Prospecting: Shop from Work Week, Social Forwarding Increase Better 
World Books’ Customer Acquisition Rate

A made-up holiday called "Shop from Work Week" helped Better World Books, a cross-channel retailer that collects and sells books online to fund literacy initiatives worldwide, increase its customer acquistion rate.

"Since we know many people shop online at work, we thought if we created a fun holiday celebrating it during a time of year when we have less shopping activity, we'd get a lot of buzz and even acquire new customers through social forwarding," says John Ujda, vice president of marketing for Mishawaka, Ind.-based Better World Books.

Shop from Work Week, which ran from Feb. 1 through Feb. 8, offered consumers the opportunity to receive 3 percent off one book in Better World Books' sale category; 6 percent off two books; 9 percent off three books; and so on, up to a maximum of 30 percent off per order. To make the promotion fun, Better World Books added a "Boss Button" function to its site that shoppers could click when they heard their boss coming. By clicking on the button, a phony Excel document of "important work" showed up on the shopper's screen.

Shop from Work Week was promoted to current customers via an email campaign and to prospects via Better World Books' affiliate network, public relations campaigns, Facebook posts and tweets from its Twitter account. Prospects also learned about Shop from Work Week via emails forwarded to them by current customers. "The unique nature of the program — which accelerated social forwarding — helped Better World Books' rate of customer acquisition increase by 30 percent during the promotion," says Ujda.