With features like one-click ordering, Prime shipping, and Amazon wish lists, Amazon is a dream platform for both buyers and sellers.
The holiday sales spike only happens once a year. So, you may want to consider reinvesting your earnings from Q4 into Q1 to make the party last longer. When done right, Q4 can end up being your most successful quarter of 2021.
In this post, we’re going to break down how to increase sales on Amazon and leverage your Q4 strategy to find success in Q1.
What We’ll Cover:
- Take Advantage of Retargeting Both On and Off Amazon
- Lower Your Bids and Budgets for Ads
- Pause Off Holiday Targeting
- Focus on Brand Building
- Prioritize Creative
- Replenish Inventory
Take Advantage of Retargeting Both On and Off Amazon
With traditional online advertising, you miss out on the opportunity to convert visitors once they’ve clicked away from your site. So when you’re planning around how to increase sales on Amazon in Q1, retargeting is a must.
The basic difference between targeting and retargeting is who you are engaging with. In targeting, you’re engaging with cold audiences. In retargeting, you’re engaging with warmer audiences.
Amazon advertising offers many ad types, including Amazon’s Demand Side Platform and Sponsored Display ads.
One may not be better than the other. Yet, understanding the key differences between these ad types will allow you to prepare your 2021 Amazon ad strategy.
Use Sponsored Display Retargeting to Go After Shoppers
Sponsored Display ads are available to Brand Registered sellers. They have proven to be a popular tool for product discovery and customer acquisition.
These ads give sellers the opportunity to stand out from the competitors due to their ability to drive relevant, targeted audiences to their site. They also drive high cost-per-acquisition and return on ad spend for advertisers.
Unlike keyword-based targeting, Sponsored Display is more like behavioral targeting. The main goal of these ads is to engage shoppers who have previously demonstrated interest in your advertised product or similar product categories within the past 30 days.
Sponsored Display Ads can even appear both on and off Amazon. Amazon can place ads on inventory they own on various websites across the internet.
Use Amazon’s Demand Side Platform to Go After Shoppers
There’s no doubt about it—Sponsored Ads should always be the first choice your brand should make to increase your sales on Amazon. But, there comes a point when you have reached the tipping point on the on-platform demand.
That’s where Amazon’s Demand Side Platform comes in. It allows you to scale toward potential customers and contextual segments, including:
- Lookalike
- Lifestyle
- In-market audiences
- Mobile vs. desktop specific ads
- A/B testing creative
- Ad frequency per unique visitor
- Ad placement, above or below the fold
- Specific domains (can exclude or include)
- ZIP code
Incorporating Demand Side Platform into your advertising mix means that you’ll be able to reach people who have viewed your products and haven’t completed a purchase. You can also reach people who are in the market for a product category but are unaware of your brand.
After the holidays, we recommend using Amazon’s Demand Side Platform to execute campaigns with a 7-day, 14,-day and 30-day lookback window. These campaigns capture the traffic from the holidays and target people who were interested in your products but didn’t complete their purchase.
This will help you make the most out of your holiday momentum.
Lower Your Bids and Budgets for Ads
If you want to increase sales on Amazon, you need to ensure you have enough budget to maintain your campaigns through the end of the year and into 2022. In other words, you want to budget smarter, not harder.
Search traffic, and consequently cost, rise during the week of Thanksgiving and spike from Black Friday through Cyber Monday. You need to be able to quickly react to changes in the auction landscape and make any necessary bid and budget adjustments.
From mid-December (around 12/17 or 12/18), you can expect sales to start declining as we reach the shipping cutoff dates for products to arrive before Christmas. To ensure the most visibility and prevent wasted spend, once you see your conversion rate drop, be sure to scale down spend during this time and lower bids.
We recommend you do this gradually so you don’t end up losing out on any sales.
Pause Off Holiday Targeting
Targeting your ads is a critical part of any successful advertising campaign. And since the rush of the holiday season has come and gone, consumers are more cautious with their spending. That doesn’t mean you have to stop running promotions. Free gift offers, winter clearance sales, and bulk-buy discounts still work can help you win over your customers for the second round of bargains.
But, once January 1st hits, you should go through your campaigns and pause off bidding for anything holiday-related. You want to give users a reason to return to your site, so feel free to continue offering deals and coupons. They don’t have to be discounted as steeply as they were in December, but competitive pricing can help make sales more likely during the first few months of the year.
Be sure to shift your focus to more relevant keywords and the ones that have historically seen the best results. Also, if you fall under the lifestyle, food, or supplement category, consider adding terms like “healthy” or “new year new you” into your campaigns to reach all the shoppers who made health-oriented New Year’s resolutions.
Focus on Brand Building
It’s normal for sellers to be creatively exhausted after the holiday season is over. But, the reality is that many of your customers are still keeping an eye on your brand, giving you a chance to capitalize on post-holiday sales.
The key here is to take advantage of the uptick in followers you gained in Q4. Focus on showcasing your product’s main features and posting lifestyle content that accurately represents your brand.
You need to constantly update the store to reflect the seasons, holidays, or special promotions you may be running to engage your followers
You can even reach out to them with the “Manage your Customer” engagement tool. This tool lets you market directly to Amazon customers who are following your brand. This helps your brand build loyal, long-lasting relationships with Amazon customers and helps boost the visibility of your new products.
According to Amazon Seller Central, “The Manage Your Customer Engagement program currently supports new product announcements, and additional templates will be added in the future. The Manage Your Customer Engagement is available to registered brands that have an Amazon Stores page with followers. If your brand is not already registered, visit Amazon Brand Registry to see if you are eligible. Once you have a Stores page, create a post that features quality content to increase your followers.”
Prioritize Creative
For many, the New Year brings a new mindset. By midnight on December 31st, the demand for products related to self-improvement and productivity increases significantly.
During this time, it’s vital to do a complete overhaul of your creative. Remove holiday branding and storefront pages and replace them with resolution-focused content.
You can even incorporate video into your store and Sponsored Brands ads to capture your audience’s attention and highlight your product selection.
Regarding how to increase sales on Amazon, sellers have no choice but to ramp up product listings and creative.
According to Yoni Mazon, an Amazon expert, and chief growth officer of GETIDA, “Sellers understand today, now more than ever before, the need to really communicate with the consumer, the end target, in the most sophisticated, beautiful, creative way possible. Whatever benchmark you created, keep pushing for the next one because it’s very competitive out there.”
Replenish Inventory
The pandemic brings about new challenges with supply chains and fulfillment. Preparation is the key to increasing sales on Amazon.
“In 2021, roughly half of consumers bought from a different brand than their usual choice due to product unavailability, which means the market is ripe for operationally sound brands to chip away at marketshare,” says Dylan Verburgt, strategist.
To cut losses and combat rising costs, we suggest sending your inventory now for January-March. Unfortunately, supply chain issues will only end once consumer demand falls. And for now, that doesn’t look like it’s going to be anytime soon.
So be ready to manually fulfill if your Fulfillment by Amazon listings go out of stock so you don’t see a drop in sales.
Michael Sense, VP of Sales at Deliverr, notes that “We can all agree that 2020 was a defining year for eCommerce, and 2021 demonstrated that same high growth. Reflecting on that, one of the most important lessons we learned is that merchants shouldn’t be completely dependent on any single fulfillment strategy. Amazon sellers will continue to need to supplement FBA with FBM for greater control and flexibility.”
Wrapping Up
When it comes to how to increase sales on Amazon, product advertising can be challenging any time of year. However, it can be particularly tricky after the holidays.
It’s important to keep in mind that people don’t have the same buying habits in Q4 that they do in Q1.
But with the tips and tricks outlined in this article, you can tap into this often-ignored sales period and prepare for your best quarter yet!
