What You Need To Know: The Promotional Launch Checklist

Before You Dig In…

If you’ve been with us this far, you’ve already seen some of what will be mentioned in this blog and subsequent video. If not, go take a look on our YouTube page and you’ll find all those nuggets of wisdom there.

In any case, this week we’ll be going over all of the little items you need to keep in consideration when you are launching your promotions.

Check it out…

Keywords For The Win

Simply put, the success of your promotions will be linked directly to the keywords you’ve chosen. Depending on the niche you’ve chosen to work in, some of those keywords may be prohibitive to target right out of the gate. However, you need to target something, right?

Focus on your mid to low volume keywords. These are overall easier to rank for simply because the competition level isn’t as high for them. When you’re ranking, you’re selling, so finding the most relevant low and medium volume keywords is a great way to go if your product listing is still young.

As far as what keywords you should target within that medium to low range is always up for debate. Think of your keywords as a net that you are casting out to sea to catch as many fish as possible. The more keywords you are targeting that are relevant to your listing make up that net. So, a WIDER net should catch more fish. In other words, target as many keywords as possible that are relevant to your product. Not all opinions are unanimous on this point, but in our experience, a wide net does indeed catch more fish.

If you are ranking for a number of keywords, you’ll get more exposure on Amazon. More exposure there leads to more sales for you.

The biggest thing to remember is to STAY RELEVANT! You don’t want to rank for coffee cup if you are selling a supplement, in other words.

Now, if you’re still lost, the easiest thing to do is google “Amazon Keyword Research Tool” and you will find a plethora of services out there that can help you narrow down the best keywords to use for your given product.

The more data you have to go off of, the better a promotion you can run.

Stay In The Budget

When it comes to promotions, a budget is something that you should never overlook. Remember, if you are giving away products at a massive discount, you will still be liable for your FBA fees. Those do not change no matter the discount, and if you’re not careful, that small fact can cost you.

You also need to take into account what paid services you are using, as well as ad costs for Facebook and the like.

The main reason for this budget is so that when things go well and your inventory runs low, you have enough money left over to reorder. The worst thing that can happen after a seriously successful promotion is that you are out of product for weeks after it. Talk about losing momentum.

Your Personal Report Cards

There are two specific reports that you can pull from Seller Central. The first one is your sessions and conversion rate. In Amazon speak, it’s called “sessions” and “unit session percentages”.

Now, let’s break this down so we are all on the same page. Sessions is individual visits to your page. These are tied to the IP address of the person viewing your page. So, if a friend of yours visits your page three times in one day, that will still count as one session, as it was a single person from a specific address viewing your listing. Going deeper, let’s say you have a hundred sessions a day, and 20 people purchase, you have a 20% unit session percentage, or a 20% conversion rate.

When it comes to keeping track of these reports for promotions, make sure you take note of your sessions before and after your promotion. What you’re looking for ideally is a rise in both sessions and conversions, which means more sales.

Obviously, if this is your first promotion just after a launch, there won’t be much date before the promotion, but definitely take note of what happens during and after your first promotion.

This report is also great for keeping up with what keywords are working for you. If after a promotion your keyword ranking, sessions, and conversions go up for your chosen keyword, you can safely assume that you have correctly targeted the right keywords to get your listing sold. Adversely, you might see that you aren’t converting well for a certain keyword. This data is invaluable, and will help you find the best keywords to make the most sales with.

Another helpful report you can pull is a promotional discount report. This report will list all of your products sold that had a discount attached to them. Besides being great to see your promotions in action, you can compare this to your overall sales to get a better idea of how you are doing organically for those same keywords as well.

If you are ranking for a number of keywords, you’ll get more exposure on Amazon. More exposure there leads to more sales for you.

Start The Countdown

When it comes to promotions, data is king. The more data you have to go off of, the better a promotion you can run. So, if your first few promotions don’t perform as well as you hoped, you can always take that data back to the drawing board. More data equals better results.

Now, go get ’em, Tiger.