How SalesDuo helped The Pencil Grip grow by 55% in a year in a crowded, saturated market
SalesDuo onboarded The Pencil Grip (TPG) in March 2021. TPG was struggling during the 2020 pandemic-induced disruptions as the schools were closed, uncertainty as they entered 2021 and they had a good amount of inventory to sell on Amazon. However, these uncertainties were impacting their sales, and were struggling to understand how to expand their business on Amazon. TPG then signed up with SalesDuo for the following programs:
Knowing you are not alone is the key
We reviewed The Pencil Grip’s entire catalog on Vendor Central. We call this process Walk the Store. The goal is to fix the top 80% of the items, that drive the sales, on priority, and then focus on the long tail. While doing so, we identified the following issues in their catalog.
Suppressed ASINs – Few of their top-selling items were suppressed due to the Test Certificate and Children’s Product Certificate (CPC). Children's Products will be tested and certified by Amazon Approved Test Centers. The Minimum Age and Maximum Age of the products will determine the outcome of the test report. SalesDuo worked with the TPG’s Team and provided them the needed guidance on how a CPC should be built for Amazon to accept the test reports along with CPC.
Listing Enhancements – SalesDuo's creative and content team know that it takes more than just setting up a Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisement to get tangible results, which is why we focused on Listing Optimization as a next step. Title, Product Desciption, and Bullet Points are search indexed to cater to the Amazon’s A9 search algorithm, and optimizing by inducing the keywords drives visibility. Display Page Image, A+ page, and Brand Store make your product visually appealing and improves conversion. SalesDuo enhanced the Detail Page by making the changes to their catalog to make it more appealing and to drive visibility.
Variations – There was a sudden dip in sales for a top-selling item. SalesDuo did a root cause and identified variations as the driving factor. Variations are needed to increase the sales (and now with the latest A9 changes — it is a must to feature high on Amazon’s search results), but it was vice versa for one of TPG’s products. Items variated were similar items but one with low cost and another having a higher cost. The top-selling item had a dip in sales because the customers preferred the lower cost item over the expensive one. We removed the items from the variation, and we noted a gradual increase in sales on that item. Eventually, Amazon started reducing the List price of the item too.
Promotions – The goal after all these fixes was to double down on sales - SalesDuo strategically introduced coupons seasonally for the fast-moving items and cross-sell the low-moving ones. The planning of Coupons was initiated well in advance for each school-specific season, and we were able to sell 13981 units from the coupon campaigns ensuring there was no impact on the Profit Margin.
Sponsored Ads – The core of driving sales is Advertising the product on Amazon. We studied their complete catalog and built multiple types of campaigns like Sponsored Product, Sponsored Display (Offensive and Defensive), Sponsored Brands for the top 80% ASINs. The advertising campaigns were periodically optimized using our Dayparting Models through API. As a result, the campaigns continue to perform well with optimal Advertising Cost of Sales (ACOS).
Home Run
The collaborative efforts between SalesDuo and The Pencil Grip helped them grow by 54.15% during 2021. The Duo Formula not alone ensured that The Pencil Grip got better on Amazon, but also saved the in-house human resources costs associated with managing Amazon, which would have come at 5% of their Annual Revenue on Amazon as against 1.5% using SalesDuo.