What does Data have in common with Greetings Cards during Lockdown?

As the lockdown in Britain started just over 8 weeks ago, Zaquarella, a Greeting Card Publisher, was pondering its future. Having spent a relative fortune on Google advertising to get traffic to our own website over the last few years, with underwhelming success, we were wondering what to do next. The business was not washing its face and the lockdown loomed large ahead.

So when Amazon offered us a ￡150 voucher to try out the new Amazon advertising features we took it with both hands. Our card products had been available on Amazon (AMZ) for a while already, but sales had been lacking. But what could we lose? The motto of the entrepreneur is to ‘try, try and try again’, isn’t it?

The concept of the Amazon Marketing Service (AMS) is to create advertising campaigns within the platform to boost impressions, the number of times your product is presented to a shopper, and to convert these into click selection and most importantly sales. The trick to all this is the daily budget Spend on these campaigns and the eventual cost of each click in terms of sales obtained, known as ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sale). An additional complication is the bid cost per search word to present your product, in this case a greeting card, above those of your competitors. This is a real challenge when the product sale price is low as in the case with Greeting Cards and Amazon platform costs are already substantial and often a percentage of the sale price.

Where Amazon excels is in their data gathering and provision of this information to their Amazon Seller – that’s you in this case, the Greeting Card Publisher. Information on exactly how your product is faring is provided real time – that basically means current up to date information is available whenever you ask for it. Daily reports are available after midnight, so you can keep close track of progress. Amazon has far exceeded the advertising capabilities offered by other traditional online platforms such as ETSY. This is a key differentiator for them and features such as being able to directly target a competitor’s product are a huge win to start getting your products noticed.

Another helper on the Amazon platform is that once sales of your product being to climb, their own optimised search and present engine will also work for you and displays your products. Amazon wants to promote sales too! And these top sellers are available on the ‘Best Sellers’ lists that shoppers can access from the landing page by selecting what they are looking for within the various categories.

Getting back to our story it’s here it starts to take off. With painstaking daily optimisation of the campaign and individual product search and negative search terms, our sales have started to increase dramatically. This was a huge relief and restored belief in our product creative design and brand theme. The data quickly showed what products were most popular and allowed us to really hone our targeting skills and of course this informed the operational side of our business to ensure stocks were available to meet demand.

The reports from Amazon allowed us to understand that peculiarities in buying patterns such as sales were often lower on certain days of the week and that peak buying was around certain hours on specific days. This information allowed us to ensure we had the right marketing budget spend ready to target those days and times.

Overall our business has experienced a huge increase in sales since March and we know for sure which cards are our best sellers with accurate data collected from many thousands of Amazon customers. We will use this to develop new greeting card ranges allowing for a full feedback loop into our business growth strategy.

Many of these sales could be attributed to new buying patterns during lockdown focusing on online platforms, but have buying habits been changed permanently as the pandemic continues? Now what are we going to do next as the Lockdown starts to ease.

Written by Rachel Dickson, May 2020 (Co-owner and Creative Director of Zaquarella). She has a background in Digital, Data, and Technology.

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