I have somehow always get @dialabook tweets into my stream via common friends. So I decided to do some snooping and find out more about the service. Found it interesting. Thought of conducting an interview. Better still, thought of making it a whole series of interviews to feature how brands are using Social Media, some interesting case studies and some failures. I am going to call it ‘Industry Speaks’
First one in line is Mayank, Founder of Dial A Book, a 9 months old startup:
- Tell us something about yourself. And how did you come up with the idea for Dial A Book. Why do you think will it be successful?
I am a software engineer by profession and based out of Delhi. The idea for Dial-a-Book occurred to me just like that, literally. I
was reading up and researching the book space in India for a few months when it suddenly occurred to me that there’s a huge untapped market segment between retail stores and online bookstores. I myself started doing e-commerce some time last year and I was sure there would be many more like me who’ll take even more time to get there, so why not offer them a service that they can use right now as well.
Dial-a-Book caters to an interesting set of customers. Our customers range from people who are not yet willing to do e-commerce to people who want their books delivered super fast(in a few hours). This is a unique space which we occupy and we being readers ourselves our passion for books reflects on how we run the business.
- Where does the organisation stand right now? :) In terms of branding. Sales. And competitors.
We are about 9 months young and working hard to improve our processes and trying to constantly up our service levels. Branding is not really a priority right now and we’ll be working on it in the coming months. Book market being one of the oldest is a highly competitive market and we are trying to establish a unique position for us so that we don’t have to worry about the competition much. Sales are picking up, we started with a few books/month and we are up to a few hundred books/month now.
- If you dont give users visuals options to chose from, dont you think you are restricting your revenue stream?
Guess you are referring to the (non-existing) website here :) Actually if you have a look at our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/dialabook) you’ll realize that a lot of customers actually buy books based on the pictures we upload on our facebook page. Though a website isn’t mandatory in our case because of the nature of our business, we do realize its importance and it’s in the pipeline.
- How are you planning to scale up?
We are scaling up as we grow. We used to do deliveries ourselves when we started but now we have a delivery team. We are also exploring tie-up opportunities with courier companies for outside Delhi/NCR orders.
- What have you done to get those x no. of sales over the past few months? What is your distribution process and how is it different from lets say Flipkart? What if a bigger company like that suddenly introduces pay-on-delivery-order via phone system?
We’ve been promoting ourselves both online(mostly Social Media) and offline and each medium has helped us in it’s own unique way.Just like online bookstores we maintain an inventory of running titles and source others as per the demand, however unlike them we have our own delivery team that does the deliveries and this gives us the option to offer better and customizable delivery solutions.
That’s a good question. When we started we had this in mind that if ‘Dial-a-Book’ picks up, people shall try to replicate the same thing and to a certain extent its started to happen with some online stores having a ‘Cash on Delivery’ model but then we were have the first movers advantage and some unique advantages that we enjoy being a startup which won’t be that easy to counter. Am sure the market will see something like this soon and the game will only get more interesting then :)
- How much do you think has social media benefited you? How have you been measuring the sales your ‘conversations’ and ‘relationships’ on social media give you? Have you tried any other marketing efforts?
We wouldn’t have been talking like this had it not been for Social Media :) Social Media has been a boon for us, literally. Social Media is core of our business, we spend a lot of time on it and take it very very seriously. When we crunched our numbers a month or so back we found that upto 1/3rd of our orders were from Twitter and Facebook combined, which is huge. Yes, we keep a close on the numbers as well as the quality of conversations/relationships. We monitor conversations and act on them asap. We’ve tried a few offline things like Direct Marketing and some promotional activities.We will be doing more tie-ups, cross promotional campaigns soon.
- If SM has been successful, do you have any further plans to scale it up? If not, then where do you think is it lacking?
Once we get a bit big, we’ll have a dedicated resource for Social Media to start with who’ll take things from here and make them bigger, get more engagement and interaction going. You can probably tell us where we are lacking :)
- Have you seen http://www.shelfari.com/ .. a community based on books. Do you think such a branded community (under your brand name) can work for indian readers?
Future Plans are to increase revenue without loosing sight of the processes and customer service levels. We have been not that active on Business Development front, but that shall change now and you should more on that soon. Target is to get to selling a few thousand books a month by the end of this year.
- Any social media tips and best practices that you would like to share with us?
We’ve been amazed to see the response a tiny brand like us has got on Social Media. Like the other day @kamla asked her followers to recommend her an online bookstore in India and one of her followers from London recommended Dial-a-Book. The interesting thing about this is that she’s not even a customer yet :) Selling doesn’t work in Social Media, Conversation Does.
Conclusions:
Some consistent and hard work on social media seems to be paying off now for Mayank. Though the next step for them now should be reaching more people, and then let them carry forward the viral momentum that he has already built. Maybe some options like mobile commerce or tie-ups with carriers can also be looked into. I have always been bullish on e/m-commerce and Dialabook seems to be standing on the verge of one.
Good luck with everything Mayank!
