Optimize Your Product Listing For Christmas Sales
If you are planning to optimize your Amazon product listing for Christmas to hit some massive sales, here we’ve discussed some effective tips which will be of great help. It is tough to compete with top sellers during the Q4 season but that doesn’t mean you should be losing out on your business. In fact, the more you update and research, the easier it will be for your store to quickly get noticed. A lot of Amazon sellers look for quick hacks when it comes to boosting visibility, but you can’t always rely on black hat tricks! In fact, to ensure your account doesn’t undergo suspension, ALWAYS stick to Amazon’s guidelines especially during holiday season or during high sales periods.
THE BIG HOW ON CHRISTMAS?
Here’s how you can quickly optimize your product listing for Christmas sales, if you want to be a profitable merchant this holiday season:
Understand the Christmas Cheer!
To keep it simple – understand your clientele, especially during Christmas time because this is when they’re going to hit the shop button the most. Irrespective of what category your product comes under, check out what your competition is selling, in terms of discount coupons, freebies and add-ons. Do a good study of their past customers, and maybe you’ll find something new to add to your listing. When you already know your clients are on the lookout for Christmas presents, this is the time to act – throw in a discount, give them free shipping, add promotional content on your web stores and advertise using Amazon PPC.
Does this sound familiar? Of course it does, but the trick is in the presentation, the text content and how you use your keywords. Go to your seller central account, open each listing and make sure you add keywords in the search terms that should have “christmas” as a part of the long tail keywords. This is known as targeting the clientele out there who’re specifically looking for Christmas gifts, and products.
Stock Your Inventory
You’ve heard this before and we’re winging it again – stock up that inventory, and actually keep an extra bundle for those products that are already best sellers. Christmas sales has a lot to do with understanding where you’ve hit your sales the most, and which products have yet to sell out fast. If your inventory list has “x” number of products that ALWAYS have a high order volume, then keep those stacked up, nice and good. If your inventory list has “y” number of products that have yet to sell out, make sure you have enough. And most importantly, highlight those products in your ad campaigns that already are best sellers.
Cold Pipeline Needs Heating Up!
To put it in layman’s language – we’re talking about those products that rarely make it till your customers. Imagine someone looking for Christmas toys for their kids. If your store comes under this category – toy category – then it’s important you recreate the content for such listings from scratch. Don’t upset the algorithm for those listings that already have good visibility. We’re talking about a cold pipeline here, and its your job to identify these products, redo the listing from scratch with a new set of keywords, and maybe (its a quick tip, give those away in a combo deal)
Get a Festive Makeover
If you’re familiar with A+ content, you know what we’re talking about – CONTENT! CONTENT! CONTENT! You don’t need a black hat trick to actually tip the scales for any of your listings. It’s all about delivering fresh content, doing a quick research for the latest keywords, checking what’s getting indexed and what isn’t, and finally – creating a great informative copy. If you don’t have EBC, that’s perfectly alright. Your Christmas makeover can also be in the form of redoing your brand profile on Amazon’s marketplace – let’s say some new banners? This can include adding fresh lifestyle images to your listing with a Christmas theme to them. Chuck out the old ones, deliver something innovative, that in keeps with the holiday spirit and actually showcases some good use.
Mobile Friendly Content
It’s understood that 80% of e-comm sales take place online, and via a mobile phone. Don’t expect your customers to order in using their laptops, if they’re already browsing through their mobiles. Here’s a quick tip – keep a close eye on who’s checking your website, social media channels and store pages. Your sale begins from a customer browsing around for a product – and it converts into a sale once they find the perfect product – something that comes with good reviews, FAQs, and enough images to visually give an idea of the product. You can download mobile friendly templates for your landing page, create ad copies that are simple to read and have enough CTA buttons.
Don’t Forget Those Testimonials
This is the time you need to highlight customer reviews and testimonials. Whether its in the form of an Amazon PPC ad copy, or a Facebook campaign that includes your product listing’s link, it’s all about generating leads. There are many people who generally buy products, after they’re done browsing on social media channels. It is your job to grab a customer’s trust by creating ad copies that come from different angles. It could a testimonials copy, or it could be content that offers a discount coupon. It could be informative, and lead the customer onto your page’s blog or it could be a lightening deal on Amazon.
Find Your Magical Keywords
Just like children find their magic and inspiration from adorable Santa Claus stories, you need to find your magical keywords. And only once your products start showing up, you’ll start making those high figure sales. To get the customer, think like one and here’s how you start –
1. If you’re a customer who wants to buy a product, you obviously know nothing about keywords. You will type in just about anything that describes what you want. And if its for Christmas, that word itself is going to be part of the search. Here’s an example – let’s say you’re looking for Christmas lights, but you specifically want a certain kind and type. But if you don’t know what it’s called, you will go for common words like “christmas light”, “christmas lighting”, “lighting accessories for christmas”.
2. Once your customer finds something that he/she wants, they will click that product but don’t assume its a buy because EVERYONE wants to surf more, decide later. If your customer has a brand in mind, as a seller you find those top end brands and sneak in these keywords in the search terms. Always pick out keywords with the highest search volume, and layer them out in your content. Your product title is the MOST important aspect of the listing – so with 4 to 5 exceptionally high volume keywords, and other specifics, create a title that’s bound to grab the bots.
3. Emphasize on phrases, and these can be used in your listing’s description, the bullet points and pretty much everywhere. Don’t make content that’s stuffed with keywords, make content that’s smart with keywords. If you know what your customers are typing AND pushing in misspellings, then you’ve hit the jackpot. With Amazon, its a constant trial and error phase. A/B testing is precisely finding out what works and what doesn’t, but here’s the trick – you need to make all the above changes at least 20 days ahead of Christmas. Your shoppers are just getting warmed up, and before you know the search volume of these keywords will hit a blast a week before Christmas, two days before Christmas, 24 hours before Christmas, and Christmas morning.
4. Try going for a tool if you can to do this research, and one is enough! A great recommendation would be Helium 10 that specifically works for Amazon sellers and vendors. If you want a tool that targets your PPC ad copies, we would recommend Viral Launch or eComEngine if you’re looking for feedback software, but if you want the big guns, check out Jungle Scout for their latest updates. But what if you’re old school and not all that tech-savvy to begin with? You can’t be an outstanding Amazon seller, unless you have a team of amazon human resources backing you up. The research is immense, and the workload is enough to keep your people occupied even during the holiday season. That’s not a heartwarming cheer now is it?
Is there more I can do? Yes, You can and You SHOULD
What’s On My Wishlist – Did we forget about this?
Every customer on Amazon has a wish list so its important to understand if your product has been added to one. Not many sellers remember that a wish list is basically a client saying – I love this, but I’ll get it later. And this is a cold lead that you would want to work on. The best way to do that is by pitching in a discount on such products because your customers will automatically be aware of the change in pricing. We aren’t asking you to reduce the price of every product, in fact that’s not profitable. For products that are incredibly high priced, a discount coupon; say 50% OFF is enough and should be applicable for just a few products. For products that come under mid-range budget, 10 to 15% OFF is decent, or you could also opt for free shipping. The trick is to understand which products are already a favorite, and the next you do is to turn that cold purchase, into an actual active purchase.
How Do I Optimize My Product Ranking?
The first thing to note – don’t panic and don’t focus on your ranking right when Christmas is around the corner. To build your ranking, you need to work on your listing months ahead, and before Q4 even begins. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work on your ranking, it means you have a focused ranking. This means don’t try and rank for everything, because you might just get nothing. Pick one main keyword phrase that you know works best for ALL your listings, and use that to the fullest, even for those ad campaigns. A good practice is to use two keyword phrases for each bullet, and another keyword phrase that’s your main. What we’re trying to say here is that if your going for a keyword phrase like “christmas lights”, let that come around in your content more often for e.g. christmas lights setup, christmas lights installation, christmas lights decoration etc.
What’s New?
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While we can continue babbling about Christmas sales and those delicious profits, there’s always something new to add to the cart. Stay tuned for constant updates, if you’re eager to learn more about selling on Amazon efficiently. You can contact us directly or subscribe to our mailing list.
If you need any professional help for your Amazon store management, get in touch with us at amz@fabongo.com.
Fabongo is a Vancouver, British Columbia based agency providing human resources to manage all things Amazon marketplace.