Musings on the L - O - N - G tail

<idle musing>
I have been reading quite a bit lately about the "long tail" of marketing (see sidebar for books being read). Briefly, the long tail is the shrinking part of the sales graph where an item sells 1-5 units per year. This is in distinction from the head of the chart—the hits—where the quantity sold in in the hundreds of thousands. The term is relatively new and the phenomenon has attracted attention recently because of the Internet and the availability of search engines. To get a better idea, either read the book or go here or here.

If ever there was a business that was in the long tail, it is Eisenbrauns. We are definitely a niche market. After all, how many Assyriologists live on your block? OK, we do sell biblical studies, too; but only academic books on biblical studies, which is a niche market. Anytime you can look through a catalog from a major Christian publisher and only find 1-2 books (sometimes less) worth listing, you know you're niche!

This was driven home to me even more strongly in the last 6 weeks. We started doing a 2 question survey of customers on our website as they checked out. One of the questions is "Why Eisenbrauns?" While I would love to say that 50% of more answered "I always order from Eisenbrauns," that isn't the truth, only 8.46% did. Here is the actual breakdown:

8.46% Left Blank
8.46% I always order from Eisenbrauns
19.85% They have the best price on one or more of the books I'm ordering
2.21% They have cheap and fast shipping
25.00% They are the only place that sells one or more of the books I'm ordering
14.34% They are reliable and/or have good customer service
8.27% The books are on sale
13.42% Other

Obviously we need to do something about the shipping, which is why we are offering reduced/free shipping for July. Bear in mind that over a third of our customers are international, which isn't cheap to ship.

But, look at the number who say we are the only place that sells the book they need: 25%! If that isn't the long tail, nothing is. And, when you look at the detail on the "Other" category, a good number of those say we are the only place they could find the book(s), so the actual percentage is even higher.

How do we capitalize on this? Well, search engines help, as does word of mouth. So, if I could just get everyone to stop talking about that river in Brazil and start talking about the joys of buying from the ibex people...

That's your job, folks! Tell everyone why Eisenbrauns is the greatest thing to hit planet earth since sliced bread!

Oh, you say that's my job? Well, how do I do that? I have an idea, let's make a mug that only has cuneiform on it with a little Eisenbrauns tagline at the bottom. What do you think? Too niche even for our niche? I think I'll have a cup of tea while I consider it.

</idle musing>