Our Father’s Day book sale continues to drive excellent sales thanks to a great range of books and simple yet effective free marketing collateral promoting this range. From a small stock commitment we are achieving sales of between $300 and $500 a day. The sales in recent days show the popularity of books as a gift for dad.
In addition to an excellent range, the A5 four page flyers drive good traffic.
This is an example of chasing better margin business for the newsagency. We make more than double the margin on these books than we make on magazines and newspapers yet we rely the traffic of newspapers and magazines to drive book sales.
Father’s Day is clearly a great time to run this size of book sale. I know of newsagents who are going much harder than us with outposts – and achieving excellent results.
A book sale at Father’s Day is now part of our annual marketing plan. It’s a guaranteed win and we have book retailers in our centre so it is not as if we have no competition.
The keys as we see them are: the right supplier, a great range, keen prices and a plan to get in, be bold and a clear plan on when to get out.
We stepped up our supply of books for fathers day this year so far they have been going pretty good but we have found that our gifts sales have suffered from it ,and we make more from gifts ,does anyone else find that gifts do not go as well when books are on offer /
We are finding the opposite Shaun, all our gift sales including books have increased this year. In our case the “victim” is lotto sales with sales of gift pacsk decreasing , this does not concern me as we make bugger all from lotto gift packs to start with.
We actively push our gifts over lotto and customers are responding by spending the $10 or $20 they were going to buy scratchies with and buying the books or other gift instead.
In saying that our overall lotto sales are the same as last year but they make up less % of total sales then last year.
We are finding both doing well. Our book margin is within one or two points of gift margin.