In this article we are going to cover the top 7 tips for doing a blast or product promotion on Amazon.
Tip 1 Price
Many Amazon sellers give away 10 to 500 products at a huge discount of 80% off or more to try to boost their sales and ranking.
This can be very expensive because you have to pay for the product that you give away as well as the Amazon fees associated with the shipment. Instead, consider lowering your price by around 50%, doing a smaller giveaway and letting organic sales boost your ranking over time.
This is a slower method but can be much cheaper. It is definitely worth testing a promotion with around 50 to 100 units before committing to a larger promotion. To know how many units you should give away – check out the section on sales velocity below.
Tip 2 Giveaway
If you do plan on doing a giveaway, carefully calculate how many pieces you should use in your promotion.
Many people use an arbitrary number like 50 or 100 because they don’t understand promotion mathematics. The amount you give away depends on the sales velocity and competition in your market.
You want to keep your sales velocity over your competitors for 5 to 10 days minimum. How? Read on.
Tip 3 Discount
If you are going to do a promotion, discounting the item to $4.99 or less usually works best. The cheaper it is, the more people that will be interested in your promotion. The jury is still out as to whether Amazon accepts free or heavily discounted items into its ranking calculation.
Rather than do a big free promotion, test the results of a smaller promotion with a 50% discount and see how this affects your ranking for your main keywords.
You can track your keyword performance on your AMZ Tracker account.
Tip 4 Competition
If you are in a very competitive market, you may need to do promotions every month or even continuously. If you are losing your ranking regularly, this could be because there are new people coming into the market. It might also be because your competition is running ongoing promotions on Facebook or spending heavily on pay per click.
Full price sales will have the most dramatic effect on your rankings, so try to do smaller promotions at almost full price using Facebook ads and Pinterest.
Tip 5 Sales Velocity
This is how many units of a product are selling per day. If you sell 20 a day, your sales velocity is 20. If the top three competitors in your market have a sales velocity of 30 products a day, how can you outrank them?
The way to do it is by running a promotion which keeps your sales velocity above this number for at least five days.
If you are currently selling 20 units a day – and your competition is selling 30 a day, you want to do a promotion with around 15 units a day for 5 to 10 days to get above the competition. Why? Because your total daily sales will be 20 units organically and 15 promo units for a total of 35 a day. That means you are over your competition’s 30 a day sales.
Using AMZ Tracker allows you to boost your sales ranking by promoting products to millions of shoppers on Vipon.
Tip 6 Keyword Tracking
It’s best to focus on one main keyword at a time when you’re doing a promotion. Make sure the keyword is in your title, features and description. Ask reviewers and the people you give a discount code to to use that keyword when searching for your product in Amazon to get the maximum effect. Have them search the keyword on Amazon for your product, then scroll through until they find your item. You can also use a Super URL in AMZ Tracker to do this.
Track the keyword’s ranking over time. Sometimes it can take 5 to 10 days for the effect of a promotion to be seen on the keyword’s organic rank.
The keywords tracking in AMZ Tracker will automatically track your rank for you once you set up your keywords.
Tip 7 Return on Investment
At the end of the day, a promotion is only good if it increases your sales more than the cost to you.
If you give away 100 units of a product that costs $5 and has Amazon FBA fees of $4, the new total cost for the promotion would be nine dollars a unit or $900 in total. If it results in sales less than this then you would’ve lost money doing the promotion.
It’s best to start small, test and scale up your promotions over time. The best tool I know for running promotions is AMZ Tracker. Check it out today!
