Amazon Holiday Planning Guide (Steps + Tips to Prepare)

Plan now for sales later!

Countdown to Holiday

It might be hard to believe, but we are a little over 12 weeks away from “Turkey 5”, the five day period betweenThanksgiving and Cyber Monday. Turkey 5 can erase mishaps from earlier quarters or cause you to fall short during an otherwise fantastic year. 

Your level of success will depend on your category and seasonal demand, but regardless of what you sell a rising tide lifts all boats, and we need to capitalize on this opportunity.

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Where to Start

Let’s start by understanding the underlying themes that will position us for success during Turkey 5. We need to develop strategies that will make an impact on how customers find, engage, and buy your products.

• Be Available: Ensure that you have the inventory needed to match customer demand

• Optimize the Customer Journey: Make sure that all customer touchpoints are R.E.D - Relevant, Easy and Distinct.

• Build a Strategy for Traffic: You need to identify new and cost-effective ways to drive traffic to your listings.

• Be Competitive with Your Offers: Sales, promotions, and value bundles are a necessary evil this time of year.

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Be Available

In order to be available you need to have inventory and be able to fulfill orders. As a seller on Amazon, you have two general options for fulfilling product. The first is FBA or Fulfilled by Amazon. This is where Amazon warehouses your inventory and fulfills customer orders. If you are enrolled in this model you need to start shipping inventory for Turkey 5 now as it will take time for Amazon’s FCs (fulfillment centers) to receive and propagate inventory throughout their network. Until the inventory is available within Seller Central you will be hard pressed to drive a strong conversion.

Another option is to fulfill the product yourself or through a 3PL provider — this is known as FBM, or Fulfilled by Merchant. FBM is ideal if you have a commingled pool of inventory or do not have the time or quantity available to ship product to FBA. The gangster move with inventory is to have multiple SKUs set up for the same listing. This enables you to have a SKU as your FBA listing so you can leverage Amazon’s logistical expertise, as well as a SKU for FBM to capture any excess demand after you sell through your FBA quantities.

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Optimize the Customer Journey

During Turkey 5, every seller on Amazon is putting their best foot forward and you need your listings to stand out in the crowd. To do this, you need to look at each piece of creative and content and ask ourself is it R.E.D?

R.E.D. is a framework designed by Collider Labs to help drive marketing strategy for Yum! Brands (and now other clients). What is R.E.D.? Let’s take a look…

• Relevant: Ensure that the creative is relevant to culture and the marketplace.

• Easy: Ask yourself, does this make it easy for a customer to recall your brand?

• Distinctive: Make sure that branding / creative / item is distinct—that it stands out from the competition in a way that you can own.

Focus on the Product Detail Page

Now that we have our framework, let’s focus on the tactical elements that need to be addressed, starting with the product detail page.

• Product Titles - Make sure that your product titles accurately reflect the product and are compliant within Amazon ToS.

• Product Bullets: Review your bullets to ensure that the most compelling and differentiation qualities of your item are the focus of the bullets.

• Product Images - Ask yourself, do these images tell a story about my product? If not, now is the time to change those images and to ensure that they elicit a strong customer response.

• A+ Content - Analyze your content to see if there is an opportunity for improvement. There are most likely opportunities to make the imagery more seasonally relevant and to add more social proof to the listing.

• Reviews - Ensure that you have enough reviews that a customer will feel comfortable enough to purchase.

Review Your Brand Store

The next area of focus will be your Store Page. You need to accomplish two things with your storefront. One - bring your brand forward in as distinct a manner as possible, and two - ensure that the page in shopable. All the distinct branding in the world doesn’t matter if customers can’t navigate to product. Here is a great example from Franklin’s Gourmet Popcorn which does a great job of being brand-forward while ensuring a seamless customer experience.

Optimize Your Advertising Creative

The last component of the customer journey is optimizing your advertising creative. For most sellers, this is only relevant for Display Advertising. Display serves two main purposes…to make customers aware of your products and to remarket customers who have already been to your product page. In either instance, you want to ensure that your ads are distinct — that they remind customers of your brand and that no-one else can easily copy the creative. Here is an example of what not to do from Verizon.

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Build a Strategy for Traffic

If you are going to have big holiday sales, you will need to have strong traffic volume. Organic rankings can only take you so far, and you will eventually need to advertise to get in front of new shoppers. This is especially true as Amazon continues to monetize the search results with a pay-for-play approach. Here are our tips to maximizing traffic during the Turkey 5 time period.

• Start building an audience early through non-branded keywords and prospecting-based display advertising. This will give you an audience (cookie pools) to retarget while running your deals.

• Be prepared to increase bids and budgets; Given the increased traffic volumes during Turkey 5, you can expected to spend 2x-5x your typical daily PPC budget.

• Leverage Amazon’s deals to drive additional traffic. Use Lightning Deals, 7 Day Deals and Coupons to secure additional exposure through Amazon-owned deal and coupon pages.

• Use off Amazon channels to drive traffic to your listings. Not only is the cost of traffic is lower off of Amazon, but you can be more relevant and distinct through your owned-channels like email and social.

By having a strong traffic acquisition strategy you can ensure that customers will see your listings, but that is only half the equation. Now it’s time to convert that traffic into orders.

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Be Competitive With Your Offers

This should be a no-brainer, but customers are looking for deals, and you need to be positioned to capitalize on the seasonal spike in traffic.

One are of focus should be Amazon-owned deals. Not only do these deals show a value to the customer, but they display badging on the search results page. Badging is a big deal for sellers as it helps to improve click-through rates and conversion. In the example below, the gray and red badging help to quickly and visually communicate that the item is on sale and gives the customer a sense of urgency to purchase.

Another promotional tactic that you can use is product bundles. This is where you put 2 or more of your current items together to form a new listing. Bundles are great because they typically boost your average order value, do not show any single item price reductions, and have the benefit of driving customer trial. Even better news, you can do these virtually!¹.

You can always gamble and hope that customers will respond to your products without any discounts, but unless you are Apple, that is a very tall hill to climb.

In Conclusion

Turkey 5 can be a stressful time period, but it can yield massive rewards. If you follow the steps outlined above, develop a plan, and execute there is no reason why you can’t have incredible Turkey 5 sales on Amazon.

Bonus Tip for Holiday Success…

• Start Early - Customers are expecting to see deals earlier and earlier so do not be afraid of running promotions earlier in the shopping season.

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1. FBA items have to be ‘1 item’, so bundles either need to be shrink wrapped together or put into a box or bag and have a single barcode.