Holiday 2023 Holiday Checklists To Last-Minute Shopping User Guide

Holiday 2023 Holiday Checklists To Last-Minute Shopping

Holiday 2023 Holiday Checklists To Last-Minute Shopping

IMPORTANT INFORMATION

‘Tis the season! So get prepared for holiday shopping, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and end-of-season deals!
57% of consumers will begin holiday shopping on or before Thanksgiving.¹ So you’ve got loads of time in the run-up to make sure listings look appealing and can help convert customers during their shopping journey. With 60% of U.S. holiday shoppers planning to spend more than $250, along with 10% planning to spend more than $1,000,² high-intent customers are just waiting to find the right deal or visit a brand store that gets their attention.
We’ve put together this guide to help you find the programs that meet your business objectives and help you gear up for the holiday rush. So, let’s dive in!

The top influences for holiday purchase decisions include:²

• Price (50%)

• Sales or discounts (22%)

• Free shipping (13%)

• Fast Shipping (7%)

• Buy online, pick up in-store (4%)

• Easy returns (4%)

With a variety of programs available to you, you can bolster specific aspects of your brand strategy to appeal to multiple customer types.

A+ Content

Maximize your conversion rate from all the Deals you’re running by adding top- notch A+ Content that adds holiday cheer! Thoughtfully implemented Premium A+ Content can increase sales by up to 20%.

Showcase your holiday spirit through A+ Content!

Use the A+ Content Best Practice Guide to understand the program features available to you, recommended best practices, and use cases in which they can be applied. The three types of A+ Content include Basic, Premium, and Brand Story. Basic and Brand Story are free to all brand owners, while Premium may require eligibility criteria that need to be met before use.
Basic A+ Content offers a great starting point for you to elevate your product listings with enhanced images, text placements, and product comparison charts.
Premium A+ Content provides more creative freedom, when compared to Basic, to communicate product features through larger images along with interactive and multi-media formats, such as hot spots, navigation carousels, Q&A modules, and videos.
Brand Story enables you to expand your footprint on the product detail page in a dedicated space titled “From the brand” or “From the manufacturer.” Use this space to build connections with customers by sharing your unique brand story, value, and mission.

Tell Your Brand Story
Use banner images to show your products in use. Feature various elements of your brand and add content to all of your ASINs in order to create a consistent brand experience. Utilize both Basic A+ Content and Brand Story modules on your ASINs to maximize your brand presence on the detail page.

Know Your Customers & Their Purchase Barriers
To help reduce returns and negative reviews, be sure to address your customers’ most common concerns with the Q&A module. Pull insights from customer reviews, returns, and customer communication to identify which topics you should cover.

Update/Refresh Content
Update your content regularly to avoid details becoming outdated. You can use the Brand Story feature to decorate your listing page with a holiday or gifting theme, which can be applied across your catalogue through the bulk upload feature.

Improve Discoverability
Use text fields across modules, limit the amount of text embedded in images, and use descriptive Image Keywords (alt-text) for each of your uploaded images.

Educate on Product Value
Help customers feel like experts on your product features and construction. Detailed explanations, with specific words and numbers, are associated with higher sales lift. Be helpful, friendly, and don’t use a lot of general, “sales-y” text.

Tips to consider

Before you start, here are some ideas to inform your strategy:

• Setting up A+ Content requires preparation. You’ll need to create the content assets (images, texts, videos) in advance to upload them to a variety of modules in the A+ Content Manager, which can take an average of two to three hours per A+ Content project. You’d also need to account for the multiple ASINs and modules. Your timeline will depend on what assets your brand has available and your catalogue size. It may take up to seven business days for your content to be reviewed and approved for publishing.

• Use the Brand Story feature to highlight your top products and seasonal discounts to maximize your cross-selling opportunities during the peak season. Brand Story is a great feature to showcase other products from your brand that you want to highlight and promote during the holiday season.

• If you want to take advantage of Premium A+ Content features and you have already had 5 projects approved and published within the past 12 months, use the Brand Story bulk upload feature to get your Brand Story applied to all your ASINs to complete your eligibility for Premium A+. Premium access will be automatically granted every Friday for newly eligible sellers.

• Use the comparison chart module to inform customers on specifications or use case differences between similar products in your catalogue, or even showcase other products that may be of better value. With Premium A+ Content, using the new shoppable Comparison Chart 1 can potentially double the cart conversion rate compared to other non-shoppable comparison chart modules.

• Use high-quality images and balance the multimedia and text combinations by using a variety of different modules. Ensure text sizes aren’t too small and images aren’t blurry.
  With Premium A+ modules, sales can increase by up to 9.7% by adding videos. 96.3% of customers surveyed said video was crucial for researching products, and those that viewed videos are 3.6x more likely to convert than non viewers.
  

• Help customers make informed purchase decisions by proactively addressing their needs and answering frequently asked questions using the Q&A module.

• Simplify the benefits for complex, feature-rich products by answering questions like, “What does this button do?” and “What does this material look and feel like?”

• Showcase photos of all angles of the product or different uses so customers have a better understanding of what they’ll receive if they purchase.
  

• Include technical specifications to simplify key details of your product that customers need to know.

• If you have access to video modules through Premium A+, use these modules to surface shorter clips showcasing various aspects. For example, a 20-second clip of the product in use, followed by a 20-second clip of various product angles.
  

• Customers want video that aids them with pre-purchase decision making, post-purchase set-up help, and everything in between. They expect a wide range of content while shopping online. Leverage your existing content from social media and brand websites to enhance the Amazon shopping experience.

• And then optimize! Run A/B tests via Manage Your Experiment to prepare content that is proven to resonate with your customers prior to the peak sales season.
  

Create A+ Content

Manage Your Experiments

Start running experiments on all your eligible ASINs now to upgrade your listing page details in time for the big holiday sales events! Publishing the winning content that resonates with your customers may increase sales by up to 25%.

Experiment with creative assets that feature holiday season elements, like winter snow fun days, gifting imagery, and festive laurels! And switch things up through the event season to see which version of your content resonates with customers and leads to conversions.
And if you don’t have marketing assets created already, take advantage of the holiday-season traffic to your listings to get results on your experiments for your next peak season. With Experiment to Significance, you can now complete your experiments between 1-10 weeks by reaching statistical-relevance!

NOTE
Running experiments on your listing page details does not impact your Amazon Search rankings!

Some quick optimization ideas:

• If you have previously started experiments, make sure to change your setting to Auto-Publish and Experiment to Significance so the winning content  can be automatically published once the experiment reaches statistical-relevance.
• You can now run experiments directly from the “Edit Listing” page for title and image experiments while you are updating your product listings. Just click on “Create Experiment” in the left-hand side selection menu. Your current title or image is auto-populated and in four easy steps your experiment is launched.
• You can now run simultaneous experiments on a single ASIN across multiple countries. This new feature will help you run a general market research experiment to see how customers respond and gain location-specific insights to tailor your content to that country.

Improve Conversion Rates
Run experiments on high-traffic ASINs to get faster results and understand the impact of optimizing content that can be applied across the catalogue.

Showcase Your Brand
By experimenting with A+ Content you can stand out against the competition with visually appealing content, tell your story to customers, and help customers make the best shopping decisions.

Increase Sales
View sales and conversation data on the content you test, so you can implement the higher performing content.

Need inspiration?
Here are some ideas:

For title and bullet point experiments:

• Add benefits of the product. Adding benefits to the title or bullet points may help introduce customers to your differentiating factor and improve click-through rates. While it may not guarantee a purchase, it could pique interest in the product.
• Reduce your product title length to under 100 characters to help reduce noise and increase focus on the differentiating aspects of the product that can appeal to the customers.

For Image experiments:

• Add high-resolution images to your content, and refresh your existing images.
• Include lifestyle imagery and attractive product shots, and test the variations.
• Highlight one set of features versus a different set with your image, and see what works best.

For A+ Content experiments:

• Introduce different A+ Content modules to your detail pages. Replace standard image modules with dual images with text modules or add comparison charts.
• Reduce clutter by using a variety of modules.
• Experiment with including and excluding the company logo based on brand popularity. Including a brand name in a title may have a positive or negative impact based on customer perception, so test both options out.
  

Get Started

Amazon Live Shoppable Videos

Have you identified the ASINs you’re planning to feature for the holiday season? Next up, add some engaging videos!

Shoppable Videos, or detail page videos, live in the Media Block on a product’s detail page. They can also appear below the fold and in search.

Diversify your content
Customers want a wide range of videos that aid them with pre-purchase decision making, post-purchase product use, and everything in between.
Focus on creating informative, demonstrative, and authentic content. Leverage any existing content from your social media platforms, brand websites, and existing content library to enhance the Amazon shopping experience.

Uploading videos to your Amazon product pages can:

Improve product/brand perception
Tell your brand story and let customers know what makes your product unique.
Decrease returns and damages
Upload informative videos to aid with purchase decisions and setup.
Improve product sales and conversion
By adding product detail page videos, sales can increase up to 9.7%. Moreover, customers that watch videos are 3.6x more likely to convert than non-viewing customers.
Showcase Your Brand
Entertain, inspire, and inform customers throughout their shopping journey with authentic video content.

*Source Amazon study highlighting the lift in third-party seller revenue when a video is added to a listing where no video existed before, studied over a 90-day period (2018-2020 US data).

What kind of content should you feature?

Here are some general recommendations:

• Storytelling

• Troubleshooting

• Social media lifestyle

• How-to / Try-ons

• Unboxing

• Product setup

• Product review

• Product demonstration

Final checks

Keep in mind, your videos don’t need to be high budget productions. Your customers care about the quality of your content, but that doesn’t mean content creation needs to be complicated. Keep it simple and make sure to check your lighting, background, and audio before uploading!
You can start uploading your own videos by navigating to Catalog in Seller Central then selecting Upload and Manage Videos.

From here you can:

• Assign a single video to multiple relevant products.
• Upload multiple videos to a single product listing.
• Track the review status of a video.
• Use automatically-created thumbnails, or swap them out for an image of your choice.
  

You can also upload and manage existing video content  by navigating to the Video tab under Catalog > Upload Images > Image Manager.

Get Started

Brand Tailored Promotions

Give your customers more reasons to buy from your brand.

Create exclusive discount offers in the form of a promotional code and potentially increase conversion among the selected customer segments.
Re-engage your high purchase-intent customers who are already a part of your Brand Tailored Audiences segmentation, such as Brand Followers, Repeat Customers, Recent Customers, and High-Spend Customers.
You can also acquire new customers with the newly launched ‘Potential new customers’ and ‘Cart Abandoners’ audience – helping to ensure they cross one more gift off their checklist from your brand!
Promotional discounts can be offered ranging from 10% to 50% off, and must be offered on all ASINs within your brand, however each eligible customer can redeem the promotion on a single purchase (limited to one unit per customer).
In today’s competitive market, driving holiday sales for your business is especially important. Offer exclusive holiday promotional codes to customers who have previously engaged with your brand to more efficiently spend your budget on customers who are more likely to purchase your products. By tailoring discounts to specific customer segments, you can:

1. Maximize Revenue: Tailored discounts ensure you’re offering the right incentives to the right customers, leading to higher conversion rates and increased sales.
2. Clear Inventory: Move surplus stock and improve cash flow while delighting customers with cost-effective pricing during periods of economic uncertainty.
3. Enhance Customer Loyalty: By showing your appreciation through discounts, you’re able to build stronger long-term relationships with your customers.

Looking for more inspiration?
See how Luminara incentivized customers to take that final step in the purchase journey. Learn more with this guide.

Get Started

Manage Your Customer Engagement

Running spotlight-worthy holiday deals or launching the must-have holiday season gift? Let your customers know! Engage your most loyal customers with tailored email marketing campaigns.

As we head into the holiday season and popular sales events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s important to keep your brand top-of-mind with customers to build brand loyalty and increase repeat purchase rates.
Get your brand in front of your existing customers and brand followers by sending them a promotional email. Manage Your Customer Engagement is a no-cost tool that allows you to send marketing emails to your Amazon customers who are brand followers, repeat customers, recent customers, and high spend customers.
Whether you’re looking to promote a new product around an Amazon shopping event or alert customers of a great Deal, Manage Your Customer Engagement has you covered. With pre-populated email templates, you can quickly create an email marketing campaign to reach and engage your customers.

Manage Your Customer Engagement supports the following:

• Percentage-Off promotional codes: Offers promotional discounts ranging from 15% to 50%, or a set denomination value on your entire brand catalogue or a subset of your brand catalogue.
• 7-Day Deal details: Time-based deals that are listed on Amazon’s Deals pages for up to 7 days.
• Product Launch Announcements: Alerts your customers of new ASIN launches.

Ready to connect to your customers and inspire repeat purchases? Navigate to Seller Central, Manage Your Customer Engagement can be found in the Brands menu under Customer Engagement.
Watch the video to learn more

Create Your Campaign

Post-Holiday Customer Engagement

Incorporating Brand Tailored Promotions, Manage Your Customer Engagement, and Customer Review programs into your strategy can also be extremely effective after the holiday season sales have wrapped up:

• Offer promotional codes for your brand catalog with Brand Tailored Promotions: Consider engaging your recent customers, those who represent the most recent 5% of customers in the last 12 months. These audiences are refreshed weekly, so your customers from Black Friday and Cyber Monday will be included. Favor a different strategy? If you’re looking to boost sales by the end of the year, consider offering promo codes and discounts to customers who are likely to repurchase from your brand, such as Promising, Top-tier, and Repeat customers.
• Increase the visibility of ASIN launches, deals and promotions by sending a marketing email with Manage Your Customer Engagement: Quickly create and send email marketing campaigns to brand followers, and repeat/recent/high-spend customers to surface your latest launches and promotions
• Read and respond to reviews for a deeper understanding of customer sentiment with the Customer Reviews tool: Resolving Customer Reviews can help uncover insightful product usage insights and strengthen connections with customers. We recommend resolving critical reviews, those with less than three stars, every 30 days so your current and prospective customers know you appreciate their business and support.
  
  

Brand Analytics

Create a winning holiday strategy powered by data.

The dashboards available to you as a brand are powerful tools that can help you understand consumer behavior, connect with customers, and grow your business. Here are some tips on how to make the best use of Brand Analytics.

• Customer Loyalty Analytics NEW
  Identify and re-engage high-value customers, optimize marketing spend, and reduce acquisition costs: The Customer Loyalty Analytics dashboard can empower you to connect with potential new customers, re-engage with existing customers, and optimize your marketing efforts.
  Unlock valuable insights into your customer’s shopping behavior alongside historical trends, giving you visibility into your brand’s performance over time. The dashboard also provides recommendations along with integrated engagement tools — such as Brand Tailored Audiences — for focused engagement of customers, enabling you to quickly and easily send promotions, coupons, and email campaigns to select customer segments.

• Engage and acquire new customers: Put your best foot forward to ensure you are capturing customers’ attention and converting on your product. Use the Search Catalog Performance dashboard to identify ASINs with high traffic (impressions, clicks) and high sales (purchases, conversion rate). You can copy and paste an ASIN into the “ASIN View” of the Search Query Performance report (for the same reporting date range) to understand which customer search terms are driving the most traffic and sales to your listing. Use this data to update your listing titles, bullet points, and advertising campaigns with these search terms.

• Get an edge over the competition: Understand who your top competitors are on a selected search term and how your products measure up. You can click on a search query within the “ASIN View” of the Search Query Performance report to drill down to the Search Query Details report, which surfaces data on up to the top 10 ASINs for the selected query. You can compare your detail page quality, pricing, and keyword relevance for Big Deal Days optimization.

• Grow your business: Identify bundling and cross marketing opportunities to acquire new customers and drive repeat purchase. Use Market Basket Analysis reports to identify new bundling and cross-marketing opportunities by seeing which products Amazon customers (in aggregate) most frequently purchased at the same time they purchased your other products. Use the Repeat Purchase Behavior reports to strategize and assess your marketing campaigns to drive repeat purchases and acquire new customers.

Access Amazon Brand Analytics Dashboards

Brand Referral Bonus

Earn a bonus on the holiday sales traffic you drive to your Amazon store.

In preparation for the holiday sales events, you may already be maximizing your marketing efforts on- and off-Amazon. So why not make those marketing dollars go further? When you drive traffic to Amazon with the Brand Referral Bonus program, you can earn a bonus averaging up to 50% of the referral fees of product sales driven to Amazon.

Take a leaf out these brand playbooks for successful strategy ideas using Brand Referral Bonus:

• The team at Honest Paws saw 12% conversion rates and sometimes $12K to $15K in sales on a single link. Read more
• Lumineux sold $2.1 million worth of products in a Deal of the Day, including $1 million through Brand Referral Bonus and Amazon Attribution links. With the 10% bonus built into the Brand Referral Bonus program, Lumineux earned $100,000 back from Amazon in addition to their standard revenue. Moreover, they noticed four times the clickthrough rate when the link text mentioned Amazon versus their website, and also saw conversion rates grow four to five times over what they were seeing on their website. Read more
• The team at Spigen gained access to new insights that helped them evaluate product interest, product purchases, and customer preferences. These performance insights were used to know where to increase their marketing budget. Read more
  Learn How to earn a bonus

Get Started

Build Your Brand Page

Stay informed and up to date on all of Amazon’s shopping events and beyond.
Visit the Build Your Brand page to explore the brand-exclusive programs designed to help you build a differentiated
brand and achieve your business objectives. And stay informed on Prime Big Deal Days and all future updates – with Build Your Brand Announcements.

Explore the BYB page

https://tinuiti.com/blog/shopping-feed/google-shopping-ads-trends-holiday/

References

• Google Shopping Trends and Optimization Insights for Q4 2021

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