Author Archives: Greg Bonsib

Amazon Prime Day 2019 – What You Need to Know

With just five days left until Amazon’s Prime Day 2019, here’s an outstanding article from bqool.com for third-party sellers (3Ps) on to take advantage of this highly unique mid-summer two-day sales event.

Amazon Prime Day 2019, one of the biggest ecommerce events of the year for both Amazon sellers and buyers, is making a return this summer 2019. The event creates plenty of opportunities for sellers to greatly boost sales and entice buyers to take advantage of many excellent deals on Amazon. Let’s see what we can do to get ready for Amazon Prime Day 2019.

What is Prime Day?

Amazon Prime Day is Amazon’s very own Black Friday, all the existing deals on Prime Day are available exclusively to Amazon Prime members, who can enjoy lightning deals, price cuts, and various types of promotions.

An official date for Prime Day has not been announced, but we can expect it to begin in mid-July this year based on the fact that it ran for 30 hours from July 16th through 17th in 2018.

Shoppers expect deeper-than-usual discounts and the best prices for products across nearly every category: electronics, home & outdoor, kitchen, TV and personal audio, smart home, and many Amazon’s house brands products such as Amazon Music, Amazon Fire TV Stick, Amazon Echo Spot, Amazon Echo. It’s never too early to start planning your shopping list by reviewing the best Amazon Prime Day deals of 2018.

How sellers can benefit from Amazon’s Prime Day?

According to a recent report, the amount of sales made on global Amazon Prime Day 2018 was nearly 4.19 billion U.S dollars, and more than 100 million products were sold during the event. Amazon Prime Day 2019 is no doubt a huge opportunity for all online retailers to maximize their sales.

amazon-prime-day-stastics

So how can sellers best prepare to convert Prime Day enthusiasm into sales?

  1. Inventory management

inventory-100

Make sure you are stocked up to meet massive demand on Amazon Prime Day 2019 to avoid going out of stock on popular items because this sales event will bring tons of traffic.

  1. Pricing and discounts

pricing and sales

Amazon Prime Day 2019 is all about deals, so if your pricing is not competitive enough, your Prime Day sales number may fall short of your expectations. Other than offering decent discounts or exclusive promotions, you can create a repricing strategy to adjust your prices based on your competitor’s prices with an automated repricer to protect your profit margins and beat the competition.

  1. Product bundling

The ultimate goal for many sellers on Prime Day is to increase total revenue. What better way to get more revenue than selling product bundles? Amazon sellers can encourage shoppers who have a hard time deciding what to purchase by offering product bundles as they are a good value for money.

Sellers can clear out slow-moving inventory by bundling less popular items with more sought after products. Most importantly, a product bundle can win the Buy Box easily because it is identified as a unique listing with its own ASIN. Your competition will have a difficult time listing against your product bundle so you can avoid falling into a price war with potential competitors.

  1. Promote your listing

You should also consider running your own promotion to make the most of Prime Day. Here are the three popular marketing strategies you should adapt to promote your listings to the top of the search results page.

  • Amazon Sponsored Products
    As Amazon’s Prime Day grows, so does the competition, and Amazon Sponsored Products is the best way to increase your product visibility and make your store rise above the crowd.
    Amazon Sponsored Products is a cost-per-click advertising program in the Advertising tab. If you are already using this program, you can consider increasing your advertising budgets to capitalize on the higher traffic in Prime Day.
  • Amazon SEO
    You should review and improve your product page for optimal product searchability and conversion to ensure your listing will rank in the top position on the search result page. Make sure you are using the right keywords for the product title, high-quality images, and clear yet informative product description. Here are some helpful tips for optimizing Amazon listings.
  • Off Amazon marketing measures
    Besides Amazon listing optimizations, you may want to drive external traffic to your Amazon product pages. Whether it is paid or non-paid channels, this approach can boost traffic, drive sales, improve your search ranking, and build a brand.

There is a number of options on how to drive external traffic. Some popular sources outside of Amazon are social media, emails, blog posts, coupon/deal sites, affiliate/influencer marketing, and even paid ads like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads, etc. Each channel has its own ways to communicate with the audience so you can create different ad campaigns to promote your Prime Day deals.

  1. Automate your review request emails

Automate your review request emails

The best time to get more product reviews is sending out review request emails during the biggest shopping event. While you are busy handling a high volume of orders during the event, sending a large number of review request emails to your buyers will likely overwhelm you. With the help of automated email software, you can save plenty of time on a review request routine.

  1. Offer Lightning Deals

lightning deals

Lightning Deal is a promotion that FBA sellers can participate to showcase their products with a limited quantity for a short time on Amazon. Since this is a limited-time offer that runs for up to six hours, it will urge shoppers to make an impulse purchase. Furthermore, Lightning Deals provide many benefits for sellers so that they can bring more exposure to their products or brands and clear out overstock and seasonal inventory. You will receive an email invitation if your products meet the criteria for a Lightning Deal.

Take advantage of Prime Day to drive sales and awareness

If you want to take advantage of Prime Day, the key to winning a Prime Day sale is preparation. We hope the above tips will work wonders on your preparation.

Good selling!

 

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Combine These 7 Simple Tactics To Successfully Launch New Products On Amazon

To launch a new product successfully on amazon.com, make certain all seven of these simple steps are checked off. This will maximize your visibility and selling potential. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself among the many who believe that Amazon is a brutally hard space to gain sales traction for new products.

I should note that all of these tools must be used. Drop any one and it will take you far too long to achieve any momentum with your product launch. This is especially true if you are a smaller brand, like we are at General Tools.

  • Generate Buzz with Pre-Order Sales – Creating hype over a new product launch will not only help generate customer awareness in advance of the product launch date, but will help boost initial product sales. To do this on Amazon, the item is setup, ASIN is obtained, NIS Pre-Order Submission Template is completed (providing Amazon with a product release date), product page is then live on Amazon. Amazon may not have placed orders for the product yet, but with pre-order sales rolling in, it will prompt Amazon to make certain they have inventory on hand for quick fulfillment of the product.

  • Participate in Vine Reviews – Vine Voices are Amazon’s most trusted reviewers. Positive feedback from trusted reviewers help customers make informed decisions, which in turn generates more sales and creates additional positive reviews. Note: $2,500 per ASIN to access the Vine program. The number of units per promotion are limited to 15.

Image result for amazon vine

  • Born to Run – Amazon program for new products. When new products are set up in Amazon, vendors are allowed to participate in a Born to Run program. Amazon agrees to buy the product as long as the vendor spends on AMS equal to 10% of purchase value.
  • Amazon Advertising – Paid Amazon service allows vendors to be more visible and stand out against their competition while increasing sales potential and providing sales lift.

There are three Campaign types to advertise products on Amazon Advertising:

  1. Sponsored Products* – Promote products to shoppers actively searching with related keywords
  2. Sponsored Brands – Showcase a collection of products
  3. Product Display Ads – Deliver relevant ads targeting shoppers’ interests or related  products/categories* Note – Sponsored Products have always been our best performing campaign type but this is not a set it and forget it ad platform.
  • Add Optimized Title and Bullets/Images/Videos – General follows Amazon best practices when it comes to a highly optimized product page. New products are setup with optimized titles and bullets (5 bullets allowed) that describe the top features of the product along with highly searchable keyword terms. Images we include: a hero product shot, side L/R angle shots and several application shots. If available, we also include a video. Amazon is now asking vendors to add 360 degree photography, a new capability on the platform.Amazon SEO Strategy and Search Term Optimization
  • Twist/Product Variation – Twisting products on Amazon allows customers to compare, choose and click thru to similar products within General’s product line. The variations all appear on one page giving customers the ability to peruse the grouped ‘family’ product line without having to hunt for these products thru Amazon.  Twisted products give customers a better shopping experience, gives lift to the entire product line, boosts sales and increase reviews. Less popular items can ‘piggy back’ off the success of the more popular/best-selling items.Image result for amazon variation products
  • A+ content – Provide customers with richer, more detailed information with A+ Content. A+ Detail Pages have helped to increase customer conversion, retain customer interest, educate shoppers about model variations/features, and promote brand awareness. A+ content is a free Amazon service and offers a very visual display of our products with additional application images, product comparison charts etc. to promote products.

Image result for amazon A+ content

Using all of these tactics together maximizes sales opportunities for new products on Amazon. Believe me when I say it works – we’ve launched many of our now best selling products this way!

Good Selling!

 

 

Tips for Linking Retail Outlet Sales Back to Digital Marketing Efforts

I was asked to address this question not long ago: A large part of our business is in consumer packaged goods sold through mass-channel outlets such as Wal-Mart. We’d like some insights into how we can use analytics to help us understand the marketing-driven revenue on the retail end. Is there a way we can link POS revenue back to our digital marketing efforts?

Response: Expert Exchange with Greg Bonsib

THE BIG IDEAS

  • Capitalize on in-store promotional events
  • What drives digital sales likely drives retails sales too
  • Hire a lead agency that is strong strategically and analytically

CAPITALIZE ON IN-STORE PROMOTIONAL EVENTS

Coordinate the digital marketing with in-store promotional events. Provide end caps or other kinds of displays with a certain product, which will have its unique SKU. You can use the SKU to isolate the point of sale and the sales for the product.

  • You need to establish the base line for sales when there are no special promotions or marketing in the mix.
  • Discount for sales lift due to approaching holidays, when sales would increase anyhow.
  • You can assume that anything you see in sales above the base line is because of marketing.

WHAT DRIVES DIGITAL SALES LIKELY DRIVES RETAIL SALES TOO

You can use analytics on the online sales to help you understand which of your marketing tactics are working better than others. That is, which are driving sales at particular online retailers, such as walmart.com. Most likely, the tactics that work best for online sales will also work best for the retail outlets too.

  • You can look at the halo effect that occurred with the rest of the product line that wasn’t being promoted. Did sales increase for the other products? The more halo effect, the better.
  • Planograms are useful tools when you have a history of sales over many different sales channels for similar products. You can compare and contrast the sales at the different retailers. Planograms can help you analyze whether a promotional event in one sales channel increased sales in others, or whether an impact at one retailer echoes an impact at a competitive retailer.
  • Use heat mapping to understand the impact of regionality and other variables.

HIRE A LEAD AGENCY THAT IS STRONG STRATEGICALLY AND ANALYTICALLY

Most big companies use many agencies, each with a specific focus, which means that you receive masses of data that is in different forms that is difficult to use.

  • Use a lead agency into which every other agency feeds its tracking, analytics, and other data. Icreon Tech is highly recommended.
  • This agency aggregates the data. It manages the data wrangling, normalization, and warehousing.
  • As a central repository you can dictate how the data is organized. For example, we’ve created three buckets: commerce (revenue), behavior (what people do on the sites), and engagement (click-through rates, and so on).

How can you build on these ideas? Let me know!

Good Selling!