What was once known as Amazon’s Turkey 5—the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday—has evolved into Turkey 12 (T12), a 12-day sales event that starts before Thanksgiving. And shoppers can’t wait to take advantage. According to Amazon, 71% of shoppers plan to shop online for Black Friday, and 70% proactively check for deals during this shopping window. To ensure your brand is effectively positioned in the Amazon marketplace, consider implementing the following strategic tactics ahead of T12 and the holiday shopping season.
Inventory Management
- Inbound Inventory Cutoffs: Amazon prioritizes customer orders over inventory intake in the latter half of Q4, so hitting inbound inventory cutoffs is essential to ensure Prime badge readiness and smooth operations during peak sales windows.
- Capacity Manager: Amazon’s capacity monitor can pose challenges, but the Capacity Manager tool allows sellers to request additional cubic feet of storage in fulfillment centers (subject to approval). This can help secure the needed space for forecasted sales growth during T12 and throughout December.
Buy Box Management
- Backup Seller-Fulfilled Offers: Prime-eligible buy-box (BBX) offers can be impacted by complex inventory management and increased shipping times during T12. Setting up backup fulfilled-by-merchant (FBM) offers can cover potential sales gaps if issues arise.
- Additional FBM Logistics: While additional logistics are required for FBM orders, proactive setup of backup offers ensures promotions and ad functionality remain active, making FBM offers a valuable Plan B for maintaining sales continuity.
Content & Creative
- Brand Store Updates: Consider revamping your brand store for the holiday season by creating a deals and/or gift guide page, featuring your T12 participating products, and sprinkling in some holiday design elements to embrace the holiday spirit.
- Highlighting Discounts: While Amazon’s content requirements can be stringent, there are ways your brand can showcase your T12 discounts within the brand story or the brand store.
Discounting & Promotions
- Discount/Promotional Testing: In the months leading up to any tentpole sales event like T12, it’s crucial to test across Amazon’s ever-increasing array of discount and promotional offerings. This testing helps determine which combinations of promotion type, discount percentage, target audience, and product assortment will most effectively drive sales—particularly since performance varies widely depending on your brand and product categories.
- Selective Discounting: Depending on the size of your brand’s catalog, consider centering your discounts around top sellers or seasonal items, allowing your brand to drive higher sales without discounting the entire catalog.
- Virtual Bundles: Group products that are frequently purchased together into a virtual bundle offered at a discount off of combined MSRP, and position the bundle as a giftable item.
- Cart Abandoners: Holiday shopping does not end when T12 ends, so consider using brand-tailored promotions to re-engage cart abandoners who may have added to their cart during T12 but didn’t purchase.
Advertising
- Visibility: Your brand won’t be the only one trying to promote products and discounts during T12, so it’s crucial to ensure your ads are as visible as possible. Increasing bids across product and keyword targets while allocating the necessary ad budget to T12 are two steps that can help brands maximize visibility and capitalize on the substantial increase in traffic to Amazon. As bids increase, your campaign’s daily budgets will be stretched thin so it’s important to monitor accounts and ensure campaigns are not running out of budget during high-traffic periods.
- Discounting and Advertising Strategy: Make sure sufficient budget is being distributed to the products that are being discounted/promoted during T12, and temporarily deprioritize the products that are not participating.
- DSP Retargeting: Consider utilizing Amazon DSP to retarget audiences who viewed your brand’s product detail pages or added to their cart during T12, but didn’t purchase. This can justify a larger advertising budget during the T12 period, as the retargeted shoppers may convert outside of T12 but are directly attributable to the period’s increase in traffic.
- Invest in Upper Funnel: During high-salience shopping periods, it’s most important to ensure your retail media strategy is not too focused on converting already qualified traffic. The influx in traffic is a great opportunity to cast a wider net and test how to reach customers in the awareness and consideration phases of their shopping journey.
Elevate Your Brand This Holiday Season
Leveraging the strategies above during T12 can set up your brand for success not only for this holiday season but also for the long term. Effective planning across inventory, creative, promotions, and advertising will help you connect with shoppers and drive meaningful results during this pivotal period. Embrace the opportunity to elevate your brand during the busiest time of the year.
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