From Prime Day and Black Friday to Cyber Monday and Christmas, Amazon shopping events are a great way to reach new customers and drive your online sales. And, like most busy sales periods, planning plays a key part in how you maximise your growth.
Here are 7 things that you can do to prepare your Amazon marketplace business:
1. Plan your sale items in advance.
Marketplaces like Amazon start scheduling deals and promotions well in advance of the event itself – so, to make the most of them it’s important to plan ahead.
During sales events, shoppers are after bargains which makes them more price sensitive than usual. To grab their attention and convert them into customers, you’re better off offering bigger discounts on a small number of products than offering small discounts across a wider range.
To help you convert as many sales as possible, Amazon offers things like deal spots, promotional pricing and coupons. But, you’ll have to be proactive to take advantage of them.
2. Create bundles to increase your order values.
A way to offer great value is by creating two or three bundles exclusively for a specific sales period. This will give shoppers the healthy discount they’re after while increasing your order values and decreasing your shipping costs.
Bundles also give customers more time with your products – the more time they have with them, the more likely they are to become loyal to your brand.
3. Optimise your listings for higher traffic and stronger conversion.
However good your product is, if it’s not appearing in the first few pages of Amazon’s search results few people will ever see it. Here are five things that you can do to get your products onto those first few pages:
→ Keywords. You want both the text and phrases that you use in your listings to mirror what shoppers are typing into Amazon’s search box.
→ Focus on getting positive product reviews. Getting your Amazon listings live a few weeks before the main event can give you a head start – even a few five-star reviews will make a big difference to both your conversion rate and search ranking.
→ Product photography. Always use high-quality photography on your Amazon listings. You want your photography to make your products look great, but you also want it to be an accurate reflection of what customers are going to receive. If your product or bundle is exclusive to that sales event, theming your photography can be a great way to show that. If you’re going live early to get some positive reviews onto your listings, you can always create two sets of photography – the first to use before the sales period starts and the other for the main event.
→ Demo videos are a great way to showcase your products. Whether you’re selling lifestyle-oriented products or something more functional, a high-quality demo video will be more compelling than photography on its own.
→ A+ content is a great way to add rich detail to your product listing. If you’re planning to offer bundles, this is where you can go into detail about each product.
4. Plan your ad spend.
There are several types of Amazon ads available and you can either use one by itself, or mix them to create a more robust ad strategy. For Amazon sales events it’s worth focussing on three – sponsored products, sponsored brands, and video ads.
- Sponsored products let you jump to the top of search results. This will mean higher traffic and stronger sales.
- Sponsored brands, specifically Store Spotlight campaigns, appear above the search results and allow you to direct traffic to a wider group of promotional products within your storefront.
- Amazon video ads are a great way to grab people’s attention while they’re scrolling through search results. Everything else on the page will be static so movement from a video will attract more eyes.
Try build your ad budget into the price of your products – this is where bundles will really help. If you have the budget available, extend your PPC campaign to include your social channels and maximise your traffic.
5. Quick delivery.
Most Amazon shoppers are going to want their orders delivered quickly – it’s one of the reasons so many people are prepared to pay for Prime membership.
Offering free, fast delivery on your listings will give shoppers added incentive and improve your conversion rates. Plus, using Amazon FBA will mean preferential treatment in organic search rankings.
6. Make sure you’re well stocked.
Amazon want to make sure that you have enough stock to fulfil your orders. So, how much stock you have will impact your organic search rankings.
You’ll need to plan your inventory carefully ahead of key sales events – you want enough stock to cover every sale, but not so much that you’re tying up cash unnecessarily. Looking at your past sales performance is a good place to start. If you don’t have any, there are a few online tools you can use to estimate Amazon sales, but their accuracy is often questionable.
Something else that you can do is forecast based on what you need to sell to make it worth your while. You can then have a plan up your sleeve for any unsold stock. Here a few ideas to get you started:
- Continue the offer/s until you’ve cleared the stock
- Repackage some (or all) of it and send it to key media to gain coverage
- Run competitions on your social channels and use the unsold stock as prizes
Get creative – what else could you do with it?
7. Get the word out early.
Using your social channels to get the word out early is a great way to build anticipation.
You don’t need share specifics – but, letting everyone know that there are some exciting deals coming will keep you top of mind and help you drive those sales when the time comes.
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Written by Tom Head | 01 November 2021