A few things you didn’t know about Amazon

By Vipon last updated on 0 comments

Most of the time as FBA sellers we’re focused on stuff like best seller ratings, review rankings, organic keyword rank, profit margins, sourcing, and running ad campaigns. Serious stuff. But sometimes, you need to relax. So this week, things you didn’t know about Amazon and didn’t like to ask.

How did Amazon get its name?

Jeff Bezos chose the name first of all because he wanted a name beginning with the first letter of the alphabet, A. (If you’ve ever seen ads for AAAAA Plumber or AA Taxis you’ll know he’s not the only one.) In fact, he’d originally called it Cadabra but incorporated as Amazon. The name also reflects his strategy to “get big fast”, since the Amazon is the longest river in the world.

What price was Amazon IPO’d at?

Amazon’s IPO – the introduction of its shares to the NASDAQ exchange – took place on May 15th, 1997. The shares cost $18.

However, the stock has been subdivided four times since then. If you held one share, you’d now have 240. So that means the effective price paid at the IPO for each of today’s shares was just 7.5 cents.

Just for reference, the shares now trade at $114 and they have traded as high as $188!

Is Amazon just a retailer?

No, it also has a huge business providing cloud computing services that are used by companies such as Lyft, Netflix, and AirBNB. It’s a business that has grown fast and is very profitable for Amazon.

How many dogs are there at Amazon?

We’re not joking. Right from the start employees have taken their animal companions in to work, and there are now an estimated 5,000 dogs at the Seattle campus. There’s even an Amazon page devoted to them at https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/how-much-does-amazon-love-dogs-just-ask-one-of-the-7-000-pups-that-work-here.

However, the dogs are way outnumbered by an estimated 200,000 mobile robots that work at Amazon worldwide.

What other companies does Amazon own?

You might think Whole Foods is a separate company. It isn’t; Amazon bought it in 2017. GoodReads looks like it has nothing to do with Amazon – but Amazon owns it. Amazon also owns Twitch, Audible, Kuiper satellite internet, AbeBooks, film site IMDb, PillPack, and Woot.

How long is Amazon Prime Day?

Trick question! It’s now 48 hours.

How long did it take the original Kindle to sell out?

Kindle, Amazon’s proprietary e-book reading device, came to the market in November 2007. It sold out within five and a half hours.

What year did Kindle e-books first outsell printed books?

A lot of people consider this was the end of the print-and-paper age and the beginning of the electronic age. And it was as long ago as 2009.

Is Amazon a tourist destination?

Yes! 23 of its North American warehouses open for guided visits which last around an hour. It’s well worth making the detour to see these state-of-the-art logistics facilities, though the kids would probably prefer Disneyland.

Who is Danbo?

Danbo is just an Amazon branded cardboard box – ‘danbo’ is Japanese for corrugated cardboard. But in Japan, the Amazon box has become a manga (comics) character and achieved amazing popularity, with action figures and even electronic gadgets designed in his honor.

What are The Spheres?

The Spheres are a set of spaces filled with plants from all over the world, where employees at Amazon HQ can go to chill out and feel connected with nature.

Where did Amazon hold its first business meetings?

Ironically, in the very early days Jeff Bezos, his then wife Mackenzie and his first employees held meetings in a local Barnes & Noble bookstore. Ironically, because Barnes & Noble had no idea they were playing host to a future competitor!

What was the first book sold by Amazon?

Douglas Hofstadter’s Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought. Quite a mouthful!

We hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s blog. Back to usual with some solid business advice next week!

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Price elasticity: what it is and why it matters

By Vipon last updated on 0 comments

Price is super important for your Amazon products. If your price is too high, you might not make any sales on Amazon. If you price is too low, you might not make any profit. Price elasticity is a basic economic concept that has a lot of meaning for marketers. It measures how a given product will respond to changes in price; some products are very responsive to price changes, while others are not.

Naturally, as the price rises, demand will fall. If the price is dropped, demand will increase. But some types of product only see a small change in demand, while others see a much bigger change. A very price-elastic product is one where a small discount will result in a big jump in demand; a very price-inelastic product is one where demand is hardly affected by the price. For instance, domestic water consumption is usually price-inelastic; we have to drink, wash clothes, shower and brush our teeth, and the price of the water supply doesn’t come into the equation.

Many consumer goods are price-elastic. For instance, if you sell small toys, novelty products, or kitchen consumables, you’ll probably find your product is price-elastic. Moving the price can result in quite large changes in sales. A price-elastic product can really benefit from a discounting or coupon campaign.

Now, an economist can actually produce a price-elasticity ratio which shows exactly how a product will respond to price changes. But you don’t need to do that to have a good idea of how price-elastic your products are.

Generally, a product will tend to be a bit less price-elastic if other factors are relatively more important. For instance:

•            safety – in the case of products intended for children;

•            high quality – in the case of products intended for professional users or connoisseurs;

•            durability – in the case of footwear, for instance, or machinery.

Think about setting up an artisan bakery. When would you trade price for one of these other factors? You would probably be quite aggressive to get the best price on paper bags and packaging, but you would want a durable bread oven that will last you ten or twenty years, and you might pay a bit more for a reputable brand. And you’d probably want high quality ingredients, so while you would shop around for your flour, you wouldn’t necessarily buy the cheapest.

So one way to make your goods less vulnerable to competitors pushing prices down is to play up safety, quality, and durability as factors.

There’s another important reason you should know how price-elastic your products are. If your goods are price-inelastic, you shouldn’t really think about discounting. You will be giving money away, and you won’t get much of a boost in sales. On the other hand, if your goods are price-elastic, offering discounts is a great way to get your inventory moving out the door, and you’ll probably make more money even though you’re selling at a lower price.

Discounting on Vipon could be a smart move for price-elastic products. The more price-elastic the product, the better the return will be. (You might also want to think about focusing your discounts on the time of year they can really grab you seasonal business, such as back-to-school discounts on stationery and backpacks.) And if you use Vipon, you know that you’re accessing a customer base which is very price-focused, too.

By the way, there’s a particularly weird kind of product called a Veblen good. Performance cars, haute couture and multiple Michelin starred restaurants probably fit this description. A Veblen good isn’t just price inelastic, demand will increase if the price goes up, because people think it’s even more important to be seen with this brand!

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Watching your Amazon competitors’ deals  

By Vipon last updated on 0 comments

If you’re an active FBA seller, you’re going to want to watch what your competitors are doing.

For instance, if they’re running a big discount offer, you need to know about it. That’s something that could affect your sales significantly. If they’re suddenly splurging on pay per click ads, you’ll want to know about that too.

So you’ll want to bookmark their product pages for a start. You’ll probably want to automate some of your task; most good FBA software has the ability to track products and Amazon sales ranks. You may find that some competitors always run the same kind of deals, for instance doing one Lightning Deal a month, or always offering the same level of discount when they have a promotion.

Make a note of when they ran a major promotion and see whether it took a chunk out of your sales on Amazon. If that particular competitor is taking sales away from other people, but not from you, then you don’t need to try to match their promotional price.

If you do want to counter their promotions, then do it with a rebate or a coupon, rather than by cutting your product price. That makes it easy to restate your base price later.

Never do the same thing that they’re doing. Find another way to counter their price cuts. For instance, if they are using coupons, you should look at the value gap, then think of different ways to fill it. You could use a multipack or a bundle promotion to make their single-item promotion look less exciting, for instance.

You might also respond by stressing non-price factors. For instance, if your competitor’s shampoo isn’t hypoallergenic, then when they’re having a promotion, make sure your marketing, web banner, infographics, and so on stress that your shampoo won’t set off people’s allergies.

Go a little further and look at what keywords your competitors are targeting, too. Do you have more, or different, keywords? How do they rank against you? Do they have keywords you haven’t thought of? You can always try to out-think them by going a step further towards ‘long tail’ keywords. If they have ‘allergy free shampoo’ you could have ‘allergy free natural shampoo’ or ‘organic allergy free shampoo’, and so on.

Use Google Alerts (which is free) to monitor what your competitors are doing and what kind of reviews and publicity they’re getting. It can be a good idea to track your own brand too; if you’re getting bad press you want to know about it, and if you’re getting good press, you’ll want to find a way to leverage it.

Remember also to keep an eye on whether new competitors are entering the sector, or old ones are quitting. This isn’t something that you’ll need to act on in the short term, but if you see a lot of competitors quitting the sector, it usually means it’s not profitable enough for them. If you’re the sector leader by a long way and you have keen prices and a great supplier, you might just happen to ‘own’ the market, in which case this is good news. You may even be able to put your price up a bit as there’s less competition for customers’ dollars. But if you’re one of twenty competitors all around the same size and the product isn’t super-profitable for you, it could mean you’ll need to think hard about your business viability in the long term. It would certainly suggest you shouldn’t match rivals’ discounts or coupon offers, as they may only be discounting to sell off their remaining stock. From your point of view, the sooner they’re gone, the better!

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Promotion Ideas To Boost Your Amazon Sales

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Sales promotions are a great way to get your sales moving. But to succeed, they have to stand out against a lot of competition, and they have to have a reason why customers should buy right now.

A flash sale is a great way to pull in orders. Keep your sale simple, with a clear call to action: “20% off if you order before Friday; click here to order”. You can do this on one product, or on all your products; if you flash sale a complete product range you may find your results are even better than having a sale on one or two discrete items.

If your flash sale did well, but didn’t quite sell enough, you can get double duty out of it by starting a new campaign, “Flash sale just extended!” In fact, you could even plan the extension as part of your original campaign. It gives you a second chance at those customers who didn’t buy first time round. You don’t want to be careful, though, that you don’t end up with your goods at permanent sale prices – that’s not a good look and can, over time, degrade your brand.

“Buy one, get one free” or “buy this, get that free” works well. Watch out though for the customers who buy one, get one free, and then return the one that was free for a refund. Another way to provide a ‘free’ item is simply to add something to the package – for instance a pen case with a pack of pens, or a “free” dog tag with a dog collar and leash. Even though you’ve costed for it and included it in the package, the customer will perceive it as a ‘free’ item that’s of value to them.

Free samples are a great way to get customers in. If you can include a free sample of another product in your packaging, why not do so?

Lifestyle discounts can be targeted at, for instance, seniors, teachers, students, veterans, or members of an association. That’s simple for you to do by finding a way to direct coupons to your selected group – in a relevant publication, through associations, Facebook group pages, and so on. You can then simply set up the coupons in Amazon and you’re ready to go.

You could offer an affiliate bonus, for instance to influencers or to well regarded websites that feature your products with a discount. If you use attribution codes on Amazon to identify the sales coming from that particular influencer, you can then pay a bonus based on sales volume.

For all kinds of promotion, include a countdown timer if you can. Split-testing the same offer with and without a countdown timer showed that when they knew the clock was ticketing, customers were nearly 10% more likely to buy.

A quite different type of promotion is giving a percentage of your product price to a charity. Plenty of businesses do this all the time, but you could run a short promotion for a particular period, for instance giving to a charity for the homeless or for children in care over the holiday season, or for military charities around Veterans Day.

Or, of course, you can just offer a deep discount. Many customers cannot resist these. And we know all about them at Vipon!

There’s just one thing that as an FBA seller you cannot, and must not, do, and that’s have a review discount program. Whether you provide products for free or at a discount, you are not allowed to do so in return for a review (unless it’s through Amazon’s own Vine program).

You can have your account terminated for doing that. Amazon takes the trustworthiness of its reviews very seriously!

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Amazon Products Strategic Discounting

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When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And when you can discount, everything that’s wrong with your business looks like it can be solved by discounting.

But smart discounting is about knowing exactly what you want to achieve with each discount; in other words, you need a precise objective.

For instance, you might discount in a seasonal sale. In this case you’re aiming to clear the decks of your excess inventory rather than hold on to it till next season. For instance, discounts on swim-wear at the end of summer, or January discounts on holiday themed goods, fit the bill here. These discounts need to be pretty big to shift the stock, as most people don’t see the sense of buying a bikini in October.

You might want to use a discount to promote your product for a particular event, such as Fountain Pen Day or International Cat Day or Chinese New Year. If you’re in a niche, that can help you gain brand recognition and make your customers feel like you’re part of the same community. It’s particularly powerful if your brand is quite new in that niche.

You could also use a discount to accompany an influencer or social media promotion. In this case you might want the discounts to be offered exclusively through an influencer, for instance the video review of your product might contain a coupon code right at the end. In this case you probably don’t want to offer a deep discount; 10% is enough to give that little extra boost to potential customers’ motivation.

Discounts can be used to encourage larger orders. Often, those are packaged as buy one get one free, or three for the price of two, rather than as a percentage discount, though the way the numbers stack up for the seller is exactly the same as if an equivalent discount had been offered. You might package your FBA products up as a bundle or a multipack. This lets you shift higher volume.

Sometimes discounts are used to reward loyal customers. ‘Private sales’ or ‘tenth order’ discounts are nice ways to keep regular customers happy, or you can simply include a coupon code for the next order with every package that goes out. These don’t need to be very significant discounts; 10% is enough to leave customers with a nice feeling of having been recognized and rewarded, and that’s what you’re after, not a huge increase in sales.

You might use a discount offer to generate email leads. That’s the online equivalent of a restaurant having a raffle for everyone who leaves their business card. Again, a small discount will get good results here.

But sometimes you need the deep discounts. You need deeper discount to create a real buzz. You need deeper discounts to launch a new products and get over customers’ reluctance to change brands or try something new. And of course if you want to get rid of the last inventory of a discontinued product, you’ll want a deeper discount there as well. These are the times that Vipon can really help.

Let’s also remember the basic rules for a good discount campaign. First, make it simple for potential buyers to see what they’re getting as a discount, and to claim it. Your discount shouldn’t require advanced math to understand, and it shouldn’t be difficult to claim. If you want to have a treasure hunt with obscure clues and tricky calculations, have a treasure hunt! But you’ll need something a bit better than money off as a prize to make it work properly; a Willy Wonka golden ticket, or a year’s supply of gourmet coffee.

And secondly, have different coupons for different sources so you can check which campaigns or sites worked best. Monitoring your offers so you know what works for future campaigns is vital if you’re going to discount even more smartly in future!

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How to sell your brands when inflation is rampant

By Vipon last updated on 0 comments

For more than twenty years, we’ve had low inflation and low interest rates. Now, following the tight supply conditions and logistic disruptions of the pandemic, war in Ukraine has pushed up the prices of oil and wheat, and inflation has taken off.

No wonder many consumers are reconsidering their brand loyalties. Many are trading down, some for the first time. How can you keep your brand selling well in inflationary times?

One way is to orientate your brand towards saving customers money. For instance, if you sell ruggedized products, work out how much customers will save on not having to replace their units so often and put that right at the top of the benefits list. Or if you sell a really hot pepper sauce you could suggest that your tiny bottle will outlast a bigger but blander sauce, because it’s so hot you only need the teensiest little dot of sauce to jazz up any dish.

Another way is to try to get customers to look at a smaller price than the item itself. For instance, a box of powdered dietary supplement might look expensive, but you could express that as “price per meal”. Beauty treatments could be priced per month, per bath, and so on.

You can also focus on loyalty, of course, by offering a coupon giving existing customers money off their next purchase. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but for consumables or regular purchases, or if you have a broad product line (eg in the home and kitchen category), it can keep them thinking of you next time they need the product.

You might also consider offering a subscription package. For instance, you could offer a monthly coffee or tea subscription. By offering a discount for a six month subscription you’re locking in revenue for a while.

That’s all good for brands, but what happens when your products are primarily impulse purchases? Those, after all, are the purchases that are going to be cut when money is tight.

Do you remember, a while back,we wrote about the irrationality of human beings faced with pricing decisions and discounts? A really deep discount will always get customers. Somehow, it’s the discount that they focus on and not the cost of the product.

You see this at flea markets so often. People will spend $50, but they say to themselves “If I’d paid full price, I would have spent $300”. Even if the $50 is the household budget for the week, they still do it.

Of course you want to limit the discount so your customer is forced to choose. It’s no use saying “come back any time, it will still be on offer”. You need a sign up saying “Sale ends on Monday” – in other words, introduce a sense of urgency.

Normally, that might be in the small print. Right now, you should put it up the top. Really stress that acting now will save your customer however many dollars. Focus them on the saving, not the price, and the urgency. That will get the best results.

As always, we’re happy to show you how to use Vipon to get the best deals in front of the best discount hunter customers!

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Your last chance for the back to school market

By Vipon last updated on 0 comments

It’s back to school time – or at least, its “thinking about back to school” time – and a lot of parents will be looking to buy stuff for their kids over the next few weeks.

According to the National Retail Federation, average household spending on school supplies will likely be around $864; where college age students are concerned, that rises to $1,199.

It’s a huge market, altogether worth well over $100 billion! And even though inflation is beginning to bite, and parents are economizing, they won’t be economizing on the essentials. Sales are likely to be flat or just slightly down, and it’s probably the luxuries that are going to get skipped.

Although smart parents already started shopping in July, 88 percent of families were still waiting for their school lists. So you can still hit this market as there are always a few families who for whatever reason haven’t got their stuff together, and there are always a few things get missed off even the most detailed list.

Schools are generally starting from 20th August to the end of August, but colleges tend to start a couple of weeks later. So you still have time.

However, parents are looking for deals. About half of all consumers now say they don’t pay full price for anything unless they have to, and every website from USA Today to CNBC has advice on how to save money on school kit.  So you need to show right up front how much money parents can save with your products.

One good way to do this is to put together a ready-made back to school kit with everything in – make sure you state which age or grade it’s appropriate for. That can include art paper, composition books, marker pens, plain and colored pencils, glue, ruler, eraser and pencil sharpener.

Multi packs are another great way to provide a discount and attract customers. Stationery sells particularly well and packs easily. Or if you already offer a multipack, jazz it up. Add an extra notebook for free to the 10-pack if it’s ordered before school reopens, or offer a special discount just for the next two weeks.

Remember some households will need to buy for more than one child. Large orders can make sense as long as the goods are not too age-specific. For instance, ordering all the pens and paper for three children to get a great deal is sensible. And of course, larger households are likely to be the ones feeling the pinch even more than others.

Consumables are one area that parents can’t delete from the list. So pens, crayons, paints, paper, and pencils are all likely to do well.

Discretionary spending, on the other hand, is the area that many parents might consider can be cut. New pencil cases, lunch boxes and backpacks might not be on the agenda if last year’s are still usable. You may need to discount heavily. If your sales so far have been disappointing, consider using coupons to offer a deep discount and use all the media you can to publicize those coupons.

If you’re using Vipon www.myvipon.com on be sure to flag up your best offers for back to school. We have a lot of bargain-seeking moms on board! But be quick, time is running out!

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Maximizing your FBA sales

By Vipon last updated on 0 comments

Sometimes, a product will sell reasonably well, but it reaches a certain point where it just stops growing. You need to be able to give it a push, so that it can start growing again. There are a lot of ways to do that; some are easy and cheap, others take a bit of time and effort, and some also involve a bit of investment.

Sometimes you might just need to brush up your keywords or do a little more advertising. But there are a lot more ways to promote your product.

Get more reviews! Include a “please review me” tag with the product, send a follow-up email to purchasers, or use the Amazon Vine program if you have a really low number of reviews.

Get reviews on other platforms too, such as Facebook, Twitter or even eBay. On Facebook you can ask for specific feedback on the product – for instance you can ask customers what color they would most like to buy, or what was the thing they learned that really helped them get the most out of the product. You can use the results to come up with new products, to add to your product listing, or even to create a tip sheet or troubleshooting sheet for your product (“How not to burn your cupcakes”).

Run a daily deal. Sometimes all a product needs is a quick boost to sales to improve its Amazon sales ranking and start topping searches. Amazon offers a number of formats including coupon codes, Lightning Deals, and so on – use them to create a bit of excitement.

Be active in the Q&As on your product pages. Often, these are where customers will find the one piece of information that makes the purchase decision easy, for instance whether the throw will fit their sofa, whether a dog collar is big enough for their Great Dane, what rating sleeping bag to order for winter camping.

If you can highlight your product USPs at the same time as answering the question, you’ve killed two birds with one stone. “Our flask has an attachment for a carabiner or belt, so you can take it hiking and have it easily available.”

Use A/B testing (split testing) to run two offers simultaneously, or assess whether changes you’ve made to the product page are working. This gives you real, real-time data on just how effective your changes, promotions, or ads have been, so you can refine your offering based on fact not gut feeling.

Check your keywords and check what keywords your competitors are using, too. Look at your reviews and Q&A for idea on what might be useful to include as long tail keywords, for instance “super strong dog collar”, “dog collar for big breeds”, and so on.

Rewrite your product description. A picture is worth a thousand words, but you should have about a thousand words anyway, well divided up into bullet points. Make sure your major keywords are all included in the product description.

Start a Youtube channel around your product and/or its uses. Putting up one video a month can really boost sales, as long as you remember to post the link to your product. Recipe videos for cooking equipment, and makeover videos for decorative products and paints, are always popular.

Learn how to cross-sell and upsell using your own site or your Amazon Storefront.

Try partnering with other brands. For instance if you have a set of craft glues, why not cooperate with vendors of other craft or scrapbooking materials?

Create a unique package with its own ASIN. Tack on extras, for instance selling dog collar, leash and harness together, or a card game with a choice of expansion sets. This will really help you out-compete your rivals, who are only offering the separate products and not the package.

Don’t underestimate how much Amazon’s auto-generated ads can do for you. Sometimes they outperform manual campaigns by a wide margin, because if there’s one thing Amazon really knows, it’s how its own algorithms work!

And finally, of course, consider using Vipon for deep discount offers to get your sales moving.

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How to let customers know about your discounts

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One of the things behavioral psychologists know is that how things are presented to people makes a huge difference to the way they perceive them. If you’re ever seen the optical illusion in which two lines of the same length appear to be of different lengths, you’ll know that presentation accounts for nine-tenths of our perception. (This illusion actually has a name – the Muller-Lyer illusion.)

So how you present your discount affects how successful it will be. For instance, if you just cut your price but you don’t also display the pre-discount price, customers may see the price is less than they expected, but they won’t see that it’s a promotional offer. This means their feeling of getting ‘something extra’ will not be so pronounced. They will also expect that price to be the ‘normal’ price, so when your discount is no longer available, they will be discouraged by seeing what they think is a price increase.

That’s why at Vipon we always show the original price crossed out before we show the discounted price. Even if the customer doesn’t do the math, when they see $22.99 crossed out and $7.13 as the new price, they know they’re getting a bargain!

There is a interesting example in the auto sector. Marketing consultants Simon Kucher & Partners carried out a survey in which the same car was offered at the same price, but telling some consumers it was the standard price, and others that it was list price less a 12% percent discount. When the consumers were asked “Would you consider buying this car?” only 21% of the ‘list price’ group said ‘yes’. But 58 percent of those who thought the car was discounted would consider a purchase.

So a discount does actually appear to have a value. It’s as if you are giving a free gift along with the purchase.

There’s also a sense in which the list price is what consumers look at to assess the quality of the product. You read about “a $300,000 house” or “a $62,000 car” or The Six Million Dollar Man and you know how you’re meant to value the product. So in that experiment, customers who saw the discount felt they were buying nearly $30,000 worth of car for $25,000, rather than buying a car that was only worth $25,000.

But you should also look at what kind of discounts your competitors are offering. Each type of product tends to have a median level of discount, or a ‘sweet spot’. For instance, if you offer a discount below $500 on a new car, it’s going to have very little effect. But if you offer $1,000 to $2,000, customers will pay attention. If you offer more, you probably won’t get much extra impact on sales.

If you’re keeping tabs on your competitors, you may see some of them reducing their prices. Rather than match their price cuts, you might consider offering a discount that will bring your product’s effective price just below theirs, while keeping your list price at the same level. That sends a message that your product is higher quality but just happens, right now, to be available for less than it’s worth.

The other big feature of how you communicate your discounts is how you present them as being exclusive, or time-limited. Whether you have discounts only for members of your mailing list, or only on 500 units, or only for a week, the more you limit your discount availability, the more effective it will be as a motivator for purchasers.

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How to create excitement about your product

By Vipon last updated on 0 comments

Creating excitement about your product is something that goes above and beyond normal advertising. It’s like the difference between someone telling you the funfair is coming to town, and actually walking into the funhouse.

One way to create excitement is to have a competition. You can’t do that on Amazon, but if you have an email list or active social media it’s quite easy to do. Suppose you sell cat food and toys. Any of these ideas would work:

•      a TikTok challenge for cutest cat costume, perhaps coming up to Halloween;

•      a quiz about famous people’s cats, which could use a multiple choice form on your website and automatically give a 20% coupon for full marks;

•      “name this cat” with a local cat refuge;

•      give anyone starting to follow you on Instagram the chance to win a month’s cat food.

Make sure the prizes are appropriate to the level of competition. If people make a big effort, make sure the prize feels worthwhile. And look for ways to continue the excitement; take photos of competition winners, run a ‘best of the best’ vote or ‘people’s choice’ vote, or  make a gallery of entries.

Another way to create excitement is to link to events. But the link has to be real. If you sell cycling accessories, a link to the Tour de France can work well. For instance a bingo card that followers can mark according to events on the Tour, or a fantasy team game, would be great ways to capitalize on the race. (Remember to check local lottery rules and if you’re offering Tour-related stuff, make sure you keep the right side of the copyright rules.) Or you could issue a Tour de France challenge for leisure cyclists; can they cycle a ‘King of the Mountains’ route locally? Step up their distance by 1 km every day?

But if you sell beauty products, that’s going to be a very tenuous link, and probably won’t get many of your customers excited.

While real life examples don’t necessarily create the same kind of excitement, they’ll still help people make an emotional connection to your product. So if you have a way to use your competitions and events to create content that you can use later, it’s a great idea. Interviews, photos, and videos can all be planned at the same time that you plan the event. Then you’ll be able to extend the excitement a bit longer.

Of course there’s another way to excite customers, and that’s to create deadlines. Some brands do this by offering limited edition goods. For instance, Montblanc has ‘Patrons of Art’ pens which can cost as much as $3,000. Converse has limited edition trainers, sometimes cooperating with fashion brands like Comme Des Garçons. If you don’t press the Buy button right away, you might miss your chance.

Of course, you can also offer a discount with a deadline, or with a limited number of goods available. “We’re offering half-price Hello Kitty schoolbags – but only 500 of them!” or “Special Thanksgiving discount up to midnight on Thursday” are great messages to get customers’ attention. A Lightning Deal on Amazon could get them buying, though you’ll need to be lucky enough for your product to be features at a time when your customers are online, and not at three o’clock in the morning.

Or you could use Vipon to offer a discount. Vipon members know exactly how important it is to act quickly before those tempting offers disappear!

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