Dustin & Kris discuss some tips and tricks you should be doing now to your listing for the holiday shopping season. Some of the topics we cover will be Amazon FBA inventory restrictions, testing A+ content, and using Amazon Live!
Q4 is here! 10 Tips and Strategies to Increase Your Sales on Amazon!
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Dustin Cain and with me as always is Kris Gramlich. What’s happening
– Not much man, how are you?
– I am good. It’s kind of a cold, dreary day out here. It’s kind of bringing in the holiday season, I feel like.
– Yeah, I think we had it yesterday it was 80 and today it’s going to be like 45. So I think we’re for the long haul.
– I think so. 45 degree-day here in Kansas City is a good day to start talking about the holiday shopping season that’s coming up here.
– Sure.
– So there’s a lot we’re going to go through here on this one but we’ve got for you guys today, the top 10 tips for preparing for the holiday shopping season. So these are things that Chris and I have done in the past. Some of the things that we’ve discovered from other people to tactics that work well. Because we’re gonna, the sales are gonna be exploding now, the traffic on Amazon is going to go up. and we want to make sure that we’re positioned to the best possible. And there’s some different search techniques that people use on Amazon in the holiday seasons. So we’re going to cover out how to sort of maximize everything. This is always fun for me, Kris, because this is part of the game. It’s strategizing ways to just get bigger and bigger slices of this Amazon pie. It’s fun because it’s a lot on here.
– Yeah, that’s where he can get creative and start to think about marketing your product and stuff. So this is like a different mindset, especially for Q4.
– Oh yeah, for sure. And this Q4 can just be a huge boost to your business right now. So we want to make sure that we’re doing all the right things. I mentioned this before, but anytime the sales volume increases on Amazon, if you’re doing things poorly, it’s going to be magnified. You’re going to be further and further potentially suppressed because you’re listing because your competitors can be doing things better and if you’re doing things great, it’s going to be magnified in a positive way in terms of that velocity. You’re gonna have more sales and move up the rankings even more. So these things are important and we want to go over all of them. So why don’t we just get right to it here, Kris? The first tip is to test your price. What do you mean by that, Chris?
– Yeah, so what you could do during this time is test your price, move it up a dollar or two or maybe even a little bit more just to see if you can pull in a little bit more margin. During this shopping time, people are conditioned to shop, especially during this time of Q4. So if you’re able to pull in an extra three, four, five dollars per sale, that could really add a lot to your bottom dollar. So don’t be afraid to raise your price up during this time, people are in shopping mode. If you do see a conversion rate go down over a two week period, you can always lower it back down. But from my experience, raising your price during this time is only going to add more to the bottom dollar here.
– Yeah, and that’s a great point. It’s psychologically, it can be difficult to raise your price a lot of times because you feel like, “Oh man, my competitors might be lower,” et cetera. But you made a good point. I mean, people are their mindset’s different right now, they’re not bargain shopping, they’re trying to get what they need to get for gifts. And if their price is more than they want, they’re not gonna be bothered by a dollar or two increase in the price but that can make a huge difference in your bottom line. So that’s an absolutely great point, I think on the flip side of that if you’ve got something you’re trying to get rid of, lower it. Just take it I mean, just drop your price down and liquidate it. This is a great time if you’ve got stuff you need to move or get out of inventory or whatever, that’s not selling for a certain reason or whatever, you can lower your price and this is a great time of year to liquidate it. So yeah, definitely testing your price is an important thing. All right, next up, create ad campaigns with holiday-related search terms. This is one I think that gets overlooked by a lot of people, but you have to go into the mindset of a buyer right now. I mean, if you’re someone shopping but you’re not really knowing what to get and you’re in a research mode, you might type in something like “Christmas gift for a five-year-old girl,” or whatever, something like that. And if that’s your target audience, if you have a product that’s for a five-year-old girl, that is a great keyword to add to your campaigns and you and I have both seen this work in the past.
– Yeah, this is where you could just set up a new campaign as an exact match and just put in certain gift-related search terms or holiday-related search terms. And this goes back to past episodes we’ve talked about where you need to know your audience. This is where you know your audience. If you know you’re targeting women 35 plus and this is what they shop for, you want to use search terms related to that audience. But so create a new ad campaign, get your top 10, 15, 20 holiday-related search terms, put those in an exact match. You can set an end date on this if you want, towards like the end of December or right before Christmas, you could put an end date if you want. So you kind of get this over with but you don’t have to but yeah, get this ad campaign running, get it started now so you can start to get some history with it.
– Yeah, those are great points there, Chris. All right, so, let’s move on to the next one. This is interesting to me cause I haven’t done this yet, this next one but this is something we’ve seen with video ads, just unbelievable conversions right now. And so this is taking it a step further. So tip number three is to create new video ads with a holiday-themed setting. I just think this could be big.
– Yeah, I mean, especially as a shopper, if you’re scrolling through on Amazon’s page and you see a Christmas tree on a video and somebody’s by a fireplace and they’re playing with a toy that they’re selling or whatever that they’re promoting, that’s going to get your attention. So if you have a product that is a gift-related item, and you have access to video ads, create a quick video ad. I’ve done this with my iPhone, it’s super easy. I was kind of hesitant to do it but I just tried it and it really does work on your phone and you can really edit it down and add some texts and you’re up and running. It didn’t cost me anything except a couple of hours maybe, but yeah, creating a video ad with some holiday theme, that’s just gonna get the customer’s attention. You’re going to get that click and hopefully, you get that convert.
– Yeah, and I don’t think we can stress it enough. I mean, we see all the people that we work with on a day-to-day basis. We see what’s happening with video ads right now, and they just perform incredibly well. And so this tactic is just making your video ad even more attractive to the shopper right now if you can add some more holiday elements to it. The great, great suggestion there. Let’s say, now we’re going to stick to this same theme because this is, there’s a lot of these tactics that you can do across your listing. So tip number four is add some sort of holiday decorations or Christmas tree images to your product images. And they can’t do it on the main one, but you can do it on the rest of them. And this can really stand out as well if your images are now more holiday-based, it can make a huge difference.
– Years ago, I used to do this for my main image, and it actually did work. Amazon wasn’t as active as far as suspending a listing or an image but now, they’re all over it. So, well I recommend doing is put it on your second image, adding like a holiday bow or a Christmas present or some type of tree or Christmas tree or whatever. Just so people are that people are of the mindset that you’re getting emotionally attached to a product or they’re realizing it’s going to be a gift. And again, this is something that’s temporary, you can always take it off after the holiday season but adding this will just help that person feel comfortable buying it for a gift, increases your conversion rate, hopefully, creases your So it has benefits to it but make sure it’s your second as if you do your first image, they’ll suppress the listing. So don’t do that.
– And on another note, I mean, this just makes your brand look so much better. I mean, you think about in the past just in retail marketing, the big places like Macy’s and all the plays and FAO Schwartz in New York, their products were so much more attractive because they had this whole holiday scene around it. And if you’re doing that for yours, I mean to the buyer, you look like a bigger, better company who cares about their products because you’re changing your listings for the seasonal holiday. So yeah, there’s a lot of upside to that. Moving on, tip number five, not just your images but if you have A-Plus content, you can update your A-plus content with holiday decorations images as well. And this just goes on that same theme, it’s just gonna be more attractive, you’re going to stand out. You see product A next to product B and product A is all decked out in holiday stuff, it just is much more attractive to the buyer than plain old boring product B right next to it.
– Yeah, and it reminds me of being it when I was younger we’d get the magazines that would be for holiday, you get to go through and circle what you wanted for Christmas and stuff. And then the holiday magazine was completely different than the magazine you got in July, it was totally different. They had the decorations, they had the people opening them gifts. So this is what you’re doing to your listing, you’re just adding more holidays to the A-Plus content. You can test this out just to keep people, again, emotionally attached or in the holiday mood. And this should just help again with your conversion.
– Yeah, and I think another thing to keep in mind this time of year is it’s not always adults that are looking on Amazon right now. I have a son, his birthday is coming up in a couple of days and he’s on Amazon nonstop adding stuff to the cart that he’s like his birthday wishlist. So we’re gonna go through there and get him a few of the things that he’s picked, but to think about that, kids are doing that right now. Where do you think kids are looking for their Christmas wishlist? They’re looking on Amazon. And so they’re going to, they are going to really be drawn to cool pictures, seasonal stuff. So this is another thing to keep in mind is there’s a lot of people adding stuff, and a lot of them are kids, to carts right now. So make sure you’re taking advantage of all of that. All right. Number six, we’re cranking on through these Chris, this is good. This is another thing that I think could be very valuable at this time of year. It’s also something that I haven’t done yet. I know that you’ve dabbled in this some, but not maybe not for the holidays, but creating holiday bundles for your FBA products using virtual bundles. This is something that Amazon’s rolled out, it’s been around for a little while but you can actually create bundles where you don’t have to… In the past, if you wanted to bundle something, you’d have to package it up as a bundle and ship it in as a whole brand new skew. So there’s a lot to that but now you can create these virtual bundles where you can just pick two or three of your products to sell together at a discounted price. And Amazon will actually pick and pack those together for you so you don’t have to bundle them. So it’s an amazing program that Amazon rolled out. And yeah, I can see tons and tons of uses during the holiday season for this. I mean, the first thing that pops in your head is what does everybody get all the time as gift baskets? Well, that’s essentially a bundle.
– Yeah, this is something I think will help you stand out because you’re going to have these bundles and it’s going to be below the main image right there. And if it has the title of like holiday bundle or Black Friday bundle or Cyber Monday bundle, this is going to get the attention of the people that are visiting your page. And if it’s a really good deal and you really have a really good offer, you’ll be able to sell more. So your average order value could go up a little bit, especially with the units, added more units is going to go up a little bit. But this is just another way to create a bundle that is going to look different, it’s going to show up in search. You can add multiple items in it and then again, when you’re done with it, you can always get rid of that bundle or deactivate it and just go back to the original bundle that you had. So virtual bundles are nice, they allow you to just take FBA products and link them together. You don’t have to do the whole packaging and stuff like you used to do in the past. So use these to your advantage.
– Yeah, yeah you can make an unlimited amount of bundles so you can certainly test this out and you might find out that you’ve got a bundle that’s a winner, you just keep it going permanently. And that would be nice. All right. Moving away from virtual bundles, and now let’s talk about emails. So number seven, this should be a no brainer in terms of strategy, but it can be overlooked a lot of times, if you’ve got an email list of your customers, you should email your list and promote all of your deals straight to your email list. It’s free.
– Yeah, and they’re going to be used to expect it, I mean, it’s the Q4 holiday season. They’re getting emails from everybody else. So make sure you promote your products that you got on ads or that you’re using coupons on. You could also if you’re using any type of messenger marketing, you can send text messages to that list. You can send messenger messages to that list. So this is just a good way to promote your products and increase your conversion rates. Again, this is gonna help with ranking, but you want to reach out to these customers because you’ve taken the time to build the list, now it’s time to use the list.
– Exactly. Yeah, this is when you cash in. And I would send more than one email, I would send it periodically throughout the season just to stay top of mind for them when they’re shopping. Cause yeah, I mean, I do that all the time, I’ll get an email and I’ll be like, “Oh yeah I was gonna buy that.” And then I go to buy it. I’d have never done that if I hadn’t been prompted. So yeah, definitely take advantage, that email list is your asset and you want to cash in on it right now for the holiday season. All right, number eight, create coupon stacks related to the holiday. So like Black Friday sales, Cyber Monday sale. Coupons are great. They’re attractive so–
– You’ve mentioned this before, right?
– What’s that? Creating coupons?
– Yeah, you’ve talked to some episodes where you’re using these coupon stacks.
– Oh yeah. Oh, there’s all kinds of things that you can do. Number one, you can do BOGOs, buy one, get one. So on one of your products you could have, it says right there when you set up this coupon, it’ll say promotions, there’s a little promotion section on the listing and it’ll say, “If you buy this item, “you can buy this other item at 50% off or 20% off,” or whatever. So again, it’s not bundling necessarily, but it can increase your order value. You definitely want to do this for products. If you’ve got one product that’s a winner, it’s got a lot of traffic and you’ve got another product that’s newer less traffic, you definitely want to have that coupon on that first product because it’ll drive traffic to that second listing and get people to add those to their orders. So you can certainly do this and these are things that you can also send out in your email, all these coupons that you created. But it just as another thing when you set a coupon up, or a promotion like that, it’s another section on your listing that’s a competitive advantage.
– Yeah, and you can control the title of these coupons, you can write it in titles that you want to be displayed. So this is where using things like Black Friday sale, Cyber Monday sale, whatever the holiday round you’re going with, you can use those in those coupons and then that just looks like your relative. When somebody comes to your listing like, “Oh this is a Black Friday sale, I’ll take advantage of it.”
– Absolutely. So definitely take advantage of all these things that Amazon offers, coupons are one of them. Another thing with coupons is I guess you could call it what we talked about for more promotions. What we’re talking about now is coupons where if you set up a coupon for your products, this is tip number nine, create coupons so you get that neon green badge on your listing. It’s great, it doesn’t matter what you discounted if you set a coupon code for 5% off for that product or whatever, a neon green badge that says 5% off goes right at the top of your listing or right on the listing. And it’s, I mean, it’s probably the biggest differentiator besides just your images in terms of you see that badge on the listing compared to all the other ones that don’t have it. And people love deals, they love them. So if you combine–
– Something to add to that, keep going, yup.
– If you’re ready and if you’ve tested your price and you’ve been raising it, then the coupon just makes even more sense. Did I steal your thunder on that?
– I’m sorry to cut you off. No, sorry to cut you off there, what I was going to get at is you’re using that neon green so that’s going to be below the price, especially in search, somebody types your search term and they’re going to be, you’re going to show up because you have that neon green coupon there. Something I’ve seen recently is, and I think Amazon’s testing this out, is if you haven’t lowered your price in the last 30 days, it’ll show like a red percentage off. It’s like if you lowered your price 10%, Amazon will show a little red box below the price along with the coupon you’re offering that says save 10%, 10% off in red. And then you got a coupon that says save an additional 10% off. I mean, if you’re running all that stuff, your listing is really going to stick out, especially if you’ve got really good images and really good titles. So if you haven’t lowered your price, lower it like a dollar or two. I know we talked about raising your price earlier, but this will add a red badge to your listing on top of that green coupon you’re offering that’ll really stand out definitely in search.
– Yeah, cause what does red and green represent? Christmas maybe.
– Christmas. So yeah, you’d have Christmas all over your listing. Yeah, so that is something we’ve seen, that is super interesting because and just thinking here, you might be able to test that price raise, like now like in October, and then raising it up two, three dollars or so then when maybe after Black Friday or sometime when you when the holiday season kicks in, maybe lower it just a tiny bit and then you could get that benefit. So that could be could be another–
– Yeah, that’s a good idea.
– Great strategy there. All right, well these are all, these are all great. So let’s do the last one. Number 10. This is also something I haven’t done. Chris, I don’t know if you’ve done this yet or not, but it’s sort of new on Amazon as well, but use Amazon Live. I’ll let you go with this one.
– Yeah, I haven’t done it yet, but I’m gonna do it this year. Essentially what you’re doing, you’re just going live on Amazon. You’re just talking about your product, it’s like QVC. Now you’re doing your little QVC for those of you who you know what that is, your home shopping network, but you’re doing your own little commercial for your product. Answering questions, showing the benefits of the product and it’s Amazon Live. I think only brand registered brands have this capability right now, but it’s just an app on your phone. Download the Amazon Live app and you go live and you can promote your product. We worked with a customer of Sellozo’s over the weekend, they did a sale and they saw high ticket item and they sold nine units during their Amazon Live. And they haven’t sold nine units in a month. So Amazon Live worked for them. So I’m going to test it out, I’m going to see how it works.
– Absolutely. And interesting, I’ve spoken with someone who’s been doing a lot of Amazon Live as well. And those videos show up all over the Amazon platform. Once there, your live videos can actually be on… There’s a section that says videos related to this item on other product listings. I mean, your live video could actually be almost like product targeting. It could be on your competitors’ listings. and it’s just more content on Amazon. There’s no way it can hurt to have that and that’s really interesting to see someone make those sales like literally while they were live, which is amazing. Yeah, so those are the 10 tips. I got to get busy, I got to implement some of these.
– I got one more bonus tip that might be something to check out here, especially if you are doing FBA. There’s restrictions now on what you can send in, the number of products you can send in. So if you don’t have FBM offer yet, you want to make sure that you create that because if you run out of inventory, you want to be able to flip on the FBM so you can keep that sales momentum going. So if you’re doing FBA, go create an FBM offer for that product and just have it as a backup plan in case you run out of stock on your FBA.
– That’s a great point because we’ve got right now with inventory and Amazon, there’s so many things going on with the inventory limitations now that there’s setting on you. I mean, you might sell out on Black Friday and then you’re in, you don’t want that to happen. But also, right now the check-in times at Amazon if you do send an inventory, it’s taking longer for them to check it in right now. I don’t know if that’s going to get faster. I mean, so there’s only gonna get busier with the holiday season. So that’s a great point, you have to have that FBM listing ready. Now you also have to have inventory somewhere else if that happens, like at your house or your warehouse, but if you do, you absolutely need to do that, that’s a great bonus tip. We gave you 11 tips. We advertised 10 tips but we gave you 11, that’s good stuff.
– That’s what you get for sticking to the end.
– That’s right, that’s right. Well, that was fun, Chris. That’s a lot to cover, we’ve got a lot to work on. Again, if anybody’s out there, we work with Sellozo. If you’re looking for anything with your advertising or optimizing your campaigns now, we would love to talk with you. You can go to sellozo.com and book a time with either Chris or I. And we’d love to talk with you, we talk to sellers all day long and we’d love for you to be the next seller that we talked to. So feel free to reach out and we can help walk you through what Sellozo does and how it can help and we can also just talk Amazon. We don’t mind, we like talking to people, talking about Amazon.
– I can do it, I mean, we can do this all day.
– For sure. Also, if this podcast is beneficial to you, which we hope it is, please share it, like it, leave us a review, all the things to help get more awareness to this podcast because we’d like to, we just want to make sure we have to build a community here of Amazon sellers that are helping each other out. So please do that and leave us a nice rating. All right, that was everything. Chris, again, that was fun and we’ll be back at it again tomorrow.
– Monday, we’re not coming in tomorrow.
– Oh, we’ll take the weekend off, I forgot it was Friday.
– We’ll take the weekend off.
– All right.
– All right, I’ll see you.
– See you, everybody, bye.