Black Friday/Cyber Monday is three weeks away and the holiday countdown has officially begun! Hopefully, your brand has dedicated time over the past few months to ensuring a successful 2021 grand finale. If not, you’re in luck: we’ve put together a list of four last-minute tips for brands to make the most of the next few weeks on Amazon:

INVENTORY

If your brand is faced with sub-optimal inventory ahead of the holidays, you’ll need to move quickly to get any incremental stock inbound to Amazon’s Fulfillment Centers (FCs). Many brands continue to struggle with restrictive Restock Limits—a challenge that Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) sellers have become all too familiar with in 2021. When in doubt, prioritize your top-selling ASINs and any products that you will be promoting during the holiday season. Sellers have until December 2^nd to ensure that incremental holiday inventory arrives at Amazon’s FCs. We recommend shipping via your own carrier rather than using the Amazon Partnered Carrier Program, because you can expedite FBA shipments.

PROMOTIONS

If you are planning to run a promotion for Black Friday/Cyber Monday and/or the December Holiday period, there is still time to submit in Seller Central. While the deadline for submitting deals has passed, coupon promotions can be submitted via self-service at any time and are a great way to offer customers enticing holiday savings. Coupons can help your brand gain high visibility on the search results page with the coupon badge, which can drive traffic, sales, and customer reviews. The most popular coupons are also merchandized on the coupons home page, category pages, and peak events pages. We recommend offering at least 20% off either your full catalog or select ASINs for optimal promotional performance.

ADVERTISING

It’s important to adjust your advertising strategy to drive traffic throughout the busy holiday season. First, make sure your brand is live with all campaign types, including Sponsored Product, Sponsored Brand, and Sponsored Display. We also recommend utilizing custom creative images and videos where available. Next, add season- or holiday-related keywords to your brand and non-brand campaigns to capture customer demand throughout the holidays. Update your Sponsored Brand headline copy with relevant holiday verbiage and swap out DSP and Sponsored Brand images and video creative with seasonal, gift-giving assets. Be sure to implement more competitive budgets and bids during the holiday lead-up period, and closely monitor performance on Black Friday/Cyber Monday and throughout the December Holiday period so that you can adjust as needed to remain competitive. Finally, direct Sponsored Brand advertising traffic to the Brand Store page that is most relevant to the user’s search; this action typically yields a higher ROAS than driving to custom landing pages.

PROGRAMS

If your brand is not currently utilizing the Amazon Posts program, the holidays are a great time to start. Posts can help to drive brand and product discovery and consideration with curated lifestyle imagery. Brands can create posts that mimic the look and feel of their social media content on Amazon, bringing the consumer that much closer to the point of conversion. Posts are published within a shoppable feed, which is automatically added to your Brand Store. Brands can analyze each post’s performance using Amazon’s available metrics, which include viewable impressions, engagement, engagement rate, and reach. Amazon allows brands to build out and submit their Posts in advance, so we recommend creating and scheduling your Posts ahead of time to ensure your brand consistently delivers fresh content throughout the holidays.

As we grow closer to Amazon’s peak shopping season, we want to stress the importance of having a strategy in place to help drive optimal holiday performance. If you haven’t had the time or capacity to build out a robust plan for Q4, have no fear! Take note of the four tips outlined above and use the next few weeks to action where possible. Focus on your top-sellers, as those are the products that will really move the needle throughout the balance of 2021. If you are seeking to amplify your Amazon strategy and drive significant growth in the new year, connect with us.