Click here to download a pdf of the slides,Navazon Inc – Selling on Amazon – Annual Planning – December 2020 Slides
Staying up to date with Amazon and all the ways to sell on the marketplace requires constant focus. Navazon is here to help you navigate the shifting e-commerce landscape and help your business grow. This month’s webinar covered a variety of high-priority topics!
Key Takeaways
- Coordination is key to succeeding on Amazon
- Strong content and inventory are the foundations for your marketing strategy
- Out of stock products have an immediate and costly effect on your sales, but can be mitigated with forecasting, dropship, and BTR
- There are new features and reports available to advertisers
- If you haven’t already, it is time to set your marketing budget and strategy for the year
- 2021 starts in 16 days, make sure you’re ready with a plan
Content
Detail Page Issues
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- Changes occur constantly, whether they come from 3rd-party sellers or Amazon updates. This may result in poor or even inaccurate information displaying on the detail pages that cost you sales or generate returns and low reviews.
- Monitoring can catch costly issues such as suppressions or incorrect content that interferes with potential sales or cause poor shopping experiences
- Maintaining catalog quality will improve brand image. With content that is reliably consistent and accurate across all product in your catalog, brands show themselves as professionals that care about the quality of their products as well.
- Combined with your own “perfect catalog” monitoring will allow you to police your content, making regular comparisons easier. Whenever you find discrepancies, submit corrections to have Amazon display your preferred titles, bullets, product descriptions, and more
Free Amazon Tools
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- A+ – Showcase your product to its fullest and ensure proper branding on the detail pages to help search results and increase customer conversion.
- Mobile Product Pages – With more and more people shopping on their phones and mobile devices, optimizing your product pages for that platform will help shoppers understand why they should buy your product.
- Amazon Store Versions – Create the ideal shopping experience on your Brand Store page for any event or holiday and switch right back when it is done.
- Video Content – Take full advantage of the marketing and advertising capabilities of videos across your Amazon content, whether on detail pages, Brand Stores, Amazon Live streaming, and more.
- Amazon Posts – Showcase your products with customized ads for free while shoppers browse your categories. This beta is basically a free advertising platform, and if you aren’t taking advantage of it, your competitors probably are.
- A/B Testing – Learn what content helps sell the most products while you experiment with titles and A+ pages.
Catalog Structure
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- Variations – Make sure your catalog is linked together properly through the detail pages of your products. Items that only vary in size, color, etc. can be listed together on one detail page to take advantage of higher traffic, search rank, and reviews.
- Browse Nodes – Ensure your products are listed in the correct browsing categories. If they aren’t in the right place, their titles could be altered negatively with ATS, shoppers using Alexa might not even find your products, proper ranking in search can be reduced, and best seller ranking can be impeded.
- Marketing Classifications – Make marketing as successful as possible by classifying your products correctly, ensuring that your ads show up for people interested in products like yours.
A/B Testing
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- Titles – Experiment with different keywords, item type names, or order of content in your titles to ensure that the name that brings the most sales is what your shoppers see.
- A+ pages – Compare different images, product feature call-outs, page layouts, or even branding types in your A+ content to find the best way to communicate and connect with shoppers.
Operational Coordination
Proper communication and coordination between and within teams can make or break a product’s success.
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- Content – Ensure you have optimized titles, bullets, and descriptions with appropriate keywords that are enhanced with A+, video and lifestyle images.
- Operations – With optimized content on your products, ensure that there is sufficient inventory. Fill POs to get them in stock at FCs, activate dropship options, and utilize Born to Run to make the products available to customers in sufficient amounts to support the advertising you will run.
- Advertising – Advertising will only reach its potential with all the other steps in place and functioning correctly. Only drive traffic to retail ready products that will convert. Use keyword data gained in the campaigns to inform changes to content.
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Operations
Inventory – Rep OOS
Remaining sufficiently in stock is critical to maintain successful sales and avoid costly recovery time. For some businesses, there could be a 42% potential sales loss on products that drop from 90%+ to <30% in stock rate. It can take 3 to 4 days to regain sales volume after a product is out of stock (OOS) for on e day on Amazon. Recovering organic search placement on online marketplaces after being OOS for 2+ days can take a week or more.
Forecasting
Amazon’s forecasting tool is not always an accurate look at the future. Creating your own forecast will involve more data, time, and effort for a more precise view. When forecasting for yourself, you should combine consumer data, purchase order history, drop-ship orders, ARA forecast, seasonality, and BB data. Often, your own firsthand knowledge of historical performance and promotions or events can be the only way to truly get a true grasp of your forecast.
Lost Buy Box (LBB)
The struggle to win the Buy Box (BB) is constant, and ensuring your products win over 3P seller offers takes multiple courses of action. The competition over the buy box has increased over 2020, and that is expected to increase more in 2021. Using Amazon’s LBB glance view data can help businesses focus on key ASINs losing the BB. Planning marketing budgets can also help combat the 3P sellers, but the biggest help may be ensuring you have agreements with your distributors and resellers to prevent the cannibalism of your products.
Marketing
2021 Marketing Calendar
Start solidifying your 2021 marketing calendar now. With all the time needed to approve of promotions or ramp ads, knowing those projected dates as soon as possible is essential for your team to make it all work together. Scheduling your budget into that calendar will be beneficial as well.
Sponsored Display Retargeting
When a potential customer is finally ready to make a purchase, are you confident that your brand will be top of the list? This advertising options allows you to re-engage users that have interacted with your products on Amazon using branded creative content. With pricing markers, you can also retarget shoppers that have interacted with similar products.
Category Level Metrics Report
Learn how your ads rate within their category against those of your peer categories. This data is measured at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles. The available metrics to compare include return on ad spend, impressions, click through rate, and advertising cost of sales. With this data, you can guide your future marketing initiative to address where you are falling behind.
Sponsored Brand Video and Mobile
Sponsored Brand Video enhances the online shopping experience by engaging shoppers’ senses at a higher level than print media. Custom and timely messaging with bold lifestyle images on ads for Mobile users enhance the user experience and draw in more shoppers to your detail pages. Combined with Sponsored Brand Video, Sponsored Display and Sponsored Product ads, you touch more areas of the shopper funnel.
Keyword Translation
Marketing across language barriers is now easier as Amazon now provides keyword translations it believes will be successful. This currently works for Sponsored Product and Brand advertising, streamlining the marketing process for secondary languages.
Advertising Tips
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- Pro Tip #1- Holiday season engages more shoppers; Strive to build brand loyalty and repeat shoppers
- Pro Tip #2- Measure performance and keep momentum going; Don’t immediately pull holiday campaigns because they may benefit from the halo effect
- Pro Tip #3- Consider retaining your highest performing 2020 campaigns and discontinuing campaigns that are not meeting you goals
- Pro Tip #4- Start planning for Q1 in December, and try to set your goals by brand, category or even ASIN level, if possible
Amazon Frontier – New Tools and Programs
Navazon Pulse
The path to getting your product listing to go live, get seen by shoppers, and selling successfully is often a bumpy journey. The Navazon Pulse smoothens out that path so that vendors can keep track of each ASIN, guiding informed actions to get shoppers to buy them.
Navazon Spotlight
The Spotlight shows you the overall health of the detail pages of your products while also allowing you to see where individual items are lacking. This knowledge will guide your actions to optimize the listings
Navazon Compass
The Navazon Compass offers a consolidated view of your Amazon account and curates the data gathered on your catalog. With an easy-to-use interface, this Amazon analytics dashboard allows you to draw insight from the data so you can quickly understand the performance of your business.
If you need help to address any of these issues and more, contact a Navazon expert today to see how we can help optimize your catalog to increase your sales and profitability.