F+W Launches Widgets to Drive Subs and Sales

3,000 widgets by year-end will help boost conversions by up to 35 percent.

By Bill Mickey
Monday, June 1, 2009

F+W has launched a widget program to tie into its social networking strategies and help drive book sales and magazine subscriptions. The company is about ready to roll out its first batch of 1,000 and plans to have 3,000 distributed by year’s end.

“We’re after a way to quickly and efficiently publish our content across multiple social networking sites and give our users and staff a way to easily take on viral marketing,” says Chad Phelps, F+W’s VP of digital products.

In the case of books, a couple of lines of code sets up a widget that features a series of links to sites and a “look inside” feature that, like the Amazon function, allows a viewer to see portions of content within the widget. “It allows you to put that content anywhere, on any site,” says Phelps.

First steps involve launching the widget across all of F+W’s 70 Web properties, as well as fan pages on Facebook and MySpace. Next, Phelps wants to push the widgets to authors and users to help virally market the products. “Third, we can use it as a sales tool,” says Phelps. “It’s a great way to engage the consumer and help drive sales of books. When users have the ability to search inside, it has a significant impact on sellthrough. It’s increased sales anywhere from 15 to 35 percent.”

Magazines are next, says Phelps. The process will work much the same way. Magazine content is uploaded to their widget partner’s platform in pdf format. “We can tag it with values, and, in a magazine’s case, a subscribe link, and identify which content can be viewed and which can’t.”

Phelps swaps out the “Buy” link for a “Subscribe” link and it’s done. He says it’s a very simple process and one that didn’t have a big up-front cost. “Over the course of the year, it’s going to cost us under $25,000.”

However, that pricing, says Phelps, was a hard-won bargain. Normally, costs can range as high as 5-times that much. “[The vendor is] all about volume. The greater the volume, the greater the pricing. It’s per-unit pricing.”

The strategy ties in well with F+W’s social media efforts, says Phelps. “It goes with our Facebook strategy because the widgets can be embedded on the page. You’re instantly creating pages for magazines and books, and then using that as an outreach mechanism to gain friends and fans and then it becomes a marketing vehicle.”