Hallmark Flowers and plants are a beautiful way to celebrate the people you love, cherish the moments you share, and connect in ways that matter the most and they are known for their top-selling Bouquets, Succulents, and Plant containers.
Hallmark Flowers and SalesDuo’s partnership is 3 years old and the key goal has always been to grow business on Amazon. Hallmark Flowers has presence on Amazon via Vendor Central, and they’ve had a successful run. SalesDuo further leveraged on Amazon Ads to grow business.
Since Hallmark sells flowers, that has high sales during events events like Valentine’s Day, Mother Day, Christmas, etc., our goal was to drive high sales with maximum efficiency as the flowers category is extremely competitive during these events.
Our Marketing Strategy in 2021
In 2021, for the events, we created 3 manual campaigns that had keywords suggested by Hallmark and related to the events and 3 auto campaigns were created to gain visibility during the event, but our ACOS was high for the seasonal keywords as they require high bids of $2 to $15 due to high competition during this period. We ran the campaigns for a period of 3 weeks due to which we could not extract the actionable data to optimize the campaigns to their maximum potential and we ended up with an average ACOS of 25%.
Our Marketing Strategy in 2022
We noticed that customers preferred specific listings for different seasonal events in the past, so we recommended Hallmark to create customized tags for the products and images were changed based on the seasonal event for the listings, and we would create a variation of these products that allowed us to display all the trending products under a single detail page. With a limited budget, we optimized the pre-existing campaigns that we were running for the last 3–4 months and did A/B testing with manual and auto-targeting and during the season we opted for the campaigns that were generating the best results that were continuously refined by adding negative keywords for good conversion.
We started with a bid-down-only strategy and chose not to compete on the seasonal keywords with high bids but increased visibility on generic keywords as we were restricted by a limited budget and opted for auto campaigns based on campaign performance and efficiency aiming at increasing the visibility of the platform.
The Outcome
The sales received through AMS on the top-selling products increased by 125% for 2022 vs 2021 with the perfect blend of the above strategies, as well as continuous optimization through product-level budget transfer basis sales and ACOS performance, which allows freeing up more budget and re-focusing on top ASINs.
The average ACOS during peak sales season dropped from 25% to 14% (2021 vs 2022) and the sales increased 126% (2021 vs 2022). The auto campaign with a dynamic bidding strategy helped us obtain maximum output on low ACOS during the peak season.
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About the Author
Akbar Syed, a senior Amazon account manager, expertly navigates the complexities of Amazon to develop sales strategies that elevate brands to new heights. Beyond his professional life, he is a tech aficionado, a culinary explorer who loves experimenting with new recipes, and a dedicated traveler always in search of new adventures and experiences.
