Extraordinary Women with Cameras: A Partner eBlast

OVERVIEW: This is a Rocky Nook paid eBlast in partnership with CALIBA (California Independent Booksellers Alliance). All assets and products are Rocky Nook’s, while the mailing list is CALIBA’s.

This campaign was strategically planned before CALIBA’s annual Fall Fest, which was taking place the weekend of 09/09/2022. Rocky Nook is distributed, sold, and represented by Ingram Content Group, who would be at Fall Fest 2022 representing Rocky Nook among its other publisher accounts. I strategically targeted this eBlast that booksellers would see online before attending Fall Fest and seeing the book on display in person to encourage product familiarity and increase talking points for the Ingram sales representatives.

WHO: The intended audience of this campaign were independent book stores and book sellers in the state of California and individuals subscribed to the CALIBA newsletter.

WHAT: The primary component and module of this campaign were the creative graphic that I designed, and its descriptive text and CTA which I wrote. The CTA is urging subscribers and booksellers to read and preview the eBook of Extraordinary Women with Cameras online via Edelweiss+. The campaign strategy is to both engage and drive sales with local field stores.

WHY/HOW: Rocky Nook’s email subscriber list skews male, within the age bracket of 60-75. Because my first campaign to this Rocky Nook’s newsletter yielded low results, and because this product is Rocky Nook’s foray into children’s publishing, I wanted to leverage our strategic relationships with independent book stores to ensure the appropriate consumers and audience would be targeted. I chose to test this campaign with one regional book store alliance, CALIBA, due to the topical regionalism of Rocky Nook as a Californian book publisher, and that both the author and illustrator of this book reside in California.

RESULTS: The eBlast was sent to 788 subscribers and had an Email Open Rate of 42% and CTR of 2%..  The book performed exceptionally well in person at CALIBA’s fall fest, as indicated by one sales representative below:

It [Extraordinary Women with Camera] was my lead-off at the Rep Pick presentation and more than one buyer remarked that the [book] display was “great-looking”.  The fact that both SoCal and NorCal stores were present made the author/illustrator duo (Long Beach/ Sonoma) extra relevant to that crowd.

I gave copies to several stores and Mrs Dalloway’s [of Berkeley, CA] was the lucky winner who got to take the display back to their store