August 23, 2012 / Marketing

Special deals move unsold yearbooks

Written by Greg Dalrymple

Every year, our yearbook staff offers package deals as a way to sell unsold yearbooks from previous years.

During the first week of school, we run our early-bird special where students can purchase the upcoming book, with a namestamp and we sell them last year’s book, while supplies last.

We are a fall delivery school, and we use this sale to try to capitalize on the excitement of getting last year’s book (for this fall, that’s the 2012 book) to promote the sale of this year’s 2013 yearbook. After that, last year’s book increases in price.

Our second big promotion is just before Christmas and is used to generate interest from our seniors. To kick off senior ad sales in December, January and February, we offer for sale a package of yearbooks that includes all four of their high school years – the current year’s book plus books from the previous three years.

To do this, we set back our run-over copies plus five books (30 books) each year. From this, 10 senior packages are created.

Our goal here is three-fold: first, we want to sell our current book; second, we want to expose our customers to our brand while promoting our senior ads; and lastly, we are selling yearbooks that otherwise would not be sold.

The last two years we sold out of the 10 senior-package special in two days, generated three pages worth of senior ads and sold additional new books. All told, we sold more than $1,000 in two days for our program. More importantly, it gave us access to students who otherwise would not have bought our yearbook.

Oh, and it opened up some much need closet space.

One Response to “Special deals move unsold yearbooks”

September 27, 2012 at 2:13 pm, KAYLEEN said:

Can you give me an idea of how much of a discount you provide on the package deals? What a great idea!

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Greg Dalrymple