Your 2021 Amazon Holiday Checklist
‘Tis the season to start planning for the holidays on Amazon. Though it might seem early, now is the time to ramp up your strategy in anticipation of a chaotic holiday season due to the supply chain crisis and ongoing effects of the pandemic. These factors — coupled with the early wave of holiday shoppers and deals — means that your Amazon strategy must be optimized in time so you can take advantage of the pivotal sales window.
To help you get started, our Amazon experts curated a checklist of holiday best practices that you can use to inform your inventory, catalog management, content, and advertising strategies this holiday season.
Inventory & Catalog Management
- Review the amount of available replenishable inventory by ASIN twice a day.
- Use a mix of Small Parcel and LTL. This will help you stay nimble to the constantly changing thresholds per ASIN and increasing inbound order processing lead-times at Amazon.
- Check “Manage Inventory” to make sure none of your listings are suppressed or inactive. If you have suppressed listings, identify and edit your listing to fill in any missing information or images, and correct any content that does not meet requirements.
- Review your listing variation structure. As other sellers make changes, they could revert to old versions or Amazon can change them. Verify that the identifying data is correct (such as size and color names) and that all of the correct child ASINs are showing in their appropriate variations. This can be fixed with a quick file feed upload or by contacting seller support if a file feed does not resolve the issue.
- Check your listings for new category specific fields. Filling these in can help with search performance and categorization.
Content
- Adjust your brand store according to the sales event and/or holiday. If you don’t have a full-scale holiday brand store strategy, repurpose existing creatives from your site or socials to create a holiday gifting destination, or simply refresh the imagery on your store to feel more “festive.” Make sure your top sellers are front and center and that the shopping experience is as streamlined and consumer-friendly as possible.
- Check that your best selling and seasonal products have quality A+ content. Add strong lifestyle images for a quick, eye-catching solution and include any information that you did not highlight in the PDP images and copy above the fold.
- Use holiday and winter assets for Amazon Posts. Build an arsenal of posts using imagery and copy targeting holiday and gifting, and schedule them ahead of time to be posted consistently in the weeks leading up to and following peak shopping events. If you’re short on holiday creatives, focus on increasing your posting frequency with content that promotes both the product and brand.
Advertising
Paid Search
- Keep your campaign budgets high to prevent them from running out before, during or after Black Friday and Cyber Monday. A high budget will help establish relevancy so you remain competitive in saturated ad auctions.
- Add new converting search terms as keywords to your campaigns to ensure you’re targeting relevant shoppers. Using keyword data from the last 30-60 days will provide valuable, more recent search terms that will be beneficial to leverage for Q4 events.
- Use Sponsored Brands Video Ads and add lifestyle images to your Sponsored Brand Ads. These creative opportunities will help you cut through the clutter of search results and improve your overall brand messaging.
The DSP
- Keep your budget high to stay live during peak days or times. With higher than average site traffic, you can expect expanded audience pools and increased competition.
- Aim to reach people as they enter the consideration phase in the weeks leading up to holiday sales events. Introducing your brand and staying top of mind can lead to conversions during and post-event.
- Round out your investment by driving further conversions through a customized remarketing segment delivered in the weeks following.
- To really stand out, Amazon has exclusive video opportunities that can be powerful drivers to close the buying cycle.
Keep this checklist on hand while planning for the holidays on Amazon. For holiday deadlines and important dates, check out our 2021 Q4 calendar and be sure to subscribe to our newsletter below.