So much effort goes into ensuring that Amazon sellers maximize their sales and profits for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But what about after that?
It’s important to make sure that you’re playing the long game with your advertising and promotions. So here are some strategies to implement on Amazon after BFCM to make sure that you don’t lose the momentum you gained during the sales event.
Halo Sales – Keep Advertising
The reality is that customers don’t stop shopping on Amazon after BFCM. In fact, many sellers notice that their sales don’t return to the pre-BFCM numbers. Instead, they have a higher baseline of sales.
This is known as the “halo effect,” and there are a couple of reasons for it:
- First of all, if you had a heavy weekend of sales, then it’s likely that your Best Seller Rank (BSR) is better than it was before the holiday. So you’ll show up in more searches, and you’ll show up higher.
- Secondly, holiday sales continue to generally increase until Christmas–at least in the US. Black Friday has traditionally been the event that starts holiday shopping, not ends it. So even if you do nothing, your sales are usually going to be better than before Black Friday.
This means that having a good Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend is important. The better your sales event, the better your halo sales. Although aggressive advertising can be expensive, it can also often be made up in the days and weeks after.
But this also means that it’s important to not let up on your advertising efforts. Amazon uses a “decaying” algorithm, which means that it relies on momentum to decide where to rank products. If you pull back on advertising too much after BFCM, then Amazon will notice the decrease in your sales, and you’ll lose all momentum you gained over the holiday.
The higher you rank, the easier it is to get sales–which in turn make it easier to rank.
Although your advertising efforts probably won’t be as effective as during the holiday, they’ll still be more effective than normal. So set clear metrics for success, and push as hard as you can within those parameters.
Brand Tailored Promotions
One of the most underutilized tools on Amazon is the Brand Tailored Promotions (BRT) tool. Even smaller brands can access rather large audiences, and offer discounts to customers depending on the segment the customer belongs to.
The “Brand cart abandoners” is a great audience to leverage, as it’s likely to be one of the largest audiences and it’s highly likely to have dramatically increased over the BFCM weekend.
These customers have not only seen your product, but they’ve added it to their cart and considered purchasing. You can create a discount that these customers–and only these customers–will see, to prompt them to purchase your product. And this segment specifically is a low-risk, high-reward segment, since you’ve already lost them.
The worst thing that could happen is that the customer could continue to not purchase from you.
We’d recommend creating a few BRTs for different audiences that run throughout December. You can set one discount and have it run the entire month, or you could run multiple campaigns that get increasingly (or decreasingly) discounted as time goes on.
Customer Engagement
Similar to BRTs, Manage Your Customer Engagements (MYCE) campaigns are utilized by very few sellers. These campaigns are particularly effective because they’re email campaigns. This means that you can extend your reach outside of just Amazon–into a customer’s inbox.
And the best part is, it’s organic and free.
So instead of always needing to fork out more money to get more customers, you can just leverage the efforts you’ve already put in to reach more customers.
The caveat here is that MYCE audiences are more likely already your customers. You can send emails to Brand Followers, which might not all be customers. But generally speaking, you can market to Recent Customers, High Spend Customers, and Repeat Customers.
If your product is a one-time purchase, then this might not be the most effective form of promotion, post-Black Friday. However, if your product is a consumable, or giftable, then this can be an excellent form of advertising, especially if you attach some kind of promotion to it.
Targeting repeat or recent customers with a discount, a week or two after BFCM can be an effective way to get easy sales from those who already love your product.
The key here is to find ways to continually engage with your customers, and find new ways to extend the lifetime value of your customer base.
Sponsored Display Ads
Usually Sponsored Display ads are not very effective at driving traffic to your product listings. However, Amazon allows you to retarget customers who have already viewed your products through display ads.
Targeting this way allows you to only target customers you know are at least interested in your product. This audience has the following characteristics:
- They’re more likely to click on your ad, since they’ve already visited the listing
- They’re more likely to convert, since they’ve already interacted with your brand
- They’re less expensive to advertise to, since their click-thru rate will be higher
You can structure your ad headline, image (or video), and campaign goal to be hyper-targeted toward that audience. In this way, you’re not convincing a customer to visit your listing, but to re-visit your listing.
Post-Black Friday Funnel
You’ll notice that all of these strategies are less about finding new customers to advertise to, and more about converting the customers who have already seen your product. And that’s completely right!
Most customers need multiple interactions with a brand before deciding if they’ll purchase a product from that brand. What you’re doing here is capitalizing on the larger-than-normal group of customers who have had at least one contact with your brand.
When you partner that with the fact that customers are just more likely to convert during Q4, as much energy as possible should be focused on bringing people through the sales funnel. Of course you’ll want to keep your normal efforts going for finding new customers. But the holidays are a great time to focus on converting customers that already exist–or re-converting customers who have already purchased from you.
Only Scratching the Surface
Brand Tailored Promotions, Manage Your Customer Engagements, and Sponsored Display Ads are just some of the strategies sellers can implement in November and December. Really, there are so many more ways to boost sales and establish your brand on Amazon.
In fact, if you haven’t already, you should check out our article on programs and tools that most sellers aren’t leveraging on Amazon. You can find that article here: