What do we know about who buys our books?

Lots!

Recently I’ve been meeting with more people from the traditional publishing industry, often because we’re hiring but also because I want to learn more about how things work in publishing.

I (and many of us at Lost My Name) am an accidental publisher and I’ve come at the job that I have via the design and software industries.

It turns out that traditional publishers don’t seem to know that much about who buys their books.

That’s not to say they don’t know anything — of course they do — but generally what they know is quite broad brush strokes and very old. For example, retailers will tell them how many copies of a book they have sold last month. But that’s about it. They won’t know very much about who bought them so they have to augment these facts with extra offline research.

This is really different to the situation we have at Lost My Name. We know lots and lots about who our customers are, why they buy and what the impact of each customer is on our business, in close to realtime.

We know all this because we market and sell direct, we talk to our customers all the time and we keep all our data about our customers in one place.

I thought it would be interesting to outline some of the high level things we know about our customers. My hope is that by understanding all the different things its possible to know about who buys your books it inspires fresh thinking and new ideas across the industry — it baffles me why more publishers aren’t using the direct to consumer model we are developing at Lost My Name.

Aside — I am aware that this stuff is not big news for ecommerce folks! I’m hoping to inspire the publishers here!

Second aside — all these charts are the result of the hard work of our fabulous Business Intelligence team. They are great.

Ok. So here’s some of the stuff we know — I’ve had to obscure some of it a bit, sorry. If there’s anything you’d like to know more about drop me a DM on twitter and I may be able to update the post or just tell you.

We know exactly how many products we’re selling (hour by hour in some cases) and their variance to our daily targets

In some markets we now have eight different products for sale — four variants of the Lost My Name book, three smaller ‘retention’ products and The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home. The product mix varies by market — we sell in 200+ countries now.

The unit sales, blend and revenue figures are at the heart of our day to day, week to week, month to month decision making around trading and marketing.

This chart shows our daily unit sales across our range in a specific subset of our markets (I’m not saying which!)

We know how many of them are gifted

We offer beautiful gift wrap for our books. This data (enriched with other data) helps us start to understand more about why people are buying and the value of our products.

This chart shows the proportion of giftwraps shipped with our products

We can make pretty pictures out of the weekly mix trends

Of course we can display our sales as a pretty charts. Visualising helps make the data more ... fun!

We know if people are buying more for girls or boys

All of our products currently require customers to enter a binary gender of a child. Although we require a gender to create the product, we aspire to make products with universal appeal — so if we see that a product is underperforming within a gender we can take steps to alter the content or marketing and try and correct the imbalance.

Here’s our almost perfectly balanced gender mix for Lost My Name softcover across all markets — boys are green, girls are purple

We know if the people buying are new or returning

So that’s a few data points on some of the things we know about the basic product sales. But we also know lots about the people who are buying. For example, and this is of course ecommerce 101, we know how many of our customers have bought with us before. And we know this by product, by market, by channel… and so on.

Here’s a chart of the blend of repeat (orange) vs new (blue) customers for The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home over (an unspecified period of) time

Repeat vs new customers is an important business metric, but it doesn’t tell us that much about why people are buying. But good news — we know this too!

We know why people are buying

Here’s a chart showing the difference in gifting occasion by product between the USA and the UK.

This chart shows the occasions our products are bought for

We know all this because we ask every customer that buys with us to tell us why they bought! It’s pretty obvious, but not something the publishing industry seems to do much, which makes it harder for publishers to tune their lists and balance their portfolios.

We know quite a lot more than the occasions customers buy for though.

We know the ages of the kids that people are buying for for different occasions

Here’s the proportion of ages of the children that get given Lost My Name for the core occasions we track.

One of our products is more popular for newborns… can you guess what it is?

We know how this varies by relationship

Here’s a chart of who is buying our products in the USA and UK in terms of their relationship to the child they are giving the product to as a gift.

One relationship is most valuable for us across nearly every product… what is it!?

We know what role each product plays in the customer lifecycle

Because we do all the retail, we know lots and lots about the exact role of each product during different stages of different customer segments different journeys! Phew.

Here’s a chart showing the proportion of products sold in terms of whether they are the first product in a new customers basket, an ‘add-on’ (so a second or third product in a basket) in a new customers basket, a first repeat product or an add on repeat product.

Dark blue = first product, new customer. Light blue = add on product, new customer. Dark orange = first product, repeat customer. Light orange = add on product, repeat customer. Main takeaway? Lost My Name brings customers in and our other products bring them back.

There is a lot, lot more we know about the retail journey our customers take, including huge amounts of data on how they find out about us — our attribution model is now incredibly fine grained and sophisticated.

We know the exact p&l of each product

One final chart. Because we do the manufacturing we also know lots and lots about the exact performance of our print houses, shipping performance and so forth. We also can combine this data with our marketing data, and our FX data to produce various holy grail charts.

For example, we know the exact profit and loss data, on a rolling basis, of all of our products taking into account live marketing campaigns running that day! Here’s a very special chart that could only be made in real time by a vertically integrated company like ours

Here’s a random set of our products (sorry I can’t say which) showing manufacturing costs, marketing contribution, shipping costs and net profit (I can’t say what is what either!)

What do we do with all this knowledge?

Of course knowing all this is just a means to an end — from my perspective as the leader of the product team it is simply to bring us closer to our customers and therefore help us design better products that create even more magical moments between adults and kids.

Whether that’s improving our existing products with new features and formats or figuring out what to make next, having this data on who our customers are, why they buy and much much more makes our creative process richer and our team better equipped to make better design decisions.

And of course this kind of quantitative data is just one part of the puzzle — we do a lot of other kinds of research.

Hopefully this piece has inspired you to think a bit more about what you know and don’t know about your customers and what kind of things you could create if you knew more.

P.S — If you’d like to jump over from the traditional publishing industry and come and help us make use of all this data and turn it into insights that lead to more brilliant products we’d love to say hi at our next Strange Tales event. Join our newsletter to get an invite.