Holiday Marketing: How Amazon Sellers Can Rise Above the Competition this Q4

Amazon accounts for 50% of all online holiday purchases, making it the best platform for holiday marketing in Q4 this year.

If you want to maximize your efforts in the increasingly competitive and crowded Amazon marketplace during the holiday season, this post is for you.

This article holds our tried-and-tested Amazon-specific strategies, packed with actionable insights you can apply during the busy holiday season to maximize your efforts.

5 holiday marketing strategies to increase your holiday season sales in Q4 2024

As you go through these holiday marketing strategies, consider your goals, resources, and budget to help you decide which ones to prioritize and implement first.

#1: Find the best-selling products for Q4

60% of Amazon sales come from independent sellers, mostly small and medium-sized businesses. Understand customer demand to join this group of high achievers on Amazon.

Here are our step-by-step holiday marketing ideas for this:

1) Review the new arrivals, most-wished, & best-sellers lists

Look for products with a high demand and great margins but low competition. Visit the new arrivals, most-wished, and best-sellers lists for this. Here’s what we mean by this:

• Look for products with Best Seller Rank (BSR) of under 20,000 in your category. This indicates high demand.

• A 20-30% profit margin after fees and shipping costs is a great profit margin to target for all businesses.

• Products with less than 300 reviews have lower competition than those with thousands of reviews.

06 Holiday Marketing - Customer Reviews[/caption]

Filter the lists based on your category and sub-category to find high-demand products in your niche.

2) Use Amazon keyword research to find what your customers mostly search for

eStore Factory can help you find the most popular search terms for the products you want to sell during the holiday season. After this, analyze the search volume, clicks, and return rates to predict how much organic traffic you could bring.

Also, review the following metrics:

• Average best-seller rank (BSR): A BSR under 30,000 indicates steady demand, especially during busy holiday shopping.

• Average daily sales: Select products with a minimum of 20-30 holiday sales/day because they have consistent interest and potential for strong performance during high-traffic holidays.

• Average price: Select a $20-$50 price range for your products as it hits the sweet spot for holiday shoppers looking for affordable yet valuable gifts.

Image source: Jungle Scout

Review your potential competitors’ product pages to find inspirations and mistakes to avoid. Or book our services for expert keyword research analysis so you can save time and focus on your key holiday marketing strategies.

Example & application

Here's what this process would look like if you have a business in the outdoor home improvement niche like Pergola Kits USA:

• Offer a wide range of patio covers that are especially popular for those looking to enhance their outdoor living spaces.

• Analyze your best-sellers–cedar and vinyl pavilions, to identify which products are gaining traction and why.

• Use the best-seller rankings and keyword research to understand the demand for these types of seasonal outdoor products.

• Analyze competitors and offer similar or complementary items. For example, you could add weatherproof furniture covers as part of your holiday marketing plan.

• Evaluate customer preferences for items like patio covers, particularly those built to withstand the elements. This will help you understand what your customers value the most. So you can make informed product selections.

#2: Optimize your product listings

87% of your customers will never return to your store if your product descriptions are inaccurate. This means optimizing your product listings ranks you better in searches and creates loyal customers with a high lifetime value.

Here's what you need to do:

1) Write detailed titles & descriptions

Add 5-10 relevant keyword phrases to your product page's title and descriptions. Adding more keywords will cram your title and description, reducing how easily readable your copy is. This mistake makes your copy less about the customer and more about the business, which isn't great for customer retention.

Do the following:

• Focus more on the benefits rather than the features of your products.

• Show your customers how they can use your products in real life.

• Focus on how your product solves your customer's pain point to create value.

• Analyze content that ranks high for your search terms to write a description that targets your customer's search intent and answers their search query.

• Check whether your title makes sense. Tell your customers exactly what your product is without any fluff.

• Read your copy aloud to make sure it's conversational and doesn't sound like a robot wrote it.

2) Use backend keywords

Backend keywords are keywords your content can rank for but are not visible to your visitors. You can appear in more search results without using keyword-stuffing techniques in your title and description.

Here are the steps to follow to add backend keywords:

• Log into your Amazon Seller Central account.

• In the main menu, select Manage All Inventory under the Inventory section.

• Find the product listing where you want to add your backend keywords.

• Select Edit and then click the Product details tab.

• Fill out your backend keywords in the Generic keyword field.

Backend fields can impact where you rank in search results on Amazon. Also, optimize all other backend fields, like Intended Use, Subject Matter, Target, Audience, and Other Attributes.

Staying up-to-date with the changing guidelines and best practices can be challenging, especially when several holiday marketing campaigns run simultaneously. Our team of Amazon experts can optimize all these backend elements for you, check whether your keywords are indexed, and analyze your backend's performance after optimization.

If you'd rather hire a full-time remote employee, Genius is where you will find high-performing Latin Americans and Filipinos at affordable rates. If this is your first time hiring an Amazon Specialist for your store, use their Amazon Specialist Job Description Generator & Template. This will give you an idea of the skills and requirements to consider.

3) Highlight customer reviews

The quantity of customer reviews is as important as quality. For example, a store with a 4.5 rating and hundreds of reviews is better than one with a 5.0 rating and only 10 reviews. The more reviews you have, the better.

Use a third-party review help service, Amazon Vine program or an automated email service to gather and display initial reviews collected through email marketing campaigns. Here's how you can use the reviews section to optimize your product listings:

• Plug relevant keywords in your answers to your customer reviews.

• Answer questions in the Q&A section with the most relevant keywords.

• Use important points of your answers to recurring questions as bullet points in the product description.

4) Use competitive pricing strategies

Set the price for your new products a dollar or two less than your lowest-priced competitor as a short-term holiday marketing strategy. Revise the prices once your customers notice and start buying your products, and you have 100+ reviews. Here's what to do next:

• Calculate your profit margins based on an estimated selling price to make sure you're within the preferable 20%-30% range.

• Find a minimum price equal to your breakeven price and a maximum price equal to the average sale price of your product.

• Use FBA's Revenue Calculator to find your net profit, profit margin, and the breakeven price.

• Avoid price wars with sellers who use aggressive price-cutting to drive sales. These sellers won't last as they lose profitability.

• Use A/B tests to test different pricing strategies. For example, test different psychological pricing strategies, like charm and flat-rate pricing, to find the ones that drive more sales for your products.

• Price your products above the minimum price Amazon has set for customers to be eligible for free shipping. Currently, this price is $25 if you're holiday shopping on a non-Prime account.

• Increase your product price slightly, then bring it down with coupons to increase click-through and conversion rates. You can add these coupons through the Advertising section in Seller Central.

• Set a business price for Amazon Business-registered buyers. Offer them bulk prices and discounts to encourage larger orders.

5) Use Amazon's A+ Content tool

Add shippable product-comparison charts, enhanced lifestyle images, and videos in your product page's A+ Content section to bring your brand's story to life to increase your sales by 20%. Here's what to include in your A+ Content section:

• Product FAQs

• Product comparison charts

• A precise product overview

• A "What's in the Box" section

• A high-definition product video

• 360-degree high-definition product images

• A bulleted list of product benefits and features

A lot of time, energy, and resources go into planning, creating, publishing, and monitoring the impact of your A+ content marketing on holiday campaigns. Leave this complicated and lengthy process in the hands of experienced professionals so you can focus on more pressing issues.

Example & application

Health-conscious customers searching for supplements like Vitamin D for immune health and bone support will prioritize products with excellent reviews. Vitamart's Vitam D supplement collection is a perfect example of this. These positive reviews highlight how their product is effective and easy to use.

Customers consistently highlight how the tiny pills are easy to swallow, taste-free, and give their immune health a noticeable boost. These reviews underscore how trustworthy the brand is, with frequent mentions of its competitive prices and convenience.

#3: Put your Seller Central account on auto-pilot

You can significantly reduce your work overload during the holiday season when you automate repetitive routine tasks like 80% of the businesses. From product research to customer service, you can automate several components of your Amazon business to stay top of mind this holiday season.

Take a look at the following holiday marketing ideas for automation:

1) Identify your goals for the holiday marketing strategy

Assess your business's performance during last year's holiday marketing campaigns and identify your target audience. This will help you set realistic goals and measure your performance. Here's what you need to do next:

• Map out your data usage, transformation, and collection processes.

• Align your holiday marketing goals with your overall business goals to give yourself a clear direction.

• Set KPIs for each goal to measure your holiday marketing campaign's performance.

2) List holiday marketing campaign tasks you can automate

There's a 44% chance you'll get your ROI from campaign automation after 6 months. So, don't expect immediate results during your holiday marketing campaign if this is your first time investing in automation software.

Here's what you need to do to identify tasks that benefit from automation:

• Ask your employees to identify which low-value manual tasks they spend most of their time on.

• Divide tasks based on their complexity and focus on simpler, easier tasks first, as they require fewer automation tool setups.

• List repetitive back-office tasks, like transaction duplication, accounting opening, and claims processing, because these tasks will not require human supervision after automation.

• Identify tasks that could keep your business running after your employees clock out.

• List tasks with a high risk of human error because of the number of steps involved or their complexity.

• Focus on tasks that are run at least monthly or more frequently.

3) Automate your holiday marketing campaigns & monitor results

Implement automation tools to send your customers personalized messages and content based on their behavior in your store and purchase history. For example, you can automate abandoned cart emails triggered when potential customers add items to their carts but leave without buying anything.

Here are some other tasks you could automate:

• Automate your customer service to meet the demands of the busy holiday shopping season and create loyal customers.

• Automate several stages and steps of your product launch. This can include adding a new product or updating an existing one for the holiday shopping season.

• Work with highly qualified experts for PPC management to maximize your ROI and improve results with micro-level campaign optimization. This will guarantee your ad campaigns are cost- and time-efficient.

• With inventory management automation, keep your virtual shelves always filled with your most popular products.

• Automate repetitive account management tasks like customer support and product feedback monitoring. Since this requires a comprehensive automation setup, speak with our team of account management experts to stay cost-efficient during the holiday season.

• Invest in keyword research and tracking tools to increase organic sales during your holiday marketing campaigns.

Example & application

You have to think beyond just managing inventory and customer service. You can also consider automating other elements of your business like customer engagement and branding. For example, we used the Built With Chrome extension for Vinyl Status, and here's what we found:

• They use Klaviyo for customer lifecycle management and marketing automation. Use this to send personalized emails based on your customer behavior to improve conversion rates and engagement.

• They enhance customer engagement with social proof with the help of ProveSource. Use this to highlight real-time purchase activity on your website. This encourages more sales by creating a sense of urgency and also builds credibility.

• Vinyl Status uses Visual Website Optimizer, which is an A/B testing tool. Use this to optimize your website, page performance, and layouts.

• They use tracking tools, including Facebook Pixel and LinkedIn Insights, to retarget customers across social media platforms.

#4: Build a personalized storefront for the holidays

Your storefront builds traffic and enhances your brand presence while highlighting your best-sellers and cross-promoting products that complement each other. This is why 70% of small businesses plan to invest more in their online storefronts.

Follow these holiday marketing techniques to increase your seasonal sales:

1) Launch a successful holiday marketing campaign 2-4 weeks before Turkey 5

Don't leave everything for the last minute. Set up and test your storefront for holiday marketing campaigns 2-4 weeks in advance. Here's how you can edit your Amazon storefront in Stores:

• Sign into your Amazon Mobile App account and click the icon, which looks like a person, in the bottom right corner.

• Go to Your Account section and then select Your Storefront.

• Select Edit My Storefront and then Update Your Page.

• Update your cover photo and profile picture.

• Add a new page title and change your page tagline.

Test new holiday promotions and channels in this phase and be retail-ready. Add a discount to some of your secondary products to engage customers and measure your results.

2) Invest in PPC Ads during Turkey 5 to make your brand stand out

This will be the busiest period as your customers search for the perfect gift for their loved ones. Here's what you should do:

• This is your time to react to customer demand, competition, and inventory levels.

• Display your most attractive discounts and holiday promotions to grab your customers' attention.

• Use Amazon PPC to promote your products and holiday deals on the marketplace during the Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday seasons.

• Display ads on various social media channels. Review these 30+ Black Friday Facebook ads strategy examples to inspire your holiday marketing strategy. This will cut down your research process by half and save you time and resources.

3) Highlight last-minute gift suggestions before the Christmas season

This is the lead-out phase, where most holiday shopping is left for the very last minute, and your customers are looking for urgent gift suggestions and ideas. Here's what to do:

• Liquidate excess inventory with premium discount offers and bundle deals.

• Make your holiday marketing strategy as efficient as possible with automation tools or an expert storefront design and management team.

• Change your brand messaging to focus on 11th-hour gift-giving.

Example & application

Ovaeda, which specializes in composite decking joists, checks all our boxes of an optimized Amazon storefront. Here's what we love about it:

• It's personalized and highlights best-sellers and complementary products using cross-selling techniques. This makes the brand ready for the busy holiday marketing season.

• They're ready for holiday shoppers with a proactive planning and testing approach.

• They can easily bundle items for the holiday season to meet customer needs.

• During the holiday season, when there's a high demand for outdoor home improvement projects, they can customize this storefront to feature last-minute decking solutions.

• You can easily replicate their strategy to capture that critical end-of-season demand.

#5: Leverage Amazon’s New-To-Brand metrics for better customer reach

This will help you beyond your 2024 Q4 holiday marketing strategy as it offers insights into the performance of your Amazon ads. In particular, these metrics tell you the number of purchases made by new customers vs. existing customers. These metrics include:

• New-to-brand sales: This is the total sales of your new-to-brand orders in your local currency.

• New-to-brand orders: This is the total number of orders you receive from a new customer or one who hasn't purchased from your brand over the last year via ads.

Look at the following holiday marketing tactics for this:

1) Analyze the New-To-Brand metrics

A high new-to-brand percentage means your store attracts new customers this holiday season. Alternatively, a low new-to-brand metric means your customer retention strategies are stronger. Here's what you should do:

• Set your holiday marketing campaign goals to determine if you want to increase or decrease your new-to-brand percentage.

• If you want to attract new shoppers, use the relevant keywords and products to attract them.

• If you want to increase customer retention and lower your new-to-brand percentage, focus on brand-related keywords.

• Justify your ad spend with the new-to-brand metric. It is ok if your ad spend is high, but your new-to-brand metric is also high because this means your holiday marketing efforts attract new customers.

2) Apply these metrics to your holiday marketing campaigns

Here's what to do if you want to increase customer retention and strengthen brand loyalty with your holiday marketing strategy:

• Launch your holiday marketing campaigns with branded keywords, which have high conversion but low clicks and impressions.

• Use the metrics during product launch campaigns to find out how many of your existing consumers purchase your new products.

• These KPIs are not at the ASIN level but at the campaign level, so make your holiday marketing campaign product-specific to avoid misleading data.

Alternatively, do the following if your goal is to attract new customers during your Q4 holiday marketing campaign:

• Target high search volume keywords to reach a new target audience.

• Place high bids to make sure your ads are displayed in front of the right customers.

• Expect a high advertising cost of sales (ACOS) for your holiday marketing efforts if you want to target new consumers.

Example & application

Escort Radar is our favorite example because it uses segmentation and specialized products like radar detector mounts to attract both repeat buyers and new customers. They use Amazon's metrics to tailor holiday campaigns for new buyers while pushing their high-quality mounts to loyal customers.

This helps them attract new buyers and increase holiday sales during busy periods like Q4. This customer data also allows them to reallocate their ad spend towards high-volume keywords.

Conclusion

Which strategy best aligns with your current goals and available resources? Is it optimizing your product listings, enhancing customer engagement through ads, or improving your product images?

Start with the approach that will impact your business the most and build from there.

If you're running low on human resources and need the help of trustworthy experts for the busy holiday season, visit eStore Factory now. We offer all-inclusive management services for Amazon, including design, development, SEO, and PPC. Book our services today to start selling more.

Author Bio:

Burkhard Berger is the founder of Novum™. He helps innovative B2B companies implement modern SEO strategies to scale their organic traffic to 1,000,000+ visitors per month. Curious about what your true traffic potential is?