Like it or not, Christmas is really creeping up on us. And for all you Amazon elves working hard, the upcoming holiday season represents a period where you can dramatically increase your sales. If the sound of that is music to your ears, then FeedbackExpress has four ways you can prepare yourself.
1. Start Your Holiday Specials Early in the Season
A lot of sellers wait until Black Friday/Cyber Monday to start advertising their holiday deals, but we feel that’s too late. Although it may raise ire with Christmas purists, getting started as early as September can have good kickbacks for you. If you think that’s too early, then the beginning of October is another option. Getting your name out there before the masses can have valuable potential for your store.
While you’re probably not going to see many, if any, sales in September, shoppers will be scouting out sellers to make mental notes of future purchases. And if you’re one of the few they look at, you’ll stick out in their minds a lot more than if you’re trying to compete with plenty of sellers two months later.
A good strategy to employ is to release teasers of your specials through email, apps and social media sites. And if you have your own site — with its own blog on it — then that’s even better.
2. Invest Heavily in the Mobile Market
We know we sound like a broken record every time we say this, but more and more shoppers are making their purchases on mobile devices. And if you’re not investing time, energy and money into nabbing those eyeballs, you’ll be losing out in a massive way. If you’ve got your own site, carve out time right now to make sure it’s optimised for mobile viewing. Shoppers will not spend time pinching and zooming to check out everything you’re offering; they’ll simply go to a seller that already has that in place.
Another tip? Look at emerging technologies and see you can leverage them for your own use. Amazon’s made big inroads that way with the likes of Alexa, Echo and Dash. And if you really want to be off to the races, make sure your products are Prime-eligible.
3. Become a Master Email Marketer and Advertiser
Forbes says the average person checks their email 15 times a day. And of the 5,000+ people quizzed, two-thirds reported that one of the first things they did in the morning when they got up was check their email. This translates to plenty of chances you have at reaching shoppers and aiming for higher sales.
But to get there, you have to make crafty use of your email marketing campaigns and make sure you’re using time-tested conversion techniques. Here are some of the most common ones to use:
- Calls-to-action: This is simply a line you put at the bottom that says something like, ‘Click here to save 15% right now’. And this is a conversion technique you should always be using.
- Personalisation: If you’ve been starting off your emails with ‘Dear buyer’, stop. Stop that right now. And if you haven’t, opting to go with ‘Dear Mike’ or ‘Hi Kelly’ and personalising them, then good job and keep up the good work.
- Images: This can include basic things like company logos, or fancier things like product thumbnails. Just make sure you’re using images consistently.
- Deals: If you’re not sending out emails that contain deals in them, then you shouldn’t be sending out emails at all. Buyers don’t want to hear updates of your store — not unless they’re stakeholders. Talk about a couple of deals you’ve got going on and how shoppers can take advantage of them.
4. Plant Product Ideas Into Your Buyers’ Heads
There are two ways of selling: waiting for the buyer to come to you and selecting a product (passive selling), or suggesting item ideas and describing ways they can save money/get good bargains (active selling). It is always, always better to be an active seller, particularly when you’ve got the holiday season to consider.
Think of how Amazon does things. When a user searches an item, there’s a spot at the bottom that suggests related items and/or items other shoppers have searched for. It’s very easy to get stuck inside the box when thinking of things to get, and seeing those suggestions are very often just the trick to convert a search into a sale.
And because you know your inventory and brand best of all, there’s no better expert than you to suggest products to your shoppers.
No matter if it’s the holiday season or not, one thing you should always be prepping yourself for is getting (good!) reviews after each and every sale. But if that’s not your cup of tea, then this is where FeedbackExpress comes in. We make it oodles easier to amp up your Amazon seller rating by taking care of all the necessary details that come along with garnering great reviews, and you hardly have to do a thing.
