Booksellers Blog

Chris Brogan has written a very clear post about the 5 steps in the continuum from getting a prospective customer’s attention through the purchase phase, and beyond.

• Awareness
• Attention
• Engagement
• Execution
• Extension

These phases hold true both online and in the real world. Brogan’s post describes the five phases in some detail, and is an excellent read. I thought I’d apply those phases to the bookselling world, to see how they apply.

Let’s look at the “real-world” scenario, with which we are all familiar, and a corresponding online example. Quoted definitions of the phases are borrowed from Mr. Brogan’s post.

Awareness:

Awareness is often purchased through marketing. Ads are bought. Events are planned. Something happens where people are made aware that there’s a new offering in the world.

A person learns that your store exists. In the real world, this is through a sign on your building, a writeup of an event in a local paper, or hearing a colleague mention the store at work.

Online: Awareness is mainly achieved through content, which somehow makes its way in front of a potential customer. This could be an email newsletter that is forwarded from a friend, a video of an author reading at your store that the prospect finds on YouTube, or someone seeing on Facebook that one of his friends became a fan of your store.

Attention:

Attention is a bit more than awareness. It means that people are giving you a little bit more of their time. They expect something back for this, be that entertainment, or a perception of value, or a sense of participation. Attention means that they know you’re there and that you’ve made it into their mind (if only a little bit).

Offline, attention often comes through sales or in-store events. Perhaps there is a children’s event that your customer thinks about attending.  Maybe it’s a converation with a friend about your store, or a profile of your store in a business journal. Advertisements can often turn awareness into attention, if your offering meets a need or desire of the customer at the time.

Online:  One of the most powerful ways to get a customer’s attention online is to be there when they need information. If someone is searching Google for a bookstore in your area, and you show up in the results, a click through to your site might convert them to awarenss. If they click through to a blog that grabs them, they may take time to read a bit more about you. Now you have their attention.

Engagement:

Engagement in this case means the sustained interaction between you (or your product or brand or service) and your buyer.

In the real world, engagement is obvious: someone walks into your store. They may ask for information, talk with a staff member, or just browse, but they are there and are interacting with the store in some way. Perhaps they sign up for your email newsletter.

Online, an engaged customer is reading your email newsletter. They are intentionally reading your blog (instead of stumbling upon it in a search). Hopefully they’ve subscribed to the blog, and may even leave comments.  They become a “fan” of your page on Facebook. They might visit your website to search for more information about a book.

Execution:

In this stage, we’re talking about the actual event, or the purchase, or the delivery of information.

Offline, this is the sale, or the attendance at the author event.

Online, execution is a sale, if you have an e-commerce system. Execution can also be an email or phone call to place a book on hold, or reserving tickets to an event. For most of the booksellers reading this, execution is the thing that gets a potential customer, who has interacted with the store online, into the physical bookstore.

Extension:

Finally, extension is a way of moving from what happened to what happens next.

For real-world customers, you want them to leave happy so that they return for another purchase, or at the very least tell their friends about your store. Much of this happens at the register: you ask them if they want to join your loyalty program or sign up for your email newsletter. Maybe you give them a coupon towards a future purchase, or tell them about an upcoming event.

Online, extension can play out a few ways, many of which involve a bridge between the physical bookstore and your online presence. Having your blog address on your bags, bookmarks and printed material in-store may give your customer the opportunity to interact with you further online.  If you are working on building your customer reviews on local search sites like yelp.com or Insider Pages, you can ask them to rate your business there when they get home.  If your customer has purchased through your ecommerce system, can you include link to sign up for your newsletter in their order confirmation email? At events, make an announcement that encourages users of Twitter to tweet the event. And if someone takes photos or video of an in-store event, ask the customer to share that information on sites like Flickr or YouTube.

Your thoughts?

Do these 5 stages make sense? Is there anything, either online or offline, that has helped you to move your customers through the five steps?