During the 2021 holiday season, customers worldwide spent $1.14 trillion on online purchases.
The holidays around Christmas are among the most important sales periods of the year and are therefore an excellent opportunity for merchants on Amazon. On the one hand, customers shop extensively for gifts, and on the other, they take advantage of shopping events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which take place just before the Christmas season. You can make the most of this time to achieve your goals - whether it's increasing sales, raising brand awareness or attracting new customers.
To be able to use the holidays to your advantage, you should start your preparations early. In this article, you will learn how you can optimally prepare for the holiday season and what you should pay attention to.
Take advantage of the pre-Christmas business with Black Friday and Cyber Monday
In order to get off to a successful start in the holiday shopping season, it is extremely beneficial to take advantage of Black Friday and Cyber Monday in order to increase sales. These are two of the biggest shopping events on Amazon. Therefore, it is worthwhile for sellers and vendors to invest enough time to prepare for these events. Black Friday takes place this year on November 25. Then, on the following Monday, Cyber Monday will take place. To be able to create offers in time and optimize your ads, you should start preparing at least 3 weeks in advance.
To learn how you can benefit the most from events like Black Friday, read our blog post.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are only to some extent part of the holiday shopping season. According to Amazon, 67% of shoppers buy Christmas gifts after Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Nevertheless, the events are among the most profitable times of the year. Since the Christmas shopping season begins shortly after the shopping events, consumer demand will remain high for suitable products. Still, you should take extra steps to curb the waning of the shopping frenzy after Black Friday and Cyber Monday. You can achieve this goal by continuing to offer various coupons and deals, for example.
Tips for your holiday business 2022
To remain successful after Black Friday and Cyber Monday, here's what you should consider:
Optimize your product listings
You can improve your ranking in search results by optimizing your product listings. The four main elements, product title, product images, product description and bullets are especially important here. According to Amazon, 36% of Christmas shoppers use product detail pages to discover new products and brands. Therefore, you should make them as informative and intuitive as possible. You can find tips on optimizing product listings in our blog post.
Another essential part of product listing optimization are keywords. Both the backend keywords and the keywords you use directly in the listing are essential.
Optimizing your keywords is one of the best and most cost-effective ways to make your products stand out from the competition. By using keywords such as gifts for parents or toys for children, you can attract additional customers. However, of course, you should only use terms that are appropriate for your products.
Tip: 31% of Christmas shoppers discover new brands and products through ratings and reviews. Accordingly, these are important for your success. Learn how you can get more reviews in our blog post.
Ensure sufficient inventory
If you are planning promotions during the holiday season, you should definitely remember to stock up your inventory. This may sound trivial, but it's essential if you don't want to lose potential sales.
To determine the right amount of inventory, you should look at past sales figures, always keeping current trends and developments in mind.
Develop a pricing strategy
Developing, or optimizing your pricing strategy is essential to the success of your holiday business. Most customers look for good deals when they go Christmas shopping. Such offers often entice them to make a purchase they might not otherwise have considered.
As a seller, you need to find a middle ground when it comes to the price of your products. Prices should not be set so low as to make almost no profit. However, they also shouldn't be set so high that they disappear in the search results and scare off customers because of the price.
Analyze and optimize your PPC campaigns
Analyzing and optimizing your PPC campaigns is especially important during a high-selling time - like the holiday season. Generally, increasing your bids and budgets in advance is recommended so that you can increase the visibility of your products and keep up with your competition.
Note: Make sure you have a sufficient budget so that you don't lose traffic!
It is also important that you continuously optimize your keywords. By analyzing keyword performance, you can determine which keywords will give you a high ROI. During the Christmas season, many customers want to buy directly rather than just obtain information about products. Therefore, keywords that indicate a high propensity to buy are especially important.
However, managing ads manually is very time-consuming and requires a high level of expertise. Therefore, you should use a PPC tool like BidX. BidX continuously analyzes the performance of your ads. The automated bid and keyword adjustments will save you a lot of time and make your ads more profitable. Whether you want to increase your traffic, attract new customers or increase your brand awareness - BidX will help you!
Increase your reach with various advertising measures
Many consumers are on the lookout for gifts during the holiday season. Therefore, you should increase your reach through various channels to benefit from this spending spree. For one, you can achieve this goal through advertisements. Ads can greatly increase the visibility of your brand and products. When you run ads, you are usually displayed higher up in the search results. You can increase your visibility by bidding on seasonally relevant keywords like "gift." It can equally be a good idea to bid on competitive products to generate additional sales.
Advertisers using Sponsored Ads and Display Ads can see a 15% increase in new customers. When combining Sponsored Ads, Display Ads and Streaming TV Ads, the increase is as high as 32%.
Tip: DSP can help you display the right ads at the right time. The platform gives you access to powerful targeting options that you can include in your holiday strategy to increase your sales.
On the other hand, you can also share your offers on social media and in a newsletter.
Create deals
On Amazon, you have the option to offer your customers various deals and offers. These offers should always be well considered in order to achieve the highest possible sales. For example, you can use lightning deals. These are discount promotions that are offered for a period of four to six hours. The deals are displayed on the Amazon Deals page and are therefore particularly attractive to customers.
Note: Lightning Deals must be submitted to Amazon at least three weeks prior to activation and meet certain criteria that vary by marketplace and category.
Likewise, you have the opportunity to offer coupons. Due to their design, they quickly attract customers' attention. Coupons are displayed on the Amazon Coupon page, search results pages, product detail pages, shopping cart, your brand store, and your Sponsored Product Ads.
Note: You should create the coupons early in Amazon Seller Central, as they will be activated no earlier than two days after creation.
If you offer several products that fit together theme-wise, you can offer product bundles. Cross-selling in the form of bundled offers can increase the total order value of customers.
Tip: If you use Amazon Prime to sell your products, your products will have higher discoverability and visibility.
Integrate remarketing into your strategy
Buying gifts can be nerve-wracking for customers. They often look at dozens of products, read through reviews and try to get as much information as possible to find the perfect gift.
These customers may have purchased products from you in the past that could also qualify for a gift. To remind these customers about your products, remarketing is a helpful solution. Remarketing allows you to target those customers who have already purchased products from you or interacted with your business.
Use the Brand Registry
By joining the Amazon Brand Registry program, you can stand out from your competition. With the program, you can protect your brand and also have some advantages in terms of your marketing strategy. If you are registered in Amazon's Brand Registry, you are eligible to use Sponsored Brands ads. These are often displayed at the top of search results, giving your products high visibility.
Brand Registry makes holiday sales on Amazon much easier. When you use the Brand Registry, you have more options to customize your product listings. Unlike wholesalers, you have more freedom to customize your listings. For example, you can create Christmas-specific listings using themed keywords.
Bottom line
The holidays are a valuable opportunity for every seller to increase sales. If you make all the necessary preparations early on, nothing will stand in the way of your success.
With the help of fully automated Amazon advertising, BidX can help you prepare for the holiday season and increase your success.
Thanks to bid and keyword adjustments through the BidX tool, your ads will become more profitable. You can make your ads even more profitable with the help of our Boost and Scheduling feature.
The Boost feature is great for events like Black Friday. With the Boost function, you can temporarily push your PPC ads. The Scheduling function allows you to schedule boosts in advance, or activate or pause campaigns at specific times. Using these features, you can stand out from your competition.
