4 Tips to Make Your Amazon Holiday Season Shine Bright

As the 2020 holiday season nears, it’s important for brands to think ahead so they can make the most of the increased demand. This year, Amazon Prime Day marked the beginning of the holiday season by happening in October. The sales during this event exceeded last year’s by $7 billion, reaching over $10 billion globally. With Amazon’s growth above 45% this Q3, now is the perfect time to make sure you’re set up for success.

Let us help you plan your work, and work your plan. We’ve created the following list to develop a successful Amazon holiday strategy—now it’s up to you to check it twice.

Research Holiday Trends

• Understand how the holiday trends across your specific industry are being observed and how larger trends (for example, a lengthened holiday rush) should be taken into consideration when crafting your holiday strategy. Remember that industries vary, so marketers need to first understand their brand, their customer buyer journey, and determine when the appropriate time is for them to capitalize on the holiday demand.
• Analyze last year’s holiday-specific performance by reviewing your advertising and organic revenue spikes to help you best plan your spend and temper internal expectations on when to expect revenue.
• Know the upcoming holiday promotion calendar. Three areas that impact holiday planning are:
  (1) what items are going on promotion
  (2) the length and duration of these promotions
  (3) how the promotion cadence is changing year over year (YoY)

Plan Your Budget

• From a search marketing perspective, align your dollars as close to the revenue spikes found in your YoY analysis. Since those spikes are when users are searching Amazon.com, marketers need to capitalize on pulling in high-quality traffic when it’s there.
• From an Amazon DSP perspective, have budget available to push messaging before and after the holiday period to drive high-funnel awareness and PDP visits. This “Pulse” strategy allows marketers to maximize their search campaigns by helping customers become aware of products prior to and during the holiday rush. We recommend executing this not only leading up to but continuing through this period to capture as many views, visits, and purchases during.
• Post Black Friday and Cyber Monday, capitalize on high-traffic pages by retargeting non-converting PDP visitors on the wider web and drive them back into Amazon for conversion.

Determine Your Goals

• Confirm the goals and KPIs that are needed to make 2020 successful. For some brands, Black Friday is one of the last pushes for hitting company targets, so it’s vital to all be in agreement on what they are and have an understanding of how they’re pacing.
• Depending on what you’re optimizing around—ROAS, Revenue, Purchase Orders, or Shipped COGs—how you set up your campaigns will differ. Knowing these details ahead of time will allow you to plan accordingly.

Create Results-Driven Tactics

• Make sure the ASINs that will be on promotion are front and center by utilizing the full Amazon Advertising suite! By doing so, marketers are unlocking the true potential and velocity for holiday rush success.
• Verify your ASINs that will be getting marketing attention (either by Advertising or Promotion) maintain an average review rating of 3.8 and a minimum of 15 reviews. This is key so your customers ‘trust’ these products enough to generate the high conversion rates you need to hit your goals.
  Note: Rise recently identified review performance thresholds and determined that conversion rates are most impacted once an ASIN receives 100+ reviews.
• Determine what tactics worked best and what opportunities you wished you had explored and pushed further by analyzing your YoY advertising data. This will allow you to generate historical wins while also testing thresholds of last year’s opportunities. Hindsight is 20/20, be sure to capitalize!

Lastly, and most importantly, sit back and enjoy the success for which you’ve planned and worked so hard. Black Friday is a stressful time for all marketers and their business stakeholders. By keeping calm and having a pulse on how campaigns are performing, marketers can make any necessary adjustments to ensure a strong end of the year. For guidance or more information on preparing for the holiday season, reach out to Rise.

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UPDATED: NOVEMBER 5, 2020

This feature was released in October 2019.