on a CPM (cost per thousand) basis. The rate takes into consideration the quality of emails sent, relative prominence of a given title in a campaign, and degree to which the campaign is targeted to a subset of customers. (Watch a short video here.)
“Indie booksellers have spent years building databases of their customers - in many cases linked to actual transactions. These customers are exactly the highly engaged, avid readers that most publishers are interested in reaching,” says John Rubin, CEO & Founder of Above the Treeline. “The new program we’re piloting helps publishers get their titles in front of loyal indie bookstore consumers and support the indies by sponsoring placement in their store-branded email campaigns.”
“Edelweiss360 is a highly innovative platform that is a win-win for both booksellers, who will be able to reach their valued customers more effectively, and for publishers, who are always looking for ways to spend their marketing dollars with optimized results,” said Josh Marwell, President of Sales, HarperCollins Publishers.
Edelweiss360 does the heavy lifting for both the publisher and the bookseller. Publishers simply elect to sponsor their publishing house’s titles in indie campaigns. If they choose, publishers can also offer additional incentives for certain titles by applying a multiplier of the standard sponsorship rate. Sponsored and incentivized titles are prominently identified when booksellers are creating campaigns. Publishers receive detailed reporting on campaigns that included the publishers title(s) and measures of campaign success – both in terms of click rates and sales.
