How to boost your holiday sales on Amazon (Valentine’s Day & Co.) - Part 1
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Benefitting from high traffic events and getting your share of extra sales can be tough. It’s damn near impossible if you’re late to the party. It’ll be like trying to outsmart the queues at Berghain night club in Berlin by arriving late at 6am. At which point you may not get entry at all...or the party is already over. If you do want to get in, this week’s newsletter edition is for you! Not into Berghain, I’ve never had success with that. I did try to rank for keywords such as “valentines day gifts” or “christmas gifts men” though. And, as a young advertiser, wasted hundreds of dollars doing so. Today you’ll learn how to do it better, get into page 1 for the the right keywords, and make a ton of extra profit. Our goal is to make you rank for these special high volume keywords. Without wasting hundreds if not thousands of dollars on ill advised ad spend. Let’s get started. There’s two parts to this: Product Selection + Preparation For the first part of this newsletter edition, let's focus on product selection. It takes a lot of effort to prepare for these events. So, of course, you shouldn’t care about them equally. Some will fit your brand like Watson fits Sherlock, while some events are there to ignore. Which ones? That’s for you to decide… Though you should at least be aware of which ecommerce relevant events are around the corner. For 2025 I created a free calendar and put the whole year on one single paper: As a reader of this newsletter, you not only receive the PDF version for free. But also the original google sheet version, which you can then edit and print out as I did. "Valentine's Day is the Super Bowl of our industry." — Patrick Priore, CMO at Paper Source OK, so we now know which events to look out for. But many sellers mess up when it comes to the seemingly simple step of selecting the right products. To avoid that happening to you, you can make use of my LIVESS framework:
Contrary to what you might think, don't just pick your established best sellers. Data by Nexus Group shows that the largest and longest BSR effect from these events is on newer products. Having said that, it can never hurt to bring more traffic to the (well stocked) products that bring the most profit to you, new or not.
Unsurprisingly, it makes no sense to pick products that will run out of stock during or shortly after the event. All your efforts will vaporise and it will take weeks to rerank on your much more important (non event) keywords.
In combination with stock, consider the product’s baseline organic visibility. Does it really needs a visibility and sales boost when considering your current stock levels? Or is it currently struggling with visibility and could use a sales and review boost? Yep, it again brings us back to not just blindly picking your best sellers.
Does the product actually fit the event in any way? In our example, is it very giftable for couples on Valentine’s day? I admit I chose an easy example with the artificial roses. Sometimes it's not as obvious. In those cases you may want to check Brand Analytics' Top Search Terms tab. It will show you which type of products sold the most for the respective event and keywords in the previous year.
Products where the main season is not shortly ahead or currently running in full steam are not ideal. Your sales and thus sales rank boost - which in turn boosts CvR and keyword rankings - will evaporate. And your long-term sales effect will be much smaller. Another general factor for your product selection? Check which products are close to receiving the Best Seller badge. Remember, BSR badges are category specific, and not related to keywords. So if you boost a product’s sales via Valentine's or other holiday keywords, it will - increase your Best Seller Rank, - help you get that badge, and - boost your CTR and CvR. Which helps you in the rankings of ALL your keywords! And that's it for this first part! You’ve picked your next event and product. In part 2 we'll look at the 3 main preparation areas you’ll need to work on for that sales frenzy: Amazon SEO, Design, and Amazon PPC. Until then! Keep on grinding David |