Success Stories

How Booktopia drives sales conversions with onsite category optimization and recommendations

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About Booktopia

Booktopia was founded in 2004, in Sydney Australia, and operates an entirely online model of book sales. By 2010 Booktopia’s revenue was north of $10 million per year. In 2020, ASX listed the company with a market capitalization of $315 million. Today, Booktopia ships over 2,000,000 packages a year to Australian addresses containing books, DVDs, CDs, maps, and other products — fast becoming the local bookstore for all Australians.
Executive Summary

Booktopia’s earlier recommendations model depended on their team manually aggregating their recommendations list, news, and bestsellers. They were looking for technology that would remove time-consuming human interventions and help their UX team design better discovery experiences for their customers.

Insider’s granular segmentation capability was a deciding factor. Booktopia tried and tested the robustness of this feature and was able to develop various product recommendations and was pleased with the results. Booktopia also wanted to test changes and variations to their onsite UX, and Insider’s technology perfectly fit the bill. They were also impressed by the knowledge and expertise of the account management team.

Booktopia preferred Insider over the other vendors because of the solution’s existing advanced product recommendations and tailor-made recommendation strategies for the desktop and mobile web. Along with advanced recommendations, Insider also provides micro-segmentation, which helped Booktopia get  granular with targeting and engagement. Insider’s A/B testing is another feature that made a deep impression on the Booktopita team — especially Insider’s fast execution. 

Insider’s platform also enabled Booktopia to unify its mobile and desktop strategies to create holistic, individualized experiences across channels. The all-around account management support and operational efficiency meant that Booktopia could execute faster go-to-market plans and dynamic personalization strategies, which helped the brand build trust and a deeply loyal customer base.

AI-powered Segmentation Combined with Classic Offers to Boost Revenue

M&S combines Insider’s web push messaging and AI-powered segmentation tools with their most successful “always on” campaigns. Insider’s Growth Management Platform tracks the category or collection that a visitor was most recently browsing but did not convert and entices them back with a timely promotion. A particularly successful example is M&S’s long running 4 pairs for 3 women’s underwear campaign, boosting lingerie conversion rates and revenue.

Looking Ahead

Booktopia will expand new products and service offerings and will look to Insider’s robust segmentation and recommendations to boost conversions and deliver top-notch user experiences. Booktopia is also considering integrating WhatsApp Business API for shipping updates.

Another area of interest for Booktopia is optimizing cart recovery & browser abandonment.  The company is looking to Insider’s Architect to power personalized cart abandonment web push — combined with deeper segmentation and CRM persona alignment — to deliver relevant web push experiences proven to bring users back and reduce abandonment rates.

To keep up with their growing categories and genres, Booktopia is considering Insider’s new Smart Recommender algorithms to enable smoother product discovery and contextualized product recommendations.

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