August, as peak summer holiday period, is the time most sellers use for resting and enjoying the sun while it lasts, however it is also time to reflect & plan the rest of the years’ strategy, which contains the 4 most important months of the year in terms of sales on Amazon.
After Prime Day that, generally speaking, has gone well, we now have to face a period with many promotional events which will help us close a good year in the marketplace. As every past year, after Prime Day and the “summer sales” (although this is not in itself an event on Amazon) comes Back to School. This year, the event will last a week beginning on Monday, August 29th, and will finish on September 5th. Are you ready for it?
The Back to School is a perfect event if you sell in certain categories. As the name of the event suggests, you have to prepare for the return to routine and school, whether you are a child or an adult returning to the office. So taking this into account, it is obvious that if you sell backpacks, cases, books, varied stationery (notebooks, pens, agendas …), basic children’s clothing (socks, pants, sweatshirts …), sportswear (tracksuits, school sports equipment …) etc. this is undoubtedly an event for you.
In addition to everything related to school, there is the casuistry of returning from vacation to our homes that we leave practically empty, creating a great opportunity for complementary categories as detergents, household products, kitchen utensils, and even products as gym towels, bath towels, tablecloths, etc. Whenever we return home, we like to “start the new course” with new products.
And if you are a seller who offers electronic products (i.e – headphones, USBs, tablets, e-books, computers, keyboards, mouse pads) it is clear you have to be present with no doubt during this week.
What should we do for the event?
Whether you participate with a promotion or deal, or if you just want to take advantage of the increase in traffic that Amazon will surely have that week, here are the must do’s to achieve your goals:
1. Work on the content of your promoted products.
There are many reasons why we choose certain products over the others for promotions – excess stock, seasonality or simply because you want to use them as a spearhead for the rest of the catalogue.
The detail pages of these products require optimization to correctly match the event, which you can do by doing the following:
Title: review the taxonomy of the title so that the algorithm indexes it well and include, at least, the two most relevant keywords in number of searches.
Images: double and triple check the product is well shown. The product should appear both inside its pack and outside, so that the client knows what he will receive and how. Include lifestyle images and a video of less than 30 seconds.
Bullet-points: properly review the product’s features, include information from the comments, frequently asked questions not included above and express clearly your differential corevalues.
A+ content: if you have it active, modify the cross-selling table including the products of the catalogue that you are most interested in pushing and if you do not have it active, you are already missing out!
2. The importance of Keywords.
On Amazon, more than 90% of searches occur in the navigation bar through words or keywords. In times of promotion, the user searches differently than in valley periods, then it is important to review the keywords and update accordingly.
How do we update keywords? Or rather, how can we find the ones we should include? There is third-party technology that makes this job much easier for you (i.e-Helium10, DataHawk, Jungle Scout, Merchandwords). If a paid subscription is not an option for you, then here’s a free little trick – go to the Amazon navigation bar, type in the generic word that best suits your product and you will see that a list of words such as “suggestion” is displayed. Use those words that surely have many searches. Below is an example with the word “shampoo”.
3. Activate variation detail pages with the products in promotion.
It is common to only activate promotions in a limited number of products, since they might have different margins, so we would want to typically go for the higher margin products to serve as a spearhead for the rest of the catalogue and help increase sales on all your products.
The easiest way to promote a halo effect is by creating variation detail pages. They are easy to create and from experience, they are a good alternative to support sales. You may find a more specific article on this in a near future, but for now below there’s an example. You need to activate them either in the central vendor platform or in the central seller platform (depending on what modality you are selling on Amazon).
4. Update you Brand Store
It is important that your Brand Store is also prepared for the event. For this we recommend that you carry out 3 actions:
a) Create a tab for the products you have in promotion.
Creating the tab has no associated cost and is simple to create. Just give it an attractive name as “Opportunities” or “Offers” and include in that section the discounted products. Make sure you choose wisely the positioning of the products, as you want to order them starting with those with the best Rating and Reviews, which are Prime and that have more stock and continuing with those that strategic reasons or for having a lot of stock you want to give them a preferential place.
b) Check that the buylines of the product detail pages redirect correctly-
Store traffic comes mainly from Sponsored Brand campaigns but also, although in a less volume, from the buylines of the detail pages. If your products do not redirect to the store correctly, open a support assistance ticket to be corrected, but do not leave it for the last minute, as we approach the event the time of updating and performing the actions that depend on support slow down significantly and you may not get it fixed in time.
c) Check the rest of the tabs and remove the products that you do not have available
It is a pity when a user arrives at the store and they find a catalogue with products no longer for sale, out of stock, or worse, that you do not sell them but a third party seller does so they can gain the customer. Inspect the products included in the store, eliminate those that you are not interested in showing and include those that are missing.
5. Help your products in promotion with advertising campaigns.
Advertising is absolutely necessary if you want to succeed; not only at events but also throughout the year.
Even if you are still doubting on what to do, we recommend you:
- Define a budget for the event and set advertising objectives. Here it is not worth cheating, do it thoroughly. If you do not have much to invest, focus on the products in promotion and if you can’t support them all, choose the most important ones and only push those. It is better to go for all in a few, than half in all.
- Define an advertising strategy and once approved follow it 100%. We usually get influenced away by what our competition does and in the end that is not good. We don’t know their goals, their budgets and following them can be a serious mistake.
- Use the three available Sponsored Ads formats: Sponsored Product, Sponsored Brand and Sponsored Display. Each one covers a goal and success comes from the correct distribution of the budget in each of them.
- Protect your product listings that are promoted with Sponsored Display. We do not want to lose the user to a competitor once we have them on our page.
- Customize the Sponsored Brand format and include the Asins in promotion (or at least include 1 product in promotion of the 3 that can be advertised) and redirect the traffic to the store to the Opportunities/personalized tab.
Amazing, the Advanced Partner, Amazon Marketing Agency, works very conscientiously these types of events, with an experienced team certified in Amazon, with a proven record of success. If you want to know more about Amazing, you may email them to hola@amazingagency.io and without any commitment, ask them your questions and request assistance on how to scale your sales on Amazon both in Europe, USA and Mexico.
