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Brief
Mills & Boon is all about fun and escapism, where people say and do things that you wish would happen in real life. Over 100 years old, Mills & Boon is a great British brand that allows readers to indulge in a truly romantic world, with happy endings and where the boy always gets the girl.
Bearing all of this in mind, Mustard New Media were asked to redesign and relaunch www.millsandboon.co.uk. This included the groundbreaking integration of ebooks across their entire product range, online community for members – allowing readers to socialise and share their passion for romantic fiction, browse the book functionality allowing sampling of titles prior to purchase, and management of customer accounts online, the new Mills & Boon website has been a real success story.
The aims of the site:
- To make a commitment to digital product by offering ebooks as an alternative to paperbacks across the entire product range in a customer friendly way - this is groundbreaking in the UK. Mills & Boon are the first, and currently only, publisher to offer this.
- To offer customers the opportunity to become part of the Mills & Boon community, exchanging recommendations with other M&B readers, getting tips from authors and information about writing romance. Users are also invited to participate in competitions and regularly updated with the latest news from Mills & Boon, before it reaches the general market.
- To extend the readership of Mills & Boon and challenge some of the preconceptions surrounding the brand.
- To allow a better forum for promotions and cross-sell opportunities, which would in turn increase sales and generate enough revenue to payback the investment over a two year period, in actuality it was repaid over 4 months.
- To give customers the ability to manage their accounts online, paying their invoices, changing their details and creating their own eBook shelf.
Strategy
Working together with Mills & Boon, Mustard New Media aimed for a balance between a highly promotionally led and yet at the same time an inspirational, indulgent brand. We achieved this by using the latest technology to interactively bring the site to life, couching the promotions within a solid, romance driven creative treatment. The results speak for themselves and customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.
The site needed to be indulgent and reflective of the escapist nature of the books, whilst sticking to some basic ecommerce principles - these being; easy to navigate, sufficiently detailed products with clear pricing, easy payment process, the ability to add in, update and change promotions on a regular basis, easily accessible content in as many formats as possible.
The site was developed so that Mills & Boon could internally manage and update the main promotional areas and react quickly to changing business needs. Working in conjunction with LibreDigital, eBooks were integrated next to their paperback equivalent throughout the site.
Whilst most major publishers and retailers are involved in some kind of eBook program, Mills & Boon is the only one to offer eBooks right next to their paperback equivalent, thereby fulfilling their commitment to make their content accessible to readers in as many formats as possible. They are the only publisher to offer all frontlist as paperback and eBook at one point of purchase. Other sites opted to have eBooks in a stand alone section making it difficult for customers to search.
Execution
The site was launched through the following marketing activity:
• Pre-launch teaser email campaign announcing that something was about to change online.
• Launch email campaign to current customers when site went live.
• Communication to affiliates.
• Ongoing PPC and organic SEO campaigns
• A PR campaign by Midas PR
• Advertising to current offline Book Club members.
• Advertising in book end pages.
The Community section of the site has provided the loyal Mills & Boon customer with a forum for discussion with other readers and helps to build not only a successful retail site, but a destination.
Results
- Within the first month of launch revenue from the site increased by 30%. This has averaged at 28% over the past 6 months.
- Number of visits to the site has increased by 38% since the launch of the new site.
- Conversion to sale has increased from 1.34% (April 2008) to 3.51% (March 2009), an uplift of 261%.
- Prior to the launch of the new site (June 2008) 30,000 customers were signed up to the monthly newsletter. This has since increased to 55,465 customers in February 2009.
Site visits and conversion figures verified by Google Analytics.
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