The Collaborative Consumer Marketing Program (CCM) is designed to help publishers get their titles in front of loyal indie bookstore customers and support independent booksellers by sponsoring (with money!) placement in these store-branded email campaigns.

In Edelweiss360, you create targeted email campaigns to send to your customers in a matter of minutes. You choose the titles to include in your campaigns and target your customer lists based on purchases by section, author, series, etc., or by tagged lists that you maintain. Edelweiss360 tracks and presents you with open, click, and, where possible, actual conversion (purchase) rates for the campaigns.

With the CCM program, publishers can compensate you for including their selected titles in your campaigns – and pay based on how many customers receive a campaign, how targeted it is, the relative focus of their titles in your campaign, and the quality of the email list (quality = percentage of customers receiving the campaign who have purchased from your store before). 

The cost to the publisher is calculated based on CPM, also called cost per thousand, a commonly used measurement in advertising. CPM is the cost a publisher pays per one thousand email recipients of a campaign. The Edelweiss360 CPM starts at $20 and reflects a campaign with a single title sent just to your loyalty program members (customers with purchase history data) – and targeted towards a relevant subset of those loyalty program members. As a campaign features more titles, is sent to more non-loyalty program customers and/or is less targeted, the CPM per title decreases according to a set algorithm calculated by the application.

Publishers may choose to ‘boost’ the CPM for individual titles in order to offer booksellers additional incentive to include those particular titles in campaigns.

Titles from publishers participating in the program are noted wherever the title is displayed in an Edelweiss360 lane with a $ burst icon. Burst icons with a dollar sign indicate that the title fee is the standard rate.

Burst icons with a number plus an ‘X’ indicate titles with a marketing ‘boost’—and the number is the multiplier above the standard rate. In this case, a title with a ‘3X’ in the burst icon has a starting CPM rate of $60, or 3 times the standard $20 rate. Publishers are very excited about these titles and are willing to pay out to get them in front of the eyes of your best customers. It’s a win for everyone.

CCM titles will also be marked in Edelweiss catalogs with these same icons (so keep an eye out for them while ordering and consider adding them to a campaign as you go!).

You can browse a list of CCM titles in the Publisher Boosts lane on the 360 homepage:

*If the Publisher Boosts lane is not visible on your 360 homepage, please email 360support@abovethetreeline.com! 

Can’t find CCM titles that fit well with your campaign, or don’t feel like looking? You can also find relevant boosted titles after you’ve put together a list of titles to share with your customers, using this button:

While working on an Edelweiss360 campaign, you’ll also see ‘bursts’ on any eligible titles currently included in your campaign and the monetary total you will receive:

To see more details about the calculation, just click on the “CCM Income” heading:

It’s worth clarifying that adding more titles to your email “dilutes” that email (from the publisher perspective) and usually earns you fewer CCM dollars.

Publishers will receive an invoice each month with aggregated totals for all sent campaigns from all stores. They will pay Edelweiss, and we will pass those earnings along to each store. All you have to do is send your emails! Hopefully, a good, targeted email will result in sales for your store as well as some CCM funds from a grateful publisher.

Keep track of your earned CCM funds, both large and modest, by clicking the link icon in Edelweiss360:

You can also see an overview of earnings on your 360 homepage:

CCM funds are now paid out monthly via Stripe. Learn more here!