When you have a product, especially a digital one, you want to be able to sell it everywhere. Online marketplaces or resellers - where your textbooks display alongside competitors - are an important sales channel. They often benefit from greater reach, helping to drive digital textbook sales.
However, as a publisher, you concede commission (as reseller platforms take a percentage of your sales) and the customer data. Leaving you in the dark when it comes to understanding who your customers are and how they engage with your content. Certain marketplaces also control the interface for your digital content, which can impact or limit your customer's user experience.
To remedy this, you can create your own digital ecosystem to sell and deliver your textbooks direct to schools and students. Simply upload your textbooks to a digital publishing platform like YUDU to create your own branded digital textbook store. An approach that brings enormous benefits like:
1: Better Profit Margins - No Commission Payouts
Making textbook sales through your own digital platform, or website, increases your margin. Instead of paying commission to a reseller for every purchase, you pay a monthly fixed fee for running your own store. Allowing you to keep a greater percentage of profit of each digital sale.
If you go a step further and create your own digital textbook delivery app, you can also sidestep Apple and Google commission fees. Selling content licences direct through your website and providing immediate access to your textbooks via a login to the app.
2: Marketing and Sales Data - Know Who Your Customers Are
Online marketplaces often withold the customer data of purchasers - typically down to GDPR requirements. Making it impossible for you to know who they are are and what they have bought.
Building your own digital textbook store on YUDU Publisher removes this restriction. Giving you complete visibility of customer information and the purchases they've made. With an app for digital textbook delivery you can also create a direct marketing channel for your customers.
Mobile app push notifications offer a fast and powerful way to update your customers on the release of new texbooks and seasonal offers. With alerts direct to the smartphone or tablet device.
3: End-user Data - Understand How Customers Are Using Your Textbooks
Understanding how customers use your textbooks is a vital part of developing and improving future editions.
Reseller platforms don't offer you analytics data on end-user interactions. So you're in the dark when it comes to understanding how customers engage with your content, what they click on, or what causes them to abandon their experience.
Hosting your textbooks on an independent digital publishing platform changes this. The right provider will have built-in analytics, giving you a wide range of data points and reports that provide invaluable insight. Which devices and browsers are used to access content, how long users spend on content, what they click on, pages that get skipped. All this data driven evidence gives you in-depth understanding that will inform future editions.
4: Enhanced Content for Improved Delivery - Easy To Use and All In One Place
Aggregated stores have technical limitations on how they deliver your textbooks. Creating your own textbook eco-system gives you more control on how to add value and differentiate your content from the aggregated stores.
YUDU offers publishers the ability to easily enhance textbooks, by adding video and audio to help improve the learning experience. Students can then make digital notes and highlights on the page, add bookmarks and search for specific keyword terms across your whole library of content.
As a textbook publisher, you can also build your own dedicated branded app. Here, you can publish all your content and resources which can then be categorised for easy navigation and aligned with your existing database. Giving existing customers easy access to their digital content via a secure login.
Creating your own digital textbook eco-system provides huge value to the end user, especially if they need access to multiple textbooks or resources at a time.
5: Control of Delivery - No More limitations
On your own publishing platform, you can control the type of sale (firm sale, subscription or redemption codes), how it is delivered (via web browser or app), and how many devices the content is restricted to.
Giving you the tools to make direct purchasing more attractive for the public and educational institutions.
Interested in YUDU's Digital Texbook publishing solution?
