The trees are shedding leaves, and we can’t ignore it any longer-We’re well into Quarter 4 and that implies only one thing: you should be well into holiday sales preparation. As you go on to strategize the do’s and don’ts of ways to maximize revenues and sales, here’s an overview on some high order strategies that will get your sales, promotions, and most importantly, profits off to a grand opening.

OPENING STATEMENT

Fourth Quarter Holiday Season is round the corner and this is the time for sellers to begin prepping for the same. Quarter 4(October – December) is a grand window of opportunity for the Amazon sellers to target maximisation of their revenue potential. The Prime Day, starting October this year, the prospect for sellers to rake in revenue should be getting bigger. The flagship event merged with Cyber Monday, Black Friday and the holiday season sets in to create whooping sales record, and business houses must be prepared in advance.

Amazon Seller! Here is big news for you.

This Q4 holiday season of shopping, you can kick start your sales and succeed at crushing the ever growing competition. Now, staying abreast of the competitors might sound intimidating, but if you try and beat the competition with a tried and tested game plan,  you have a first order chance, not only overcoming the stiff competition but also accelarating sales revenues and maximising profits.

Selling on Amazon, allows the sellers, the access to millions of potential buyers, but it is a massive competitive market with all third party sellers, attempting to grab a slice of the pie. Most, rather all, good things in life come for a price and if you want something, you ought ti work hard to attain your goal.

Here are some relevant tips which may help boost your sales and revenue incomes this festive season  :

1. Plan your inventory:

Inventory planning is critical to hitting your sales goals. Running out of inventory on Amazon during holidays costs hundreds of thousands in lost sales. At the same time, you may double your sales and increase brand visibility with careful preparation. Amazon is focused with deliveries during the festive season. It is common for inventory to sit in trailers for days, waiting to be received. Thus, it is important that your inventory arrives before you need it. Ensure that you have sufficient stock during the sales surge. It will also provide time to restock, if need be.

As a seller, you need to eye up what you have in stock and which products are predicted to become stars. Do you need to move through existing units in stock or do you need to replenish? Deciding whether to increase inventory or not should happen early. In terms of strategy, you need to review best selling products because you may need to over invest. Develop your merchandising plan in accordance with your sales reports to see items that perform well.

2.   ADVERTISING.

Prep your sales early and get ready to drive sales this holiday season. Advertisers will have the opportunity to take advantage of significant traffic and sales potentials. This is the time to optimise your ad campaigns so as not to miss out a minute of potential sales. Your advertising goals must  help shape your holiday strategy.

• If sales increase is your priority, then focus on keywords that are driving clicks and coverting into sales. Keep track of your advertising cost of sales (ACoS), setting an ACoS target that helps you reach your sales targets.
• If creating brand awareness is your priority, then focus on impressions or the number of times your ad is shown. Add more of relevant keywords and set strong cost-per-click (CPC) bids to help you win and gain impressions.

Set your campaigns to run in continuity without an end date, which will aid in building sales and new customers. Running your ads in parallel with your sponsored product campaigns will help expanding your reach and engorge buyers in multiple stages of purchase journey.

3.   PRODUCT LISTING OPTIMISATION

The holiday season is around the corner, it becomes important to list your priducts accurately with optimised keywordsto sell more. Holidays in Q4 are the busiest time, bringing in huge responsibilities. Working rigorously on these responsibilities will help end the year on positive and massive product earnings.

So, the query of interest is how to start the listing optimisation for your product during the holiday, thereby increasing your sales considerably.

• Keyword Research    – The spine of listing optimisation for the products. It is vital to make an extensive research on keywords that the customers are searching for. A product listing without a detailed analysis of keywords will not rank in the search results page.
• List Account Product Information    – Do not ever err on not investing enough time to list product information accurately and in depth. Listing the detailed and authentic product information shall help you rank high in search results pages.
• Optimize Product Image, Title and Product Description    – People would be giving gifts during the holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Providing them with more than two or three clear images can be extremely helpful. The clearer they can visualize your product the better is your chance of conversion. Also, optimizing the product title and descriptions would help you sellers sell more than twice your average sale during the sale season of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

4.   DISCOUNTS AND PROMOTIONS.

Sellers, gear up to provide discounts on general products a lot, providing incentive and motive to the consumer in every possible way. You must provide a monetarily equivalent perishable good or item whose sales value you foresee declining. Strategy is, clubbing similar sets of products together in a hamper, best terming them accessories or related purchase essentials. This shall assist more sales and create a good Amazon strategic plan.

Make use of data available to you to find out the interest and likelihood of customers going for similar purchases. A customer who purchased decorative lights is likely to buy extension cords and bulbs and other decorations, more so, if offered discounts.

Additionally, coupons improve the visibility by placing your products on Amazon’s coupon pages, which are among the most visited during the holiday season, as people are on a look out for good deals and offers. You need to create robust deals and promotion strategies to increase visibility of your products and attract more customers. For categories like electronics, beauty, health, personal care and handmade items, the sellers should strive to get their products in the Amazon gift guide.

5.   PARTICIPATING IN HOLIDAY DEALS.

Lightning deals are a very popular marketing tactic. The deadline for submitting Black Friday and Cyber Monday Lightning Deals lies between late September to early October. To participate, you should consider options as early as in August and finalizing decision by mid-September.

Along with Lightning deals, you should plan in advance for coupons and giveaways. During the holiday season, especially Q4 holidays, these popular pages see most traffic, as more and more buyers seek great deals.

There are content creators who have huge following on social media sites, blogs, You Tube, and such other platforms. These content creators are big influences. During the holidays, the shoppers tend to turn to these social influencers for gift ideas and suggestions. Sellers, thence, must partner with these influencers placing their brands in far- and wide-reaching gift ideas for the holidays.

In the days leading to and through Cyber Monday Week, start the promotion of your deals, coupons and giveaway freebies with social advertising. Such targeted ads take your product to top of the mind shoppers head to Black Friday. This shall help you bypassing competition.

To ensure that your brand gains high order placement, you will need to allocate surplus budget behind them, during November and December. The increased expenditure might be a bitter pill, but worthwhile.

6.   REVIEW YOUR PRODUCT PORTFOLIO AND THE STORE BEFORE BLACK FRIDAY

Amazon is a continuously evolving shopping site. To be successful here, you need to innovate and expand your brand portfolio on a regular basis. If you aim at expanding your reach and thus sales revenue, you should strive towards expanding your product line. Product research and analysis shall assist you in keeping up with evolving consumer demands and fetch you a decent profit.

Study contemporary trends to figure out products and items or brands that you can add to the existing inventory. The significant factor, here is, getting the list ready much before Black Friday, that is the Friday after Thanksgiving, which sets in the shopping spree for festive gifts and holiday shopping.

The trends keep changing, so make sure to be on your feet to adapt. The best way to figure out what is popular in this time is to analyze Amazon’s ‘best-selling ‘ list. Filter the list by category to get a better grasp of what us popular in each segment.

Also, make sure your brands have a fair number of reviews before Black Friday. Your product’s visibility largely depends on customer feedback and reviews, CTRs, conversions and product’s sales history amongst others.

Summarizing the holiday season Game Plan:

Pre-Holiday

Use last holiday’s data of trends to keep up with budget planning and allocation. Review keyword performance for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands ads that were active in the last holiday to get an idea of what strategies worked well.

Set budgets for the Q4 of the year, increasing your daily campaign budget caps and portfolio budgets to prevent ads from capping out and pausing during the day.

Identify which products to prioritize with advertising and ensure that inventory levels will be sufficient through holiday.

Inform shoppers with robust, descriptive titles, multiple high-quality photos, rich bullet points.

Ensure that advertised products are retail ready. Amazon recommends advertising products with at least a 3.5-star rating, 15 reviews, and optimized product detail page content.

Showcase priority products and holiday deals on the homepage of your store. Utilize the dynamic deal tile to highlight sales products on various pages.

Peak-Holiday

Actively monitor your campaigns:

Check that your ads are active and delivering properly. Ensure that portfolio and campaign budget caps aren’t being hit early in the day. 

Search for your ads in the wild throughout the days to verify that your ads are showing as intended and understand what your competitors are doing.

Once you’ve made it through the peak Holiday rush, you’re almost done! There are a just few more steps you should take to close out the season and ensure your accounts are ready for the next year.

Post-Holiday

Step down bids and frequency settings as demand decreases.

Revert daily budget caps and portfolio budgets to pre-holiday levels.

Pause holiday-specific ads and switch out seasonal creative.

Update your stores pages to replace holiday creative and expired product deals.