Is there a market for merchandise?

There is, but it is smaller than we had initially anticipated. Based on our pre-order form, our marketing of that form, and the pre-orders generated, we anticipated selling 900 items. 216 items were sold — 29% of our projection. Turns out our pre-order form, which was non-binding, was not an accurate reflection of demand — in fact only 8% of our pre-orders materialized into actual orders!

We found that our most successful sales days were those where there was an e-mail sent out with an urgent call-to-action. Our sales spiked on the day we sent out our first introductory e-mail to the shop, the day we announced that there was one week left of the shop, and on the last day of the shop. We learned (from the membership department) that in order for someone to convert to buying something from WBUR, it usually takes about 6 times of them seeing something promotional before they’ll commit. On the days that we weren’t hammering promotions, we saw little to no sales. 

We are fairly confident we marketed the store well enough, and the details of the approach are in our previous post. We ran promotion through these different channels and platforms, reaching well over 1 million impressions:

The effectiveness of these different channels varied. When we increased the on air promotion to hourly, the amount of direct traffic to the site and traffic from wbur.org increased, so we believe the last three days of frequent on air promotion made a difference. (The on air channel and event marketing are the two channels of the ones listed above that we cannot directly track.) The second most effective channel was email to our loyal listeners and donors. While our Facebook ads were creative and broad reaching, given the reach and the cost ($$$), we are disappointed in their effectiveness.

Are people interested in WBUR-branded merchandise? Which items?

We describe the rationale for the specific items we listed for sale in our previous post. Our question here is did we hit the mark with these items. The items for sale in the shop specifically did not overlap with anything we’ve given away in a pledge drive, and we aimed to create more direct “WBUR fan” merchandise with a younger demographic in mind. So what sold? The women’s baseball tshirt was our top seller. The tank top, with a more specific message about our syndicated shows, was our least popular item. With that, we conclude that the basic WBUR-branded merchandise sells. 

Who will be the most engaged audience for the Pop-Up Shop?

The most engaged demographic were women and existing WBUR donors. 60% of our customers were women (and the women’s shirt was the top seller). And although the channels we used to market reached donors and non-donors alike, especially on Facebook, we also saw a 60%/40% split in donors and non-donors purchasing.

This was a surprising finding, because we had initially predicted that the store would be a way for non-donors to access apparel items without going through the donation/premium channel. However, our findings showed that our donors were continuing to engage, and while we did reach a good amount of non-donors, they usually bought less and were less engaged.

After doing a little sleuthing through our order logs, we determined that about 20% of the purchases were made by WBUR staff and friends & family of the staff. This emphasizes our point that this merchandise is ideal for people who have the most loyalty to WBUR.

While we offered many different discount codes, ranging from 10-25% off, not many people utilized them. They served as a good entry point for us to contact members and supporters, but when they clicked through not many people actually typed them in. A surprise to us, but we hear this is not abnormal.

Is a merchandise website a profitable venture for WBUR?

As of right now, it is not. We did not make a profit on the Summer Pop-Up Shop. Our costs of procurement, transaction fees, promotion, and staffing exceeded $8000. Could this be a profitable venture? We are confident a pop-up shop could be run such that it doesn’t lose money, if we fine-tuned and automated a lot of the processes we did this summer — basically if everything I figured out this summer could be done on auto-pilot. But a merchandise store will not be a significant source of revenue for WBUR. The margins don’t translate into a large profit, and the effort needed to market the items took up significantly more time than we had anticipated.

Conclusions

There many things we can continue testing, in terms of length of shop, time of year, type of item and type of promotional strategy. We can run further experiments to:

• Improve marketing effectiveness — e.g. shorten the number of days, send more emails, lower prices.
• Lower procurement and transaction costs — e.g. only procure items as orders are submitted
• Change products — e.g. sell items more tailored to our existing donors, who are older. (We have gotten a lot of staff comments that our donors don’t wear tshirts.)
• As part of the purchase process, engage customers in a conversation about WBUR’s value

1. The profit model for selling merchandise, given the staffing, procurement, and promotional expenses, does not point to a new source of station revenue.
2. We did not find a large, untapped market looking for fan merchandise, likely because we’ve already met our most-loyal customers’ needs through our pledge drives. Despite marketing to non-donors, we did not identify a large group of non-donors looking to purchase merchandise.
3. Women were the majority of the customers. The women’s shirt was the top seller. We should incorporate this discovery into all of our promotional and pledge drive designs.

There are many reasons to run a pop-up shop beyond raising revenue. For example, WBEZ in Chicago has launched three different pop-up shops positioned as a benefit for members. The concept here is that the merchandise is a way to further engage with their most loyal audience. Similarly, we are talking at WBUR about making merchandise available for purchase at more of our in-person events. Given that we’ve found that our loyal fans want the merchandise, and we can make it available in small batches, for times when we know we will interact with the right customers.

If you’re reading this for the first time, welcome. This is the second blog post of the WBUR Summer Pop-Up Shop series, covering the marketing and promotions of the website. The store itself launched on July 24th, 2018, with an estimated run time of exactly one month.

The promotion plan comprised of creating a message and visual style, photography and videos to designed to engage buyers, and a broad communication plan.

We launched the campaign with the slogan: “Broadcast your love for WBUR.” This slogan made its way onto the website and every marketing material we had. The aesthetic was a beach background with the merchandise on top of it. Our logo took a fun spin on the serious WBUR brand.

To give our buyers a feel for WBUR, and to create an emotional connection with the staff who work on our shows, I took photos of staff members of WBUR wearing the merchandise. Having real employees as the models highlighted the quality of merchandise and the fit of the shirts, and showed audiences the faces of people that worked so hard behind the scenes. Here are a few of the shots.

During the summer, BizLab connected with behavioral economist Erez Yoeli and heard about his research that has found that in order to increase altruistic giving or engagement with a non-profit, it is essential to eliminate plausible deniability. In his example, plausible deniability means seeing a Salvation Army bell ringer in front of the grocery store and promptly exiting out the back entrance, with the excuse that “I never saw him!” With our marketing campaign, we wanted to put the word out in as many channels as possible to reach WBUR listeners to reduce plausible deniability. We used these channels to get our word out to the constituency:

1. Email to Members, Donors, and Events lists
2. On-Air Promotions
3. In-Podcast Promotions
4. Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)
5. Native Ads on www.wbur.org
6. Events and Guerrilla Marketing
7. Google Ads Words

In terms of email, we split our campaign up between dedicated emails to existing lists and designed ads that were dropped into other email promotions. We dropped our ad in our daily email “WBUR Today” (25,000 subscribers), “WBUR Tomorrow” (2,000 subscribers), Cognoscenti (27,000 subscribers), and Commonhealth (25,000 subscribers), which went out every day of the week except for Sunday for the entirety of the campaign.

We then directly emailed our events newsletter (8,000 subscribers) for the launch and one-week remaining date of the shop. Continually, we sent a dedicated email for the launch and one week remaining to our sustainers (17,000 subscribers) and sent one dedicated email each to half of our entire membership (35,000 subscribers each). We also sent two dedicated emails to the people who filled out the google form, one to say that their items were available, and one to remind those who had not ordered yet that their time was running out. On the last day of our campaign, we sent an email to every single person who had ever clicked the link to the shop.

For our On-Air promotions, we started the campaign with 4 10-second mentions a day, with a total of 108 mentions from July 24th through August 20th. During the last week of the shop, we increased the amount of mentions from 4 times a day to once an hour, totaling 59 times in 4 days. The copy for the spots changed every week from announcing the pop-up shop to an urgent call to action for the last days of the shop. Additionally, we wrote copy for 15 second pre-rolls in our podcasts, and got 86,000 impressions from them, targeted to listeners downloading in Massachusetts.

We ran multiple paid and unpaid social media campaigns. Starting with Facebook, we ran 7 campaigns that ranged from single images to carousels and videos. In total, our paid Facebook garnered 158,158 impressions and reached 49,920 people. For the last two weeks of the shop, we added boomerangs and videos to our instagram story (8,000 followers) daily, including a count down for the last week of the shop. Continually, we utilized our WBUR Extra twitter (1,000 followers) for a little trip I took to Scotland and brought along my merchandise. For a few tweets, we got retweeted by the WBUR account (74,000 followers).

On WBUR’s website, we have space for ads for membership and underwriting. We placed an ad for the pop-up shop on the top banner ad of the website on a rotating basis, and also added another ad on a different spot on the website. This made it possible for listeners that had heard the on air promotions find an actual channel to get to the store without having to type it in themselves. We found that the banner ad on the top of the website was one of the top performing sources of conversion for our shop.

In an added effort to get people interested in the merchandise, we created printed pop-up postcards, which had a QR code that scanned to the website as well as the URL to the shop. We handed these out at the WERS Wicked Good Music Festival and displayed the merchandise in our tent.

Finally, we used our Google AdWords account to place ads for phrases such as “wbur shop,” allowing us to optimize SEO for the shop.

In order to understand which marketing channels were most effective, I added UTM parameters to every URL we promoted. Every purchase made in the shop was tracked back to the marketing channel.

To see the results of our experiment, tune in to my third and final post!

Hey there!

I’m Suzie, one of the BizLab fellows that worked this summer to find additional sources of revenue for WBUR, with the goal of identifying new opportunities for public radio funding.

Merchandise has been a strategy for arts and nonprofit organizations for years. It gives companies with intangible products and services a way to become tangible and to broadcast their branding via clothing and household items. Organizations like EveryTown for Gun Safety broadcast their message through their advocacy T-shirts and New York City’s High Line sells tea towels with the route etched down the center.

Public radio organizations provide many more examples of how to incorporate retail merchandise into the listener experience. NPR’s Planet Money made an entire segment about the journey of a shirt from creation, to purchase, to disposal, which you can access here. Moreover, NPR itself has a full-time merchandise website, alongside This American Life, and Minnesota Public Media. Other public radio stations have adopted the “Pop-Up Shop” model, including Chicago’s NPR station, WBEZ. Here at WBUR, there has been talk of one for years, with ideas and designs floating around different departments without an outlet other than pledge drives to put them out to the public.

That’s where BizLab comes in! Joan DiMicco, our director and fearless leader, wanted to see if a merchandise store could be an alternate channel for profit for WBUR. She then needed someone to take the idea and turn it into a physical experiment. WBUR was also interested to see if this could be a job handled by one staff member dedicated to the store. This is where I come in!

In the public radio industry, the exchange of goods occurs usually during pledge drives and live events. Items are either given away as swag for promotional or relationship building purposes or given as a gift (a “premium”) in return for a donation that is larger than the market value price of the item. A merchandise store challenges that model by changing the exchange from a two-way gift to a transaction. This both reduces the barriers to entry for ownership of WBUR branded items and increases them. No longer will people be paying $120 a year to get a T-shirt, but in the same vein, no longer will people be able to walk up to a table and take a shirt home for free. In this venture, people will enter a virtual marketplace and buy items for an average retail price.

We began the summer with a few core questions:

1. Is there a market for non-pledge related merchandise?
2. Are people interested in JUST WBUR branded merchandise (i.e. no catchy public radio slogans)? Which items do people like?
3. Who will be the most engaged audience for the Pop-Up Shop? (age, gender, geo, and donor status)
4. Is a merchandise website a profitable venture for WBUR?

In order to conduct this experiment and answer these questions, we went from concept to a fully functional e-commerce business in less than 12 weeks. Our strategy had 5 steps:

In this blog post, I will talk about the first 3 steps: Ideation, Partners, and Implementation.

Step 1: Ideation

During my first week at WBUR, we were present for an event for the WBUR “Sounding Board”, which is a group of young people who listen to WBUR who come to offer feedback on programs put on by the station. We learned first-hand why people donate and, more importantly, why they don’t. Later in the week, we met with a consultant named Sarah Bloomer to kick off some brainstorming for each of our experiments. Here, we determined that the way to visualize our own store would to be by a) differentiating, b) mimicking, and c) understanding consumer demand.

In terms of differentiation, we wanted to make sure that people understood that this was not affiliated with a pledge drive, and thus not entirely related to membership. We wanted to avoid this because of the existence of premiums. If we did not explain that this was a for-profit venture within the business laboratory of a non-profit, it could be possible that current members would feel cheated out of merchandise that they paid larger amounts of money for. Through this realization, we decided to avoid using any inventory we already had, and design brand new pieces. Continually, a lot of the WBUR merchandise itself is tied to a pledge drive, be it a marathon shirt with the date on the back or a dated slogan from a past fundraiser. This gave us the opportunity to test whether there was a market for solely WBUR branded items.

While we were looking to set ourselves apart from pledge drives and other public media outlets, we also needed to learn what was working for them. We researched various websites that sold merchandise to see which items were the top sellers, the price points, and the amount of inventory for each. WBUR has done a few fundraisers that have a similar model to a purchased based campaign, so we consulted with the membership department on their tactics for success.

As more and more people caught wind of our venture, the suggestions for items began pouring in. We quickly realized that there was also an opportunity to test which items would work best for WBUR’s audience. But that also begs the question, which audience? At WBUR, if you donate to the station you are considered a member. The membership of WBUR is split about 60/40 women and men, and the average listener of the station is in their 50s. Could a merchandise store be an opportunity to get non-members to support the station by eliminating the high premiums, or would it attract mostly people who already support?

Before we even began conducting our experiment, we found the need for another experiment.

Thus, the WBUR Summer Pop-Up Pre-Order was born! This took the shape of a Google Form, placed as an ad in our daily/weekly e-mails to subscribers and sent out as a Facebook ad to different selections of WBUR supporters. Inside the form, I placed 12 designs for various items from notebooks to T-shirts to water bottles, and even a WBUR (pronounced wubber) ducky. Some of the designs I came up with myself, while others were previously mocked up by a woman named Lillian in membership (who is on maternity leave, thank you Lillian!) just in case an experiment like this was ever to happen.

The Pre-order form was live for about 10 days and offered a 10% discount to anyone who entered their e-mail. We had 63 people fill out the form, and they ordered a total of 111 items. Of the 12 items, there were 6 that were clearly the best sellers, comprising 77% of all orders.

We were surprised to see that they were mostly T-shirts! Around the office, everyone said they wanted anything BUT a WBUR T-Shirt, but once the results came in we could not argue with the market. Marketing testing FTW! Going with our gut would have resulted in a store of dog bowls and rubber duckies.

We added a suggestions box at the end of the form for people to tell us what they wanted to see, and these are a few of the results.

Because we already gave away stickers for free in our office, we decided to avoid selling them (differentiation!) for this iteration of the project. The final 6 items selected from the pre-order form went on to become the 6 items we offered “in store”.

Step 2: Partners

Here is a diagram of all the different departments/companies we worked with to complete this experiment.

In order to create a functioning e-commerce business, we needed to have a) things to sell and b) a place to sell them. The designs I put on the pre-order form were just proofs mocked up in our own office, so we needed to find someone to turn them into tangible goods. At the beginning of the summer, the membership department had asked us about our plan for fulfillment, because during pledge drives they usually ship everything out themselves. Joan and I agreed that we would rather have a shipping and fulfillment service outside of the creepy basement, so we contacted Grossman Marketing, a well-known marketing firm in Somerville that has historically supplied goods for our pledge drives. They were able to design, procure and fulfill our orders in a sustainable, local manner.

The next step was to find a host for our site. We contacted different e-commerce platforms and eventually settled on Shopify based on the cost and the UX of their design tools. We selected the basic plan ($29.99/month with percentage fees of purchase) and were able to begin designing immediately.

Once the external partners were settled, we looked inward to get the funds and allowances to continue. Because WBUR is an affiliate of Boston University, any contracts we signed or terms and conditions we clicked were a liability to the school. We thus worked closely with BU’s legal department to verify Shopify’s terms of service, make sure Grossman was on the list of approved vendors, and to create our own terms of service for the site. We also worked with WBUR’s financial department to set up a payment gateway between Shopify, BU, and WBUR that would place the money in the appropriate accounts. The digital team got us the domain name for our site, and the membership team gave us parameters for customer acquisition and analysis. Our other partners helped mostly with promotion, which I will explain further in my next post.

With all the necessary approvals in place, it was time to design.

Step 3: Implementation

Shopify makes designing an e-commerce website incredibly easy. They have really done their homework in terms of all the pieces necessary for a customer to have a fulfilling experience on a site. It basically creates a generic template for you, complete with contact pages, E-mail confirmation, inventory records, and animations. All you have to do is customize it to your brand. My main job while designing was creating an overall aesthetic of the shop, writing copy for the items and figuring out a way to display the products while not actually having any physical products yet. If you are reading this post any time after August 24th the shop will already be closed, so here are some screenshots of what it looked like.

I worked with Grossman on ordering the items while I was designing the site. Joan and I came up with some revenue projections based on hypothetical profit margins as well as projected demand, based on the pre-order form. We projected that if we sold ~90% of our inventory, we would make about $6,000.00 in profit. Between the 6 pieces we designed, we stocked the store with 900 items.

The store was fully functional and ready to launch by July 19th, but a few items were on back order, and the legal department at BU was concerned about a few pieces of Shopify’s terms of service. This stalled our launch until the following week, but because we had scheduled the marketing to go live on the launch date, we were able to overcome the blockades.

The store itself launched on July 24th, 7 weeks and 1 day after planning began.

Check back into my next two blogs to learn about the promotions and analysis of the project!