How to Drive Sales on Amazon During Black Friday / Cyber Monday 2024
The Black Friday / Cyber Monday holiday shopping season this year will be the biggest shopping event in Amazon’s history. That means more shoppers, more visibility, and more sales opportunities to grow your brand than ever before. However, the Amazon competitive landscape is also more competitive than it has ever been, meaning you need to have the right playbook in place in order to win. In this post, the Bird Dog Agency team breaks down how to most effectively leverage inventory planning and management, conversion rate optimization, a deal/coupon strategy, and advertising to make sure you dominate this holiday season.
Inventory Planning & Management
The most important thing you can do to properly prepare for and get the most out of the holiday shopping season is to make sure your products stay in stock and available throughout the year and into 2025. You can have the most elegantly targeted, well funded, and expertly deployed advertising strategy with best in class creative video assets, but if you can’t get your product to the customer’s door, you have absolutely nothing. While much of your inventory planning strategy has likely already been rolled out, there’s still critical considerations for you to stay on top of.
The first thing to remain aware of, especially for 3P Sellers on Amazon, is that you are constricted by inventory storage limits that Amazon sets for your FBA inventory. Each Seller has a different storage limit, which is determined by your sales volume and velocity history and expressed by an Amazon metric called Inventory Performance Index (IPI). A poor IPI score reduces the amount of inventory you are able to send in, while a healthy IPI score grants you more Amazon fulfillment center space to inbound FBA inventory into. It’s also possible you sell products which are subject to ASIN level inventory restrictions, which limit the amount of FBA inventory you can inbound for a single product.
Demand will increase significantly during the holiday shopping season, so it is imperative to forecast expected sales growth in order to remain in stock while meeting that spike in demand. The best way to do this is to use historic data to understand sales growth from your pre-holiday benchmark to hone in on how much additional order volume you expect. This should be done at the ASIN level in addition to the account level as you will need to prioritize your best sellers to send in to Amazon warehouses. You will also want to keep in mind that it can take as much as 6-10 weeks of lead team for Amazon to receive, scan in, distribute, and make available your inventory after you have packed and shipped it to them.To be safe, you should send in at 12 weeks worth of inventory to have full coverage.
UPDATE: As of this writing, Amazon west coast fulfillment centers are full. This has resulted in Amazon pausing inbound shipments to these fulfillment centers, reducing relative inbound shipment fees for east coast fulfillment centers, and extending the shipment closure window for the automatic closure of inbound shipments. Our recommendation at BirdDog Agency is to send in more inventory coverage than you were originally planning to in order to insulate yourself against these delays.
Conversion Rate (CVR) Optimization
Increased traffic during the Black Friday / Cyber Monday period means that your products will receive more impressions through both paid and organic sources and that more people than ever before will be seeing your brand for the first time. This demands that your brand and products are optimized for clicks and conversions across all shopper touch points including ad placements, the search engine results page (SERP), your Amazon brand store, and your product detail pages.
Product detail page (PDP) listing content optimization is the most critical area to focus on when it comes to ensuring your products are ready for the increased shopping volume of the holiday selling season. While it’s table stakes to make sure your product titles, images, bullet points, and descriptions are optimized, those are not the only visual on-page elements shoppers use when determining whether or not to purchase. Components of your offer, including price (we’ll get into this more below), shipping speed/fulfillment type, availability, product review score, your seller rating, and Amazon badges all influence the CVR of your PDPs. From a rich content perspective, product carousel videos, shoppable A+ content modules and high-quality video all help convert your shoppers from browsers to buyers. Specifically, lifestyle images/videos (images where your product is featured in use by real people) and infographic images (especially for more technical products) are most effective at showcasing how your product solves a problem and adds value. These same principles apply to your Amazon brand store, where we recommend creating a dedicated tab within your store to items running a deal or coupon
From a written content standpoint, you must keep in mind that you are catering your content to two different audiences: 1) the actual humans looking at your product pages and 2) Amazon’s A9 search algorithm which is indexing on-page written content and backend keywords to help determine relevance in search results. You want your content to help a prospective shopper make their buying decision and also want to make sure you are indexing against your target search terms for search ranking. There is a multiplier effect at play here, as any marginal gains you can extract from improving CVR will improve the efficiency of your advertising not only through the promotional period, but beyond.
Deal / Coupon Strategy
Just as with Prime Day in July and Prime Big Deal Day in October, shoppers are coming to Amazon during the holiday season expecting to find low prices, big sales, and steep discounts. Based on past year’s performance, the Bird Dog Agency team recommends that your discounts be at least 20% off regular pricing in order to move the needle in a significant way. As a brand advertiser, you have a number of tools at your disposal:
Prime Exclusive discounts are available only to Prime Members and receive unique placements on the Amazon home page and promotional deal pages. They also add a badge to your product, which helps both click-through rate (CTR) and CVR.
Lightning Deals are available to all customers and create a sense of shopper urgency since, as the name implies, they are only running during a limited period of time. Lightning deals are particularly useful for gaining traction with those shoppers who have come to Amazon specifically seeking deals.
Coupons cost brand $0.60 per use and are one of the most effective CTR and CVR drivers available to brands. While the bright green coupon badge attracts the attention of shoppers, we regularly see customers forget to actually redeem the coupon. At Bird Dog Agency, we routinely see coupon redemption rates <30%even for coupons as much as 50% off. We highly recommend that all brands consider coupons as a part of their promotional strategy.
The most important aspect of deciding on what deal strategy is right for you is knowing what your goals are for the holiday shopping period. Some brands use this event as a way to gain new-to-brand customers at the expense of short term profitability, while other brands seek to maintain a certain level of profitability per order which informs how deep they discount. There is no right or wrong approach, as long as you understand how each tactic supports each goal.
Advertising: Leadup, During Event, Leadout
Leadup: The months and weeks prior to the holiday shopping season can oftentimes be just as if not more important than the BF / CM period itself, since shoppers begin the browsing process in anticipation of deals that will be available later. This is also a period when shoppers are discovering brands for the first time and adding products to their carts and wishlists to revisit for price cuts. It’s not uncommon to see an increase in clicks, a drop in CVR, an increase in CPCs, and higher ACOS during this time. At Bird Dog Agency, we recommend increasing ad budgets to ensure that campaigns remain in an always-on state as traffic volume increases.
This time period is always when reaching your most relevant audiences through Amazon DSP is absolutely crucial. DSP Retail Essential Creative (REC) ads in particular give you the ability to deploy multiple creative variations to serve distinct audiences the most effective creative for their shopping behavior preferences. This is also the time to layer in Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to generate high-performing lookalike audiences using Amazon’s first party customer data insights.During Event: Your primary objectives during the BF / CM period are to make sure your campaigns do not pause due to insufficient budget and to make in-flight campaign adjustments based on real time performance. For example, if a certain campaign, product, or keyword are producing a high volume of clicks (spend) without sales, you will want to deep dive and triage that scenario immediately in order to prevent runaway wasted ad spend. It’s possible there is an issue with your product content, the offer, or the discount / coupon strategy which is having a negative impact on performance. Similarly, you want to be quick to respond to instances where a campaign, product, or keyword is performing well and over-delivering on expectations so that you can allocate additional budget and increase bids to maximize your returns. It’s also critical to stay vigilant when you achieve Amazon badges such as “best seller” or “Amazon’s Choice” badges, as these can provide a significant CTR and CVR boost to ad performance.
Leadout: The post-holiday period presents a massive opportunity where many brands begin to take their foot off the gas at a critical moment when you need to take strategic action. Beyond reviewing sales performance, taking stock of inventory levels, and understanding where your BF / CM strategy succeeded and failed, this is a time to re-engage with your recent shoppers and buyers in a targeted way to establish a more durable relationship with them. DSP and Sponsored Display (SD) remarketing are two of the more straightforward ways to remarket to customers who engaged with your products but who didn’t convert. If you are remarketing to customers who saw a product which didn’t have a discount on it during the holiday period, this is also the time to promote a price discount to see if that gets them to convert.
The leadout period is also where AMC custom audiences give you a competitive edge in terms of targeting your browsers with tailored messaging. A few of the most valuable custom AMC audiences you will want to consider leveraging are:Shoppers who added your product to cart but who did not purchase
Shoppers who added your product to a wish list but who did not purchase
Shoppers who searched for a specific keyword but did not purchase
Existing customers who are not subscribers
Lookalike audiences
Conclusion
Amazon’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday shopping season is an absolutely critical time of year for brands to capitalize on not only in the moment, but also as a springboard into the next year. Through the strategic understanding of inventory management and planning, conversion rate optimization, a comprehensive deal/coupon strategy, and a sophisticated advertising approach from leadup to leadout, you can make sure you maximize the opportunity to grow sales and build your brand. Reach out to Bird Dog Agency today to help get started.
