How Booktopia gains loyal brand devotees and why they invest so heavily in automation

Founded in 2004, Booktopia is a homegrown Australian online bookstore recognised for its exponential growth having been listed in the AFR/BRW's Fast 100 eight times running!  Having invested heavily into automation technology and social engagement strategy - their stocks skyrocketed recently following the announcement of their new earnings plan and investment into the latest technology. Leading brand and communications for the group is Adam Freedman who was appointed in 2021 to elevate Booktopia’s brand awareness and engagement with consumers in the Australian market.

Having succeeded in his mission to make Booktopia’s brands, divisions and products distinct, known, and adored by consumers - we sat down with Adam to get an insight into the brand’s social strategy, how the cultivate loyal brand devotees, their forward-thinking integrated marketing campaigns, how they optimise partner relationships and which technologies excite him the most.

Partnerships have always been a cornerstone of the Booktopia business model and in 2021 you created a dedicated strategy partnership team to foster new partnerships. Can you tell us how you measure the success of partners, and what they had in terms of co-branding and affiliate marketing programs to co-marketing and co-produce innovation? 

The barometer of a successful partnership is creating a strong value exchange for customers, offering tangible benefits to each brand’s audience base that will provide a foundation for a long-term relationship. A cornerstone of our partner strategy is that partners help to drive traffic to our website, delivering incremental revenue opportunities and supporting our strategic customer acquisition objectives.

The narrative between partners should be easy to understand with little to no explanation necessary -providing more freedom to bring the ‘story’ of the partnership to life across different channels, helping to build brand saliency.

We are working on a range of initiatives with partners - there is no one size fits all approach. The one thing they do have in common is ensuring we put the customer (on both sides) first, creating content that will be most relevant and engaging to them, with the aim to increase their purchase intent and advocacy now and in the future.

What channels are you using to engage with different audiences, and how do they differ depending on region, and demographic group?

As we are a pureplay Australian retailer, we are heavily focused on activating digital channels to reach as many Australian book-buying customers as possible. Our strategy is to show up where and when customers want or need to buy a book, for business or for pleasure.

Social media is a key channel for us to engage different audiences, maximising connections with authors, to leverage their influence over their audience base, to drive traffic to the Booktopia website. Our affiliate channel also enables us to reach a diverse audience base, providing unique offers and content, including partnering on ‘book club-style’ activations which have become increasingly popular, to reach and engage new audiences.

In an interview two years ago, your CMO said: “It’s about being stickier with customers and ensuring they keep coming back to us, creating a unique proposition for when you’re buying books around user experience, deep integration into everything we’re doing, our tech stack and CRM programs. Our entire UX journey through to post-purchase talks about earning and using these points.” Can you expand on the relevance of this now and what technologies and ways you’re engaging with customers and improving UX?

We’re continuing to identify ways to add value to a customer’s experience at all points of their journey. Our CRM team uses Emarsys to effectively unlock customer insights around their shopping behaviour and ensure we are serving them with content that keeps them engaged and gives them reasons to stay loyal with us.

LongtailUX has also enabled automated keyword gap analysis, increasing our organic website traffic. We have created over 60,000 automated landing pages to rank unranked search queries, providing650,000 annual incremental sessions.

We’re also increasing the volume of exclusive content across the website including author video content and interviews on Booktopia’s podcast, to give customers more reasons to stick around on the site and support their purchasing decision-making.

What technology excites you the most? Can you provide examples of how you have successfully integrated artificial intelligence or machine learning into your digital marketing efforts, and the impact these technologies have had on performance?

Booktopia has invested heavily in automation technology in its Customer Fulfilment Centres. This included deploying Australian-first robot technology, supported by Booktopia’s custom-built. Warehouse Management System, improving fulfilment, packaging quality and dispatch rates. The significant uplift in efficiency from these investments has reduced costs and enabled the capability to ship 50,000 daily units, supporting Booktopia’s reputation as a market-leading retailer.

The Marketing team as well as our team in the Customer Fulfilment Centre use proprietary data and dashboards visualised with Tableau and Grow to optimise hourly website traffic and ensure constant visibility into order and unit economics for peak profitability.

Booktopia has also created a proprietary pricing and inventory algorithm providing real-time pricing and merchandising updates to get the right products in front of customers at the right time and price.

Can you discuss any case studies or examples whereby you’ve created a particularly innovative or unique digital marketing campaign with a partner and the results that were achieved as a result?

Booktopia has developed an extensive network of relationships with authors and publishers which has enabled the creation of more unique experiences for customers than competitor retailers enabling authors to reach their fans and communities. One particular campaign we have launched and now run annually off the back of these partnerships, ,is Booktopia’s new flagship award - Favourite Australian Book Award. We run the biggest-of-its-kind public vote for a book award in Australia, helping to ignite a nationwide discussion on great books from great authors - spearheaded by the authors themselves canvassing for votes - and driving high volumes of traffic back to the website. Last year, more than 170,000 votes were cast, we had a 78%increase in users year-on-year over the same period and our revenue exceeded our forecast by 350%.

Booktopia has an impressive track record of rapid growth since forming in 2004 - how have you kept up with changing customer behaviour, stiff competition and relevance in Australia?

Booktopia’s core value has always been around customer obsession and as such, it has remained attuned to insights around their behaviours and needs and this narrative has long been at the heart of the business. The company has been committed to ensuring an utmost commitment on delivering unique value propositions to retain and acquire new customers - fast shipping, offering 6 million+ titles in its book catalogue and at competitive prices.

By consistently delivering an attractive, convenient solution, Booktopia has been able to establish its position as Australia’s biggest bookstore with a goal to be the go-to bookstore for Australian consumers, seeking to support and champion a locally-owned, independent business against other larger conglomerates.

Do you have plans to expand into other markets globally? If so, which ones and why? How will your strategy differ for each?

At this stage, Booktopia’s focus is on continuing to scale in ANZ and reaching and engaging as many local customers as possible. As a proud Australian-owned business, the strategy is to provide the best possible experience for local customers, offering customers a great, quick and convenient solution, whatever their budget with an unrivalled range of titles to choose from.

What do you think is behind the success of unicorns? What can you tell us about the culture and company ethos, the kind of partners you choose?

Unicorns have successfully found ways to solve everyday consumer problems, backed by having a great level of ambition to make an impact. They have identified critical insights around customers’ pain points in their lives, leveraged trends and provided tangible technical solutions to address and solve them. They have scaled at the right pace and continually learnt from their customers which has enabled them to pivot and evolve at the right time.

Booktopia has been on a similar path, finding ways to create a great book-buying experience and make more books more accessible to more people. The company is driven by an unrelenting commitment to delivering a world-class customer experience and embedding quality and service in to its output. It has a long-standing passion for serving all Australian communities, including reaching under-privileged and under-represented audiences, ensuring books are accessible for all Australians to enjoy, no matter where they are and what their background is.

Another key pillar of Booktopia’s culture is its value of innovation. Integrating new technologies across the business has led to the growth of Booktopia’s warehouse operations and significant improvements in efficiently delivering high volumes of books to customers.

Our selection of partners feeds into this, ensuring they provide tangible value to our customer experience either directly or indirectly, for example, through operational or marketing activities. We seek to work with smart businesses on a shared quest for innovation with a genuine commitment to helping our customers.

What do you find most valuable about being a part of eTail Australia and what will you be sharing at the event?

It’s great to celebrate the Australian retail industry and hear from great industry leaders about the challenges and opportunities they are navigating and how we can all work together to continue to make positive change for tomorrow’s customer. I’ll be sharing insights on how having a strategic content marketing plan can be an effective tool to winning customers' 'share of mind', driving greater visibility and engagement to elevate purchase consideration.

Join Adam and other panelists on the "Keynote Panel: Fighting with multinational giants – How can Australian homegrown business compete with big enterprises and stand out as a unicorn in a saturated market?" on the 16th Feb @ 9:40am.