Today, we are pleased to feature a comprehensive look at sales campaigns at the University Press of Mississippi, courtesy of Kristin Kirkpatrick, Electronic and Direct-to-Consumer Sales Manager. Many thanks to Kristin for sharing her expertise.
Creative Discounting
When we launched our new website in 2019, one of the first things we did was a deep dive into the backlist. We then offered select titles for $5, $10, or $15 each. At the time, it was the most successful online sale we’d ever had.
Since then, we’ve run quite a few sitewide sales. For example, in 2020 we had a 50th anniversary sale, where we offered every single title on our website for only $19.70 in honor of the year we were founded. We’ve also run sales that offered percentage off discounts. Our most recent sale was our most highly discounted percentage sale to date, offering 50% off every title on our website.
Keep it Fresh
We do try to vary the sales and discounts so that nothing becomes too routine or stale. For instance, in addition to varying the amount of the discount, we might sometimes offer free US shipping with no minimum purchase. We also held a sale earlier this year for only our pre-order titles to help drive pre-order sales.
We try to run at least three major sitewide sales per year, in addition to offering periodic specials via fixed price discounts or discount codes for various holidays and events. For example, we might offer a discount on all Women’s Studies titles for Women’s History Month.
Promote Vigorously
For all of the sales, we carefully craft an advertising campaign designed to help boost sales. This can include mailing postcards advertising the sale to our house mailing lists and previous purchasers of related titles, distributing postcards at various local events, running social media campaigns, and sending out emails to our email mailing lists. Of course, we advertise the sale on the website itself, with front page banners and a sale landing page that includes any "fine print" information. We try to work in a mention of the sale whenever possible in any routine marketing promotions that we might undertake while the sale is ongoing. We also try to activate authors by letting them know about the sale and inviting them to share the sale info with their family, friends, and social media followers.
Watch the Numbers Climb
The improvement in sales numbers has been staggering. In the first year of our new website, we saw a 300% increase in total online sales numbers. I’m also happy to report that that number has only increased, and that last year we achieved an increase of over 1000% in website sales when compared to our very best numbers when we had our old website.