Planning Your Amazon Promotions for a Profitable Q4

Welcome to the Bring your Product Idea to Life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell.

I'm Vicki Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly practical advice as well as inspirational stories from small businesses. Let's get started.

Hello and welcome to Bring youg Product Idea to Life. I'm really happy to have you here.

And on today's episode, I want to talk about your Amazon promotions that you may or may not choose to run in quarter four of this year. And the reason we're talking about it now is it's summer, as I've said to the last few episodes.

I'm hoping you've got a little bit of downtime, a little bit of headspace, a little bit of time to think this through.

And so I'm releasing episodes that I think will be beneficial to you and give you a little bit of space to think about things so that come September, October, even November, you're not being really reactive and thinking, do I need to put on a sale? Do I need to start discounting my products?

You've already planned out now in August what you want to do later on this year, and when it gets there, you're ready to go. As we know, quarter four is the biggest sales opportunity and it's the most competitive. And I think that good planning will give you better results.

Often people ask me about Black Friday and they often come and ask me about Black Friday in November. The question I get asked most often in November is, should I pick part in Black Friday? What should I do for Black Friday?

And if I don't take part in Black Friday, what can I do instead? And by the way, it's the 28th of November this year, so it's, it's quite late. I think it's always quite late, but planning earlier is really helpful.

And then you don't need to ask me in November because you already know what you're going to do. So let's talk about what you can do to plan your promotions on Amazon, specifically in quarter four.

So the first thing is, if you've been selling on Amazon a while, review what you did last year and specifically review what worked. So did you do promotions? Did what? And if you did do promotions, what kind of traffic did they drive? What were the conversions like? You can remember.

You can go back into all your historical reports on Amazon and get all of this information. So if you weren't really tracking it at the time.

If you just have a vague sense of, oh yes, my sales were better in November and I know I did, I know I took part in Black Friday, but I can't remember exactly what. Obviously you can go back and read your reports and find out exactly what you did.

Because looking at what worked last year I think is a really good starting point. Because if something worked for you last year, hopefully it'll work for you this year.

And if it didn't work, then, you know, you potentially don't want to be repeating the same thing again and you can try something new this year. So that's definitely where I'd start from.

If you haven't been on Amazon that long, or if last year came and went and you didn't do any specific promotions, don't worry, I'm going to talk you through now all the different things you could be doing on Amazon to drive more traffic in quarter four. And you can decide which any of them are relevant for you and which you might like to try because there's a lot on there.

So you may, you may or may not be aware that on Amazon you can do all kinds of things. You have deals, you have vouchers, you have lightning deals, you have obviously Amazon advertisements.

And it's really hard to know what's best for your products, what to try, how it all works. So I'm going to lay all that out for you now so you can start incorporating this into your planning.

So deals on Amazon are things like lightning deals or prime day promotions. So they run for set dates and you get a badge on your listing that explains you're taking part in a particular promotion.

So a lightning deal is a time bound promotional offer where an item receives special merchandising.

So it might have the deal badge, so the lightning deal badge on it for a limited number of hours and it's usually somewhere between 4 to 12 hours, which is determined by Amazon. And then a deal is also time bound where an item again receives special merchandising.

Often there's a deal badge on there for a number of days, so that's a little bit longer. A prime day promotion counts as a deal because you are submitting a discount using usually for a defined period.

So over prime day this year it was a three day period and for that time you'll have the prime day deal badge displayed on your listing. So while I'm as I'm recording this, we're on day three of Prime Day. So it's the 10th of July as I record this.

So you have to pay to take part in these deals. And there's no discount if your product doesn't sell well or doesn't sell at all.

So at the point at which you say, yes, I want to take part in Prime Day, for example, and you submit your deal, you pay Amazon, but they don't take the money immediately. But you know what I mean. You commit to paying that money. And even if you don't get a single sale, you've paid that money.

You also have to be eligible to run deals. There's a few criteria, one of which is you need at least a freestyle rating.

So if you don't have a freestyle rating on your product, you won't be able to take part in any of these of these deals. So, yeah, lightning deals, as well as getting the badge and your products, there are deal pages on Amazon. So for Prime Day, there'll be a deals page.

There will also be deals they'll feature on the homepage for Amazon when you go as a customer. Again, for lightning deals, there's a page for that as well.

However, taking part in one of these deals does not guarantee you're going to be on the Amazon homepage. In fact, let's be honest, you're probably not going to be. There's also no guarantee you're going to be on the lightning deals page.

And I just want to be really honest about that because I think sometimes people think, okay, if I sign up one of these deals, I'm going to get loads of exposure on Amazon. But actually, possibly not.

Probably most likely the only difference will be is that when a customer sees your listing, they'll see the badge and they'll see that you know you're offering a lightning deal or whatever it is. Which isn't to say it's a bad thing, but I think you need to be doing something else around that.

For example, telling people you're having a lightning deal on Amazon or running ads to your listing while the lightning deals on to encourage sales as well. Because if you have a deal but you're not getting traffic, you're still not going to make any sales. So I hope that's useful to know.

So vouchers are where you can set up discounts on a single product or a set of products. And customers can discover vouchers, so they can find them on the vouchers homepage.

They can find them in the search results because when your listing comes up, it will show it's got a voucher and they'll see it on your product detail pages. So this is where you need to give a discount and you set up a new set budget. And then there's different ways. You can set up a voucher on Amazon.

So you can set up a voucher that you share with a group of people. So for example, your mailing list list where people actually have to type a code in a checkout to get the discount.

Or you can set up a voucher that's displayed on your listing and customers just need to click on it on the product detail page and then when it goes to their basket, the discount is applied. You can also set up promotions so for example percentage off or buy one, get one free. And the percentage off can be tiered.

And I quite like these for brands where you have products that work well together. Some use hair care brands, for example.

Example, let's say you sell a range of shampoos, conditioners, serums, oils, whatever it is, you can easily set up a discount where you say, if you buy three of our products you get 5% off, if you buy four of our products, you get 10% off or whatever it is you want to offer. And that can be quite a nice way of encouraging multi buys. And you can also do a buy one, get one free. They're quite unusual.

I don't think I've ever set up a buy one, get one free for somebody.

But it might be that you have a product, a higher price product and maybe then you've also got a lower price product that you'd, you know, you'd quite like to shift. Maybe, maybe it's sitting in FBA and you're like, I've got hundreds of these, it's quite like to get rid of them.

I don't really want to pay Amazon to store them or to send them back to me. You could set up an offer where every time someone buys a shampoo they can get a comb, for example.

And for the customer, obviously that's some added value. And for you it means you're selling through a product that perhaps you've got excess inventory off. So that's an option.

You can no longer do money off promotions. That used to be a thing. You used to be able to say £5 off, £10 off, whatever, but you can't do that anymore.

It's percentage off or buy one get one free. And for all of these promotions, you set a start date, an end date, and the budget that you want to spend on the discount.

And Amazon will not let you exceed that budget. So bear that in mind.

Interestingly, there's something else I'd like to point out, because I found this interesting, is that when I was looking at Amazon's guidelines and eligibility criteria for these promotions, so I can make sure I was sharing this all really accurately with you.

Amazon actually suggests using social media to share if you're running a promotion, which comes back to what I was saying earlier, that you can do all of these things. You can have a date, you take part in a deal, you can have vouchers, you can have promotion, you can even add a sale price.

But all of these things are much more effective if you're already, if you're also driving traffic to your listings, if you are someone who is turning up on page one of the search results organically, maybe you don't need to, but for a lot of us that isn't the case.

And if that you, if you're not turning up on page one and you're still having to work to get traffic to your listings, then I think telling people that you're running a promotion, a sale, whatever it is, or driving traffic through ads will really help with conversions. So as I just mentioned, then you can add a sale price. So you can put some of your products on sale for a limited time.

And you can do this by going into the listing and you can say, I'm going to run a sale for 48 hours and I'm going to add a sale price.

And then when your product shows up in the search results, it'll be, you've probably seen this, it'll be like slash true, the rip will be slashed through and it will show what the new price is. You can also set sale prices in bulk now as well.

So if you wanted to discount your whole range, for example, for a limited number amount of time, rather than doing each listing individually, you can also now do that in, in bulk. And this is what Amazon calls a price discount. So you can only do this for up to 30 days and you can do it on a limited number of units.

So for example, you could, you could create a price discount that's specifically for prime customers, or you could do it for all customers.

So this, a price discount is essentially a sale price, but it's just when you're doing it just means you're setting it up in bulk and you can limit which customers can have it.

So, for example, if you're using fba, you might decide that you want to create the discount just for customers who have prime, because customers who don't have prime will purchase your FBM offer and have to. And then you'll have to handle the shipping and these will also appear with a strike through in the search results and the products page.

So that's quite useful to know. And then the other thing is, as I mentioned before, is that running ads, maybe in combination with something you're doing above, works really well.

Obviously, advertising in itself isn't a promotion, but it could be. It could be that you don't run ads on Amazon and you've decided actually for Q4 you're going to turn them on and drive more traffic.

And that is obviously something you can do. Final thing to think about is are there any dates you want to align your promotions with? So Black Friday, as I mentioned, is 28 November.

Cyber Monday is 1 December. Christmas gifting, as we know, starts from any time from, I want to say, September. I stopped by my Christmas presents in September.

Maybe everyone isn't as early as me. And goes on until, well, on Amazon, right up until Christmas really. Because if you've got fba, you can get things a very short notice.

Halloween might be something that's relevant to you, depending on your customer or your product. So it's worth thinking about when you're going to plat, what promotions you want to run on Amazon and when you want to run them.

And once you've done that, you can also plan your stock.

So if you are selling via FBA and you're sending stock into Amazon, you need to know that let's say you're going to be running a promotion for Halloween, so you've decided that for the 31st of October you're going to be running. Let's say you're going to have a sale.

You can have 25 off everything on Amazon for Halloween and you've decided that's what you're going to do and you're going to do some marketing around that and maybe you're going to set up some ads.

Wouldn't it be a shame if you didn't have enough stock in Amazon to fulfill all of those orders and you went out of stock and you missed out on sales?

So once you've decided what promotions you want to run and when you want to run them, the next thing is to make sure that you've got enough inventory if you're fulfilling orders yourself.

Obviously this is perhaps slightly simpler if you're just using fba, you might want to consider also opening up an FBM offer just for any promotional period, so that if you do run out of FBA stock, you can still fulfill orders yourself and you don't lose those sales. Obviously, that's completely up to you.

And then the final thing I would do is make sure that your listings are as good as they can possibly be before you do any kind of promotion or drive any kind of traffic to them.

If you go Back to episode 289, which is just a few weeks ago, I spoke about how you know how to refine your product listings and get them to be the best they possibly can.

Because I think if you're going to be driving traffic to your listings, whether that's paid traffic via ads or whether that's just increased traffic because you're offering, offering a great promotion, you really want your listings to be as good as they can possibly be because that will really help with conversions. So a few bonus tips for you before I end this episode.

Other things you might want to do when you're thinking about your promotions is plan, are there any bundles you could be adding to Amazon or any gifts or upsells you could be doing? So, for example, I spoke about promotions maybe where you're encouraging multi purchases.

Can you actually bundle some of your popular products together and get them on Amazon just for like the gifting season? Perhaps. Can you think about your messaging?

Do you need to update your product listing text to make it clear that it would be a great Christmas gift or a great Halloween purchase or whatever it is? Can you add some updates? Can you update your images?

So do you have any festive image imagery or gifting imagery you can swap in that you're not using at the moment? So if your products are beautifully wrapped, for example, can you add images of that that show it?

What can you basically do to get your Amazon listings as relevant as possible for the season? And I know it feels really strange. I'm recording this in July or listening to this in August. It seems like a long way off.

But it's just things to think about because if you, you know, I always think that preparation. I'm a big, I'm a big planner. Let's be honest. I'm a big planner.

I love being organized and I think it would be really great if you could think about now. Okay. By the end of October, I want all of my Amazon listings to have festive imagery.

Or I'd like a page on my store with all my gifting products or whatever it is. Hope you can plan all of that out now and then you've got something to work towards and then you're not rushing at the last minute.

So that would be my suggestion to think are there more images you can add? Are there more products you can add, things that will sell really well at this time of year?

And do you need to make any tweaks to your listing text, as I've said?

And those are all things that you don't have to do right now because it's August a little bit early, but you can definitely plan when you are going to do them. So that's my advice to you is to start planning out your promotional calendar for Amazon.

So think about what kind of discount would you want to offer, what products you're going to you're going to do this on how you're going to share anything that you're doing and think about anything you need to do to get your listing and storefront ready for quarter four. If you need some help with this, you can always book a power hour and we can brainstorm all of this together.

And I'm going to put a link to that in the show notes. So thank you so much for being here.

So next week's episode is going to be a re release where I'm going to be busting lots of myths about selling on Amazon. So all those things that you've heard that you thought were true, it turns out that they aren't. So please tune in for that episode.

Also, of course, going to have a fantastic interview this Friday and I look forward to speaking with you really soon.

Thank you so much for listening.

Right to the end of this episode, do remember that you can get the full back catalogue and lots of free resources on my website, vickyweinberg.com Please do remember to rate mistakes. Review this episode if you've enjoyed it, and also share it with a friend who you think might find it useful. Thank you again and see you next week.