With Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving and Christmas all right around the corner, this is a great time of year to think about promoting your products and getting them ready for one of the most profitable periods of the entire year.
— Amazon customers purchased enough TV’s in Q4 of 2017 to create 2,500 towers the size of the space needle & enough instant pot pressure cookers to make 9-MILLION bowls of chili simultaneously! —
Those are some crazy statistics and just go to show how valuable this selling period can be for you. Sellers that work and put in the effort to improve their products and prepare for this season can expect increases in sales of up to and over 1000%.
If we are looking forward to selling over Black Friday and Cyber Monday then we should be taking steps NOW to ensure that our product listings are optimized and ready. Here’s our guide to help you prepare your products in time for these upcoming sales and get the most out of this holiday season.
The first thing we will be looking at is our product listings so let’s dive straight into that with one of the most prominent components of your product page, the product photo.
A picture is worth a thousand words or so they say. No matter whether you believe it or not it’s well known that the vast majority of Amazon shoppers will draw their first impressions straight from your product photo.
Good product photos should be of professional quality, clearly displaying the product and its features. Here’s a quick checklist we put together that you can use to make sure your own product photos are ready for the holiday season.
The answer to all of these questions should, of course, be yes.
“Does my product…?”
- Have a clean white background & the highest resolution possible.
- Accurately and clearly display the product without watermarks or intrusive graphics.
- Take up around 80% of the total image. We don’t want too much or too little white space.
- Accentuate the product’s features & show how they will meet the consumer’s needs.
- Tell a story of how the product will fulfill its role.
- Build an emotional connection with the customer.
If the answer to all of these questions is “YES!”, then you are good to go and you can move on to the next section.
The next thing we want to address is our copy. Your product listing copy is the next stop on a potential customers path to the checkout. Here we are trying to list the product’s features and uses with clear and captivating writing.
It is crucial that your product’s title and description contain essential and high-value keywords that will rank across multiple categories. If you need some advice on what keywords to use and how to find them then you can check out the article we wrote last month on Keyword Research.
We want our product title to contain as much ranking power as possible.
With each sale of a product, keywords from the title of that product will receive a little boost in value.
Similarly, if our title is full of relevant and high-value keywords then each and every sale of our product will boost the visibility of the product in the relevant sections leading to an enormous increase in exposure and visibility.
– We want our product to be as VISIBLE as possible over the holiday season. The more views a product gets the more chance we have to make a SALE –
You can also consider using bullet points to add longtail keywords to listings and list product features, but remember to keep it readable and intriguing.
Here’s our checklist to make sure that your product title and description are both ready to go.
- Have I done in-depth keyword research, analyzed the keywords used by my rivals and researched popular longtail niches?
- Does my product title contain the essential keywords that I will be trying to rank with?
- Does my product title take advantage of every character available? Spaces after commas can be excluded and title-case used to increase readability.
- Does my listing comply with Amazons quick start style guide?
- Do my back-end keywords contain more search terms?
Last but not least we should make sure that our product listings are optimized for mobile and any enhanced brand content we have access to is also set up and optimized.
We know it’s a lot but we are almost there. Now that our listings are optimized we are ready to LAUNCH our product in time for the holiday season and ride that wave of sales to the moon!
So how exactly do I get to the front page in time for the holiday?
Let’s take a minute to talk about product launches.
A product launch is a promotional campaign where a product is sold at a drastically discounted price (sometimes just breaking even) in order to rapidly boost its sales rank and hit the front page.
If we are going to front page and take advantage of the holiday season then we need to be sure of two things.
- When in my specific market do sales for my product begin to increase for the holidays?
- We have a strategy to launch or product and boost our sales rank in time for the beginning of the holiday sales increase.
If we launch our product too early we might see ourselves having to extend our promotional campaign in order to maintain our ranking lest we drop off before the start of the holiday sales. This can cost us both inventory and money as we giveaway possibly hundreds of products at reduced prices.
If we launch too late then we might find ourselves missing the holiday sales entirely or having to giveaway absurd amounts of products to fight the increased competition around that time.
Our aim should be to get to page one just as sales begin to increase we can ride the wave up to the top.
A good rule of thumb is to launch your product 7-10 days before a major holiday or buying event. But, we recommend using a bit of Google’fu and researching last year’s sales figures for your chosen niche. Timing is vital when taking advantage of these sudden surges in customers.
If you are looking for a great place to launch your new products then look no further than Vipon.com, With Vipon you can launch product promotions through their electronic direct mail, smartphone app, and international website.
There’s a Black Friday holiday special happening right now so jump over there and check out some of their fantastic deals. I have personally seen products increase in sales rank by up to 500% ranks to their promotional campaigns.
Don’t miss your opportunity to take advantage of one of the most profitable periods for Amazon Sellers. Click here for more details or contact us at ads@vipon.com.
We hope you all have a wonderful – and profitable! – Holiday season.
The AMZ Tracker Team.
