As Q4 approaches, OMG Commerce founder Brett Curry hosts a special Last-Minute Levers masterclass to help brands maximize performance during the busiest shopping season of the year. Joined by Amazon strategist Luba Ilyasova, ad expert Jonathan Steffens, and Connor Crook, CEO of Diamondback Tools, the session dives into what’s changed on Amazon in 2025, how to build a profitable holiday strategy, and which final levers to pull before Black Friday / Cyber Monday hits.
From international expansion and tariff navigation to using Amazon’s newest ad analytics, profit margin tracking, and creative promotion tactics, this masterclass offers a playbook for protecting margins, scaling smartly, and avoiding common Q4 pitfalls. Whether you’re planning coupons, bundles, or last-minute campaigns, these insights will help make this your strongest and most profitable holiday yet.
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Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!
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Chapters:
(00:00) Intro
(04:32) Diamondback Tools & Amazon’s Role in Brand Growth
(06:43) Strategic Fit – How Amazon Complements DTC and Wholesale
(11:54) Key Shifts in 2025 – Tariffs, International Expansion & SKU Updates
(16:07) Major Amazon Changes – Matching Product to Customer Intent
(21:04) Sponsor Acknowledgements & Tool Shoutouts
(22:14) Ad Trends and Competitive Landscape in 2025
(25:26) Making Data Actionable – Customer Journey Analytics & Search Query Insights
(32:40) Last-Minute Levers for Q4 Success
(34:15) Testing New Main Images & Launching Video Ads
(35:51) Building Gift Guides & Creative Holiday Angles
(37:18) Integrating Email and SMS With Amazon Promotions
(39:26) Diamondback’s Promotional Strategy for the Holidays
(45:21) Virtual Bundles – Opportunities and Pitfalls
(50:27) Balancing Aggression and Profitability in Holiday Ads
(52:33) Post-Event Remarketing & Retention Tactics
(56:35) Final Thoughts – Promotions That Actually Work
(58:37) Closing Remarks – Building Profitable Brands This Holiday Season
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Connect With Brett:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce
- Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/
Request a Free Strategy Session: https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact
Transcript
Brett Curry:
Well, welcome to last minute Levers, your final prep before we enter into what is arguably the most wonderful time of the year for sellers and merchants and brand owners. We got q4, we got peak holiday, we got BFCM coming up right around the corner. And so we wanted to take this time to do something kind of unique and this is going to be a bit of a unique event. I'll kind of lay the stage here momentarily, but we want to get you ready and give you some final strategies, tactics, levers to pull so that you can make this a smashing success. And so this is not going to be your typical webinar. I love learning. I love attending webinars. Sometimes they're kind of like death by PowerPoint or Google Slides or Gamma or whatever the latest flavor is. We'll certainly have some visuals, we'll have some presentations to show you, but I wanted this to be more of a conversation with experts so that you can get some raw feedback and ideas and I think this will be fun and I think the pace will be enjoyable.
And so I'm really just your host today. I'm just the guy behind the microphone keeping everything moving, making sure we're on track and really pulling out some great insights from our guests. And so I do want to introduce our guests because do we have a lineup for you? So first off, we've got Luba. She's part of team OMG. She's our senior A BM or Amazon brand management strategist. And Luba is one of those people that I don't know anybody that knows the insides of baseball for Amazon, like Luba. She comes from running a hardware store just long as the other day, running a hardware store on the upper west side of Manhattan to becoming an Amazon pro. And she actually ran Amazon for a client of ours years ago and then someone that I became a real friend with, the owner and Luba and her team grew that brand, a pretty big brand from 3 million a year on Amazon. Nothing to seize that, to just shy of 17 million a year on Amazon. She's grown other brands. She's a trusted coach and advisor. She's kind of running our team here at OMG and so can't wait for you to hear from Luba. She's fiery, she's got insights. You're going to love her as soon as you hear from her. So we'll hear from Luba momentarily. But welcome to the program Luba and scale of one to 10, how excited are you to be presenting on the webinar?
Luba Ilyasova:
I actually love being on a webinar, so I would even say it's 11.
Brett Curry:
Oh, we're dialing this one up to 11 for all you Spinal Tap fans out there. Next up we got Jonathan Finka. I had to look this up. Jonathan, you've been with OMG for seven years, man, that is in internet years. That is a long, long time. So super glad that you're part of the team. Jonathan is an ad pro. The dude remembers numbers like nobody's business. He is very strategic, he's logical. He understands how brand building works and how Amazon advertising works. And so Jonathan, with that man, welcome to the webinar. Welcome to the show, so to speak. Thanks for coming on. And same question for you. Scale of one to 10, how excited are you?
Jonathan Steffens:
More of a realist. So I'm going to give it a seven, a strong seven.
Brett Curry:
I actually, I had those hedging bets in my mind, right? Placing bets and I knew you were going to come in under, so I love that. I think that's a good ad strategist who's really watching the numbers and bidding and looking at probabilistic outcomes. Got to take the realistic approach, right? It's a seven. Yeah, and I think that's spot on. So love that. Love having both you on the program. So you're going to hear a ton from Jonathan and Lu as we go here, but the real star of the show, the real guest of the show here is our friend and client, Connor Crook from Diamondback Tools. What's up Connor? How's it going today?
Connor Crook:
Things are good. Things are good. I've been down in the warehouse sewing stuff all morning. You've been making tool belts today, not tool belts. We're looking at some brand expansion and I'm just sitting down at the machine playing around with some concepts and seeing what might come out in the future.
Brett Curry:
You're playing your best Christmas elf here. Like, hey, let's not just talk about products, let's not talk about growth. Let's go make some stuff. You're going to get to hear from Connor, one of the longtime OMG clients, a friend. We're really seeing tremendous growth, amazing product time and back tools. And so we'll get to see how Amazon fits into their overall growth strategy, what their promotional strategy is going to be like for q4, and then some challenges and some wins from this year. And really that's going to be the flow of this webinar. I think it's important to take just a couple of minutes. We won't spend long here, but let's talk strategically how should Amazon fit into your overall brand growth before we get into a season like this and start discounting and start going nuts, trying to close sales and whatnot. I think it's important to back up and say, why are we doing what we're doing?
How is Amazon fit into the grander scheme of things? Because ultimately I should be trying to build a business and trying to build a brand, not just trying to sell stuff on Amazon. So we're going to back up. I really love Connor's perspective here. So we'll do that very briefly and then we're going to get into some challenges and some wins from this year, what has changed and what's different and so how that's going to shape our Q4 plan. And then we'll get the last minute levers, promotional strategy, lots of good stuff for you to take away and make this one of the best holidays yet. So let's start with strategy. So Connor, I want to hear from you, how does Amazon fit into your overall brand strategy and how has that evolved over recent years? Because again, as we get into this situation where we may be tempted to slash our profits to close more deals in q4, we step back and think about the overall strategy. So how has that evolved for Diamondback Tools?
Connor Crook:
Yeah, Brett, thanks. So I bought Diamondback back in 2016 at the very end of 2016, got going next year and our strategy was all about our website tool wells.com. We eventually added some dealers. We weren't really able to get into the dealers in the US but we had some success internationally and I was really hesitant about Amazon, just horror stories that I've heard about them copying your product, knocking off your product, you lose control of it. And after a few years, I think it was 21 or so, we had an employee at the time sales lead who said, Hey, I've got some experience with Amazon, I can set it up. We'll see how it goes. Well you know how to do it. Let's do it. It was also a good timing because that was post COVID when the DTC market was slowing down and it was a good time to really branch out into some different channels.
So once we got in there, what we found is Amazon provides a couple of different really key features for us. One, it's a different sales stream, it's a different customer. I think Luba has some information she'll share about globally the overlap or lack of overlap with Amazon, but we've definitely seen from what information we can get from Amazon that it's a different customer. We have some really interesting anecdotes about how you can get a customer on Diamond Bag that becomes your online customer and vice versa. Some of the different just shopping habits. Another great thing that it's done for us is help smooth cashflow issues. Amazon DTC wholesale, they all have different ebbs and flows. Obviously right now stores or wholesalers are stocking up for the holidays, but customers are cooling it down. They know Black Friday's coming, so we know that we're going to have a spike in both Shopify and Amazon as you go into the holiday, but then even there they kind of ebb and flow a little bit differently. So just understanding how Amazon can smooth cashflow, how it can bring in new customers, and it's just an expansion to have one more stream. And I was talking about costs and stuff. I look at it this way. Amazon wholesale and DTC, they're all going to cost you 30 to 40 points. It's such
Brett Curry:
A good point. It's such a good point. You really can't avoid
Connor Crook:
It. Yeah, you're going to pay margin to a dealer, okay, dealers doing certain things for you, they're selling for you. Amazon, that's a place where you can market. It's a place where they're going to sell for you. They're going to do part of your warehousing for you and they're going to open you up to new eyes so you can pay for that. DTC has been a tremendous amount, much of it with OMG on advertising, on Facebook, on Meta and Google. So either way you're paying. Yeah,
Brett Curry:
Yeah, man, it's such a good point. Yeah, you're going to lose 30 or 40 points. It's going to vary a little bit by your category, but you're going to be giving up that margin and just where it's going does vary a little bit from channel to channel. And I love this chance to step back and just look at this holistically. I'll use a couple of examples here. Boom. Originally boom by Cindy Joseph. Now boom, beauty longtime client of OMG. We worked with them for years and years on the Google and YouTube side, and then we helped them launch on Amazon and they went from zero to $6 million the first year and very little cannibalization of their core business. And it's because there was a lot of pent up demand. There was a lot of people that have been seeing the boom, my Cindy Joseph ads, and they love the message and they love the angle, but they just weren't buying because Boom wasn't on Amazon.
They launched on Amazon. Things take off. Obviously we do a lot of work on the ad side and the organic optimization side and stuff like that. Then you look at native deodorant. We were working with Moist, the founder from the early days and went through the acquisition and grew them with p and g for years. I think they did a billion dollars last year. Moist tweeted, but one of the things he said about Amazon was like, I just wish I'd gotten there sooner. That was the main thing. I wish I'd gotten there sooner. But I think what we're potentially tempted to do, and I tease this a little bit at the outset, is we're tempted to say we're on Amazon, it's Q4, it's about to be cyber five or cyber 12 or cyber whatever it's going to be this year. Got to do well. So I'm just going to start giving away all my margin and then end up making mistakes.
And so seeing how this fits, this is a great place to close new business, a great way to attract new customers. To your point, Connor, sometimes you meet people and you will get customers you wouldn't have otherwise gotten. And so that's really what this is all about. I want to talk briefly about, anyway, actually we can dig in as much as we see fit here as we go here, but what are some of the things that have shifted? So I'll start with you Connor, and then I want to go deep with Luba and Jonathan. What's shifted this year? What's changed on Amazon because there's been a lot and then how that's going to influence us in q4. So what are some of the changes you've kind of endured here in 25 so far, Connor?
Connor Crook:
Well, the big story in e-commerce and commerce in general this year is obviously the tariffs. The tariff situation has been really huge here at Diamondback and interesting on a lot of different levels because we were a made in USA product for the first five, six years I ran in business. That just became untenable and for a lot of reasons and we moved our production to Vietnam. That was a huge move that we did. And as about the time we got all of our product moved to Vietnam, we had the announcement of liberation day and we were being liberated from, I don't know what liberated from your profits. Exactly. So it quickly became our strategy around liberation day and the tariffs was, hey, we are selling a lot of our product internationally. We need to lean into that and we need to figure out a way to get our product to various places around the world without coming to Charlottesville, Virginia along the way.
And so we were working with that a lot with wholesale, but it's also a part of our Amazon strategy. We had always fulfilled orders into Canada from here, FBM from here in Charlottesville or FBA through American warehousing. So we are moving a lot of our Amazon strategy around Australia and Canada. We're leaning in heavier there. We're starting to put in advertising in Canada. We haven't started advertising in Australia yet, but we're seeing solid organic growth there. And so it's all about moving the product and getting it to those locations without coming here to avoid the tariffs. So international expansion has been really big for us. Another thing that came with the shift in manufacturing was skew changes internally. We made the decision that this product is a DB 500 or whatever it is when it's made in Asia, it becomes a DB 500, a phrase.
Well then you lose a lot of traction with the algorithm. So working on strategies to avoid losing the traction that we've grown around certain products has been a big part of our growth this year. We also, because when we moved to Asia, we divided between our best product and our old product, which is now on sort of our better level best product. And so there's been a lot of discussion around channel strategy as to what goes on Amazon, what goes on tool belts.com, what goes to dealers and how do we emphasize different products. And the biggest part of our Amazon strategy this year is just really been the growth DTC wise. September was pretty far off of the pace of where we hoped to be, but we made up for it on Amazon. And the interesting thing is it's not cannibalization because we're seeing most of the growth, Amazon or a lot of it is in Australia and Canada. As we've moved more there, put more of our product available on Amazon. So our Amazon strategy has been avoiding tariffs and leaning into international, dealing with updated skews and trying not to lose traction and then trying to figure out how to make Amazon really a thoughtful part of our omnichannel approach so that it's growing without cannibalizing the other channels.
Brett Curry:
Man, such good insights there a lot we can unpack. I love that. Thinking about which products are going to be on Amazon, which are going to be strictly DTC or other channels and yeah, tariff mitigation and international expansion, all of those are opportunities that Amazon unlocks for us. We'll get back to some of that more as we go here. I'm going to kick things over to you Luba right now and I want to hear from you what are some of the things that have really shifted this year and what's changed that has materially changed the game on Amazon? You've been doing this for 11 years, you've seen everything under the sun as it pertains to Amazon, so fire away and feel free to share your screen too if you want to share that presentation if that's useful.
Luba Ilyasova:
So first of all, Connor, great success on Amazon and most importantly I think you have the winning perspective on how Amazon feeds into your ecosystem because too many people are afraid of Amazon. And I've always said that if you are not in control of your products distribution on Amazon, somebody else's will. We see it all the time where a brand's products end up on Amazon sold by third party resellers and you have no control over content, over pricing, over quality. And we always advise brands who may not even be interested in it, at least take control of your own product that is being distributed there. There's always going to be the case. And just to elaborate on the whole cannibalization thing, we've actually, in a good old days when you could match Amazon scrambled email to the actual customer information, you can't do that anymore, not at the scale, but we ran with one of the brands I worked with, we ran their Amazon customers versus their direct to consumer customers. There was about 10 15% overlap.
Brett Curry:
That's crazy.
Luba Ilyasova:
You would think it would be so much bigger, but in reality people shop where people want to shop. I can see 20 Facebook ads for a beauty product. I will not buy it through Facebook, I will not. I go and I will look on Amazon, is it available there? That will be my first resource. But what dramatically changed on Amazon this year is matching product to customer intent. That is the biggest change that took place. You can't any longer spend your way into sale because if your product is not optimized to the point where it's matching the consumer purchasing content, your ads are simply not going to show. So you have to be very thoughtful about who your customer is, what your brand is and what is your value proposition. So we're going to be giving away some of templates and I know everybody uses tools, we all have tools, sometimes we have way too many tools, but these are quick templates that you can use and I'll just walk over them and then we'll email the links to anybody who is interested. So template,
Brett Curry:
We'll make sure everybody gets it, we'll email it out to the whole list.
Luba Ilyasova:
So the first template that I put together that I like to use is sort of estimating if you should even be running the deal. So you just plug in with the referral fee. That's standard 15%. So let's say on average you pay $5 in fulfillment fees, that's your 20% is your gold taxers and let's say you're going to run a best deal. Best deal for either be next week or for Black Friday, Monday is going to cost you a thousand dollars per deal. Now this calculator helps you calculate if your regular price is $15 and you're giving 10% discount and you sell 6,000 units with 20% advertising cost, will you make money in the end or not? And you just plug in numbers and see where you want to be in terms of advertising, how many units you need to sell, how much margin you can give away to come out where you want to come out financially. That's a useful little template.
Peak event budget, pacing what you plan to spend, what you actually spend paid revenue, total revenue, are you where you want to be in Taos? If not, then you may need to dial down your advertising expense. You may want to look into why you pay so hot. And finally inventory, do you have enough on hand inbound to FBA at a WD, how are you selling through? Should you pull back your ads or maybe pause the promotions? This is something that I usually recommend running during the large high velocity events, literally to have 15 minute touch bases and during the event just to see where you are because things can get out of hand.
Brett Curry:
Love it. Those resources are amazing Luba, so we'll email that out to everybody. Feel free to use those, share those. I think now is a good time actually to mention our sponsors and you alluded to this Luba, that everybody is using tools and I think the most sophisticated, the fastest growing brands are using tools makes life easier and better. But sometimes you just need to get down and dirty with a spreadsheet and I do that all the time. We use HubSpot and other tools for sales, I love them, but sometimes I just want to put stuff in a spreadsheet because I want to manipulate and play around with it and think big picture. And so I do want to highlight our sponsors before we hear from Jonathan on what's changed, some wins and challenges from 2025, but Amazon Prep, a MD prep, kpac, hello tax seller, candy LTA three Colts, check them all out, they've got special offers, they're all valuable in their own and so check out our sponsors. Jonathan, from your perspective, challenges wins and what's shifted in 2025 so far from the ads side of things.
Jonathan Steffens:
So I think everybody knows that the landscape in Amazon is always getting more competitive and obviously 2025 is no different from the past couple of years in that sense, but it is different in the way that it's getting more competitive. Obviously we've been seeing a lot more, at least the bucket of brands on Amazon. I think we OMG work with about 30 ish brands on Amazon, but we've all pretty much across the board been seeing more and more intensity from either copycat sellers or knockoffs or even more that are more sellers popping up that are trying to say that they're your product or making swiping your images and whatnot. But that's sort of always been around, it's been a lot hot more intense over the last couple of years. But of course the tariff play and just kind of piggybacking off of what Lulu was saying about using really scrutinizing, will this promo actually be profitable at the end of the day to tie into that is really brands have had to really hone in on what are your numbers.
We've worked with many brands that were just on Amazon and they had their product that they were slinging on Amazon for the last few years and they never really like, Hey, what's margins? What's your goal? And they would come to us and they'd say, what should our ACOs be? What is tacos? I've never heard of that and not a business owner myself, but I like to think that if I, I would have that nailed down, but just as it's getting more and more competitive, we're seeing higher CPCs, the tariffs are obviously eating the margins, that number is really important and that's also really important for the ad side of things to know that if that number is being determined by your agency or you're trying to figure out what is that performance target we need to be hitting, it's really critical to have everything else in a row so that yeah, we can be at that 15% or 20% or 30% ACOs or whatever that taco number is.
Just making sure that you are being obviously profitable at the end of the day, but then as aggressive as you can be. Another big shift in the Amazon ecosphere, which also is if you're going to events or whatever and hearing from promotions from Amazon, they're always talking about their new features that they're rolling out and it's sort of been a data overload and it's really been rolling out for the last two years, but with all the brand analytics and the customer journey analytics and the search query analytics and then the Amazon marketing cloud and all the insights you can get from that, there's just so much that you could really dive into it. Especially like the Amazon marketing Cloud and all the different audience segmentation that you can go into there. You could go in there and be absorbing so much data for you could probably absorb that data for two months and not really come out of it with an actionable like, Hey, I'm making more success over here because there's just so much data and so much to look at.
There are some really good nuggets and I think that the customer journey analytics is a great insight so you can dig into your audience trends and then Amazon's also giving you like, hey, your awareness is decreasing month on month and here's some tips for growing your awareness, whether that's expanding sponsor brand ads, sponsor display or running promos to certain subsets of your audience groups. And we do use that very frequently, but then the software providers that we use, KPO one that we use a lot for just really great reporting and they can pull all of that kind of together and then we can have more cohesive narratives. So the software is doing the work of analyzing all this data into group sets that we want to be looking at to then optimize our PPC around that, the Amazon marketing.
Brett Curry:
One thing I want to do, sorry, let's just key on something really quickly Jonathan. So with the, we've realized that our problem was never necessarily more data. Now we have lots and lots of data. We're swimming in the data and if you're not careful, you just at the end of the day you end up and you're like, well, I looked at a lot of numbers today, like an unbelievable amount of numbers, I don't know what to do. So the only way this is beneficial if we say, okay is what this means and this is what I'm going to do next, and so you just talked about something interesting where if awareness or impressions are going down on a specific item, you're maybe looking at, okay, how do I reverse that trend? And so can we unpack a few of those or just the highlight if I kind of cut you off midstream, but what are a few of those? Okay, these are the important data points that you could be finding and then what do we do with those?
Jonathan Steffens:
Yeah, so especially on the topic of as we're getting into q4, we've always got the promos, the big deal event next week and then of course Black Friday, cyber Monday, so the customer journey analytics as I touched on, you can look into that and see your different audience pools of shoppers that are in awareness, shoppers in consideration, intent purchase, and so sponsored brand ads sponsored display are the ones that ad types that we can use to really grow the awareness and considerations. So shoppers who are seeing the brand, becoming aware of the brand, maybe even engaging, coming to the listing page and those are critical initiatives in the lead up to a promotional event is just getting awareness out there. People don't know your brand and of course they're not going to be searching for your brand, at least not as often. And so then just building that awareness pool is hypercritical and then you can also use those pools to then retarget both during the event to say, Hey, you looked at my product, so I'm using a display A to retarget people who looked at my product in the last seven days because I know you've been kind of window shopping in the lead up to this event and now I'm remarketing my product to you while the promo's running and then also post an event and you can again remarket to those same cools if you have a consumable remarket to those who purchased at the repurchase rate range.
And then also in the search query analytics. This is a very insightful data point that's going to say for your whole subcategory, Amazon sees we're selling tool belts. Amazon sees there's 5,000 purchases in the last month for tool belts and your brand only got 1%. Okay, this is mission critical because this is on the core of our
Brett Curry:
Product, a lot of upset, a lot of room to grow and extend,
Jonathan Steffens:
Right? A lot of room to grow and then obviously you can see the fruit of your effort and that we're working on the SEO to make sure that we're organically ranking and indexing for tool belts and that we're working on the ad side of things to make sure that we're showing up for tool belts and then week over week, month over month, we can see, okay, our share is increasing here we are gaining this relevancy. And so yeah, just really knowing not all of this data is going to be actionable, but using the data to steer some of your actions and using it to assist you and not getting too lost in the, because it can drive you a little crazy. It's
Brett Curry:
Easy to do. One of the best analogies I ever heard was that of a pilot and if you ever have looked in the cockpit when you're boarding a plane or something, you're like, there's an unbelievable amount of dials and displays and knobs and buttons and stuff like that. Really pilots mostly use about six of those to fly the plane, right? Everything else is just if something goes wrong, they can diagnose and fix things and whatnot. And so that's really the way you're going to be too running your Amazon business or hiring an agency or an in-house team is they're going to run the business based on five or six data points with, they'll have everything else to kind of diagnose if something goes wrong. I love that the lead up, the main event after math, Jonathan where the lead up we're looking at, hey, how do we grow awareness and kind of fill the funnel so that then during the main event we can close as many people as possible and then afterwards, how do we remarket to people and close those that maybe didn't close or close people that maybe got money over the holidays but haven't bought anything and now they're going to buy from you.
And so lots of good stuff there. Lube, did you want to chime in on that?
Luba Ilyasova:
On a data, the number one data point that I always look at, and I'm coming from a brand perspective, so number one data point that I've always had to report on was profit margin in terms of dollar and percentage. So if the profit margin in terms of dollar and percentage was at or above the level that I needed, that was literally the only data point that I needed to look at. Now if the profit margin was not where I want it to be, if it was below in terms of dollars or percentage, then you start looking into which of my products is not making me money? And then you start dialing in why is that product is not making money? Very often you discover that the reason is because it's sitting mostly unpaid traffic versus organic. If that's the case, you dial back down and you say, okay, great. Why is it unpaid traffic? Is it not getting click through rate is the conversion rate is the number of session. So I always like to work back from the profit margin looking to what's not working and answering questions, what can I change, which lever can I pull to improve it?
Brett Curry:
Love it, love it. Let's roll right into the next topic with you Luba, and feel free to share some of the visuals on this, but as we look at our last minute levers for holiday 2025, what are some of those? And so after you share, we're going to talk to Connor about his promotional strategy and then we'll wrap up with Jonathan. Jonathan on the ad side. But I know part of this could be we're looking at deals, we're not going to do deals because we want to protect margin, but roll through some last minute levers here for us, Luba.
Luba Ilyasova:
Absolutely. Well first of all, before we get into levers, I just want to reinforce the ideas that you cannot sell stuff that you don't have. And I've seen brands lose Q4 because they didn't ship stuff in time and always be proactively planning. And if you can, and I think you're doing it, if you can have fulfilled by merchant backup to your fulfilled by Amazon,
Talking about paths, deal track or no deal track, I'm not going to lie naturally, it's much easier to have successful Q4 if you plan on running deals, but even if you don't plan on running deals, there is still a no deal track, which is where you focus on video ads on optimization of your product detail page, setting up specific store pages and retargeting. That's where your SAEO, which is genic search optimization, we all optimizing for AI these days. And for Amazon agents, Chad g pt, you want AI agents to pick up your product as the most relevant to consumer query. So leader assets optimization, store curation and use of advertising is going to help you if you are not going to run deals.
What are the last minute levers you can pull? And I'm just going to scroll through some of this. What are the last minute levers you can pull right now because we are really in the final stretch of getting everything done and ready. The number one thing I recommend test new main image, have several versions of a main image, test it through. There are multiple services that help you with that PFU product tinian, there may be more if you have your own user group AB test on Amazon, test as many new images as you can right now that may possibly dramatically improve your click through rate regardless of you running deals or not set up sponsored brand video campaigns. Believe it or not, if you don't have high production assets for a video using Amazon Video Builder actually works. Those videos that you make using Amazon templates, they perform rather well build an Amazon gift guide page. Even if you're selling, you may think you're selling the most UNG giftable products, but I worked with a Showerhead brand which had a huge spike in q4. People were giving each other showerheads for Christmas. You just never know what's helpful.
Brett Curry:
Quick note on that, Luba, we got a long time client, they sell mops and microfiber products. Shout out Brett Haney, but a long time ago they ran an email that was the worst Christmas gift ever and it was a mop and they're like, don't give her a mop or don't give him a mop or whoever. And it actually ended up being a tremendous seller for them. And so they're like, oh, sweet, we'll just lean into this worst, worst gift ever. Here you go. It's like you could have a holiday guide and even poke fun at your own product, but people are going to buy, people are going to buy in q4,
Luba Ilyasova:
People are going to buy in q4, build an Amazon give guide page, have a sponsored brand ads targeting that page. Specifically Jonathan already mentioned retarget with recent product visitors set FBM backup. You just don't know what's going to happen with your inventory in q4. Always have a backup. It's not going to be as effective as having FBE offer, but at least you're not going to go completely dark depending on your business model. If you have SMS and email list, this is what we found, and Brett, I think Nick actually has some studies on this where the email includeDTCall to actions, one by on website, one by an Amazon, and they've actually seen really well response to buy on Amazon.
Brett Curry:
Yep. It's a great strategy where if you've got an email list, and I hope you do, especially if you're multichannel and omnichannel test with some of those, including that buy on Amazon button, a lot of people would rather do that anyway, so test it.
Luba Ilyasova:
Amazon has stats which say that Amazon buy with Prime button on your website actually improves conversion by 25%. That could be very meaningful, 25%. So whether you are all about aggressive deals or leaning more into optimization and PPC, what I call the no deal track, all of these seven levers you can pull right now and have meaningful impact on your Q4 sales. I do have one disclaimer. Do not make any major changes to your product detail. Page 72 hours prior to high velocity event
Brett Curry:
And why is that? Luba 100% agree, but make it clear why you don't want to do that.
Luba Ilyasova:
You're confusing the guts of Amazon. There is an algorithm you make change to the bad end or to the copy and the algorithm now needs time to figure out how you relevant to customer incourse. So if you're going to do major updates, either do them at least 72 hours prior to major event or wait till next week's, big prime deal days are going to be over and then make all of your changes in time for the algorithm to index them prior to Black Friday Cyber Monday.
Brett Curry:
Totally makes sense. That makes sense. Awesome. So let's do this, Connor, and I believe you're muted, but talk through your promotional strategy for this year and how has your promotional strategy changed over the years because it's important to consider it. A lot of people expect discounts, and so this is the time of year for deals. It's also a great way to give away all your profits. And so yeah, how are you guys approaching this year? How has your promotional strategy changed over the years?
Connor Crook:
Well, my first comment, now that I'm unmuted, I'm going to reiterate some of the things that Lou has been talking about. Inventory? Yes,
Brett Curry:
Yes, yes.
Connor Crook:
Inventory, inventory, inventory because it makes a huge difference to success on Amazon. One of the main things we have seen in our success this year is maintaining steady inventory because whenever you have stockouts on Amazon, you get dinged and you just fall back down the algorithm to recover from. A big part of our growth and success this year has been maintaining the inventory of all the products that leads into what are our holiday plans. We don't really know yet. And the reason we don't really know yet is because we're still a month out and we don't know exactly what our inventory balance is. We know that we're going to have coupons on Amazon, we're going to do discounting on our website. We're going to try to make them a different play so that if you go to Amazon, you get this product at a good deal.
Whereas we've become very specific about categories of products on our website, and then there's also product bundling, which we like to do on both of them. But the product bundling is one of those things we really don't know until we get approach and we look at our inventory because bundling is oftentimes, well, here's a product that we think is really great, but we haven't been really selling that much of it, so let's make it part of a bundle. Maybe that way we can promote that product going forward. I believe that customers always prefer a free gift than a discount. I also prefer to keep protect my margin by giving away free gifts because we're a brand that we want people to become immersed in. So the more Diamondback products I can get into the customer, the more I know they're going to buy down in the future. So
Brett Curry:
I love that. I want to key on that just really quickly, Connor, I think it's a great point, and we have several apparel brands that do this, especially early in holiday, and some of this is mostly all they do for the holiday is free gifts with purchase and it fits because we need stocking stuffers. We need a gift to give someone else. Maybe I want to buy a tool belt for myself, but if I do this, I get a free gift. Now I can be, I was really shopping for my son or whatever because I'm going to give him the free gift. There's all kinds of ways to kind of position that and angle that. I remember my buddy Peter that owns a Groove Life's silicon wedding ring company for the longest time, and I think they still do it. They mentioned, Hey, free gift with purchase, it's a $19 value, a $30 value or whatever. And all that really means is you're going to get a free ring in your size of a color or something that couldn't sell, right? It's just like it's inventory that's sitting there. Let's make this a high perceived value. Let's increase our conversion rate for it for holiday. It's man, I'm making you feel an outsized benefit. It maybe even feels bigger than a discount, but guess what? I'm not eroding my margin at all. And so love that strategy. I think more brands need to use it.
Connor Crook:
So we're going to be running coupons on Amazon as we get closer into the season and we'll have some bundles, but of course we won't really probably start running some inventory reports over the next couple of weeks as we see what's coming in inbound, what's been selling well, and then we'll make some decisions about what exactly products we put into bundles, any particular discounts, because going back inventory is so important, you never want to run out of the inventory. So we try to run different promotions between Amazon and our website just to kind of give different customers a different opportunity.
Brett Curry:
Connor, is that sort of based on the skews or the products you see moving on those various channels or is it based on the products that you have excess inventory on in those channels? Thinking about what products do you discount or feature what you bundle, how do you look at that differently on DTC versus Amazon?
Connor Crook:
Well, let's just take a step back and look at this strategy in general. You can use all the, we have a lot of tools now. We've been talking about tools. You can use tools on your website or on Amazon that say, I know that if a customer buys this pen, they're probably going to buy the top for the pen and they might buy this bag to put it in. Great. I know that information. I can bundle those things together and I know that customers are likely to buy all of those things. On the other hand, I know that I got this pen, this top, but I got a lot of these phones lying around, so I'm going to say on my website or on my Amazon page, people who bought this also bought this. No, they didn't. But if I convince you they did, then maybe you will too.
Brett Curry:
Maybe they didn't, but they should. And so if I bundle it and now people will,
Connor Crook:
So bundling to me is a way that you can help your customer by helping them complete their bundle, but it's also a way that you help yourself as the brand by slow inventory, promoting inventory that you do. We've got this great product, but it's not getting in the hands of the customer. So if we just get more of 'em out there, it's not a bad product. We just hadn't found the right target audience for it yet. So I don't think our mix there is different on Amazon versus on our website. We do want to see what's selling on that channel so that we're highlighting that product, but then what we put with it might be based on some mix of those other factors.
Brett Curry:
Totally makes sense. I want to pause for just a minute and talk Luba and Jonathan. I know you guys were talking about virtual bundles and some new opportunities there specifically that we can lean into around the holidays related to ads. Any points on that? And whoever wants to go first, go for it.
Luba Ilyasova:
I'll go first and I'll say that virtual bundles has been probably one of the least. You utilized tools on Amazon, mainly because A, you're paying two or three fulfillment fees for one order. So if you're doing commercial bundle of product A, product B and product C, you're going to end up paying three FBA fees at the lower price. Kana, you did not know that.
Connor Crook:
I didn't know that, but I hope that the person who manages my Amazon channels here in my office and there and the consultants that they use have that conversation regularly.
Brett Curry:
I love that. I love subtle messages. This is how you lead folks. This is how you become CEO, the subtle messages. I love it, Connor. Yeah, with emails after pro. Yeah, so that's good.
Luba Ilyasova:
You have to be careful about putting those bundles together because you do pay more than one fulfillment fee. Also, it only shows up on one of the product pages. So what you want to do, if you want to move that product that you have laying around and doesn't sell, you want to put it on the most traffic page that you have, even if it may not make sense from the product usage decision, but that's how you bring visibility to your slow movers. That's how you create a virtual bundle. But the biggest drawback was virtual bundles always was that they could not be advertised through sponsor it product ads. So you could create a ton of them and the only way to advertise them was through setting up a pitch store saying bundles and driving sponsored brand ads. So Jonathan, how excited are you about sponsored product ads for bundles?
Jonathan Steffens:
We have seen some light success out of virtual bundles, but with the addition of putting them into sponsored product ads, we could see obviously a lot more traffic going to them. As lube said, that historically hasn't really been a way to push them too hard just kind of existing on the listing page. And it's just like another variation of frequently bought with, it's not that right, but it is just as a shopper perceiving it historically didn't really ever mean too much to them unless the discount was pretty large. So did you want the less levers for PPC here now? Yes, please. Please
Brett Curry:
That. Back to Connor in a second. Yeah, go
Jonathan Steffens:
For it. Yeah, I'll be here real quick. So in the lead up, obviously already we're almost done, get the lead up to next week, but lead up to promos always being, considering the performance dip that we usually see two to three days, sometimes a little bit longer in the lead up to the day of the event. So you want to be just really aware of that PPC performance, and so making adjustments to make sure you're still hitting your targets sponsored brand. Jonathan, any insights
Brett Curry:
There? And this probably depends on how aggressive or how conservative our clients want to be, but do you ever advise, Hey, don't black too much in that lull because our people that are looking, then they're looking in the few days leading up to the fall prime day, which now just totally blank on what it's called or the Turkey 12 or whatever. And so how much should they pull back or should they pull back at all?
Jonathan Steffens:
Right. No, yeah, not necessarily meaning pullback, and I don't think we touched on this yet, but obviously any promotional period, you really have to know what you're trying to build on Amazon and where does your brand fit into the Amazon system? With Diamondback tools, they have a very diversified product portfolio and someone who's buying the belt is likely developing a belt system. And so there's many different pieces that they're going to buy potentially over the lifetime, especially if they love the brand, which most of our shoppers we do see, they love the brand, they come back and they buy more, but it's not like a $20 supplement that you're consuming every single month. And so the repurchase window is very different and someone who buys a whole tool belt system is not likely to buy that exact same system again, at least not for, hopefully it lasts for five, 10 years.
I don't know how long it typically lasts, but that's going to last a long time. So thinking about the event in that sense that they're not diamond back is building subscribers. So we do want to be moderately aggressive for the promotional periods with this kind of brand building product line, but because we're not building subscribers because we have a longer repurchase window, we're not going to be hyper aggressive. If you're a consumable product and you know that if somebody likes your product, they're going to be back in 30 days where you're going to get a subscription out of it, you can afford to be a lot more aggressive. So
Brett Curry:
Thinking maybe even go break even or close to it in a situation like that where in other scenarios that would be silly. You're not making any money giving it all to Bezos. Yeah, exactly.
Jonathan Steffens:
Right. So all that to say in the lead up, it's not necessarily you need to pull back, it's just you need to be a bit more hyper aware that you could see sharp fluctuations in those couple of days in the lead up to the event. And then even days right after the event where your usual parameters for bid adjustments and if you have bid up and down or you have some kind of software running your bids, just knowing that it can be a little bit out there skelter in those couple of days. So you might shoot your tacos from a 5% up to a 15% for those couple of days. So you want to go in and make some changes. You don't want to blow up your efficiency just for the sake of that additional awareness. A lot of window shopping that's happening in those couple of days during the event, you still again kind of have to know how aggressive you're trying to be.
And so we check in at least every hour from 9:00 AM eastern till about 8:00 PM Eastern, which those are kind of, that's when it picks up and that's when it falls off. And then of course if you have a lightning deal, you really got to be on top of that, but during that time, tacos is a bit better. So that spend divided by total sales is a bit better of a true north star than ACOs. ACOs is still very important. If you target is 15 and you're seeing the ACOs coming in at 300%, it's probably some adjustments you need to be making, but there's a lot of lag because that hourly data updates that Amazon gives us is there's going to be a ton of sales attribution lag. So the ACOs is a little bit less relevant. It might be showing if your target's 25, you might be at 50, and that'll lag down to probably closer to 30 after the event, and that might be okay for during the event, but that tacos number is still very important to be paying attention to because there's not going to be too much clawback to the total sales.
And then as we get outside of the event, we already hit on this a little bit, but remarketing, using display ads to remarket, especially if you are a consumable repurchase brand product. So you can use that to time when you're remarketing, did they purchase in 30 days ago during that event? Okay, now it's time to remarket to them with display ads. Yep,
Brett Curry:
Really great. So we're going to talk about a couple of those bonuses and then how we can help you as well if you need additional help for the holidays. But final thoughts from you, Connor, on just how you approach couponing and discounting and this time period, are you going to mostly lean into just coupons on Amazon? Have you ever considered lightning deals and some of those other tools that Amazon has available? Just kind of talk about any final points there.
Connor Crook:
So margin and profitability, I think we've played around with some of these other tools before, some of the lightning deals and those things, but a big part of where Diamondback is right now in our evolution as a company is establishing the baselines, which sounds kind of sad, I guess, pathetic that we're nine years in and we're trying to establish baselines, but we've been through a lot, especially with the change in manufacturing, so profit margin, contribution margin from the different channels. Right now we want to really focus on doing the same thing for a little bit of time and establish and establish a plan. So I think we're going to really lean into coupons this year. It's something we've done in the past so that we can then look back and say, effective how are we doing? And that way when we look at next year, we've got a plan for, okay, last year this was the margin that we assumed was going to be the sweet spot where we didn't lose too much profit, but we sold more units.
And then we can really start to hone in on these things. So going back to 2017 when I started the business or bought this business, that was the time of revenue, revenue, revenue, revenue, revenue. Let's see how fast and how hard we can go and how much we'll count profits later. Just grow, grow, grow. We'll figure it out. Yeah, yeah. Guess what got equal? Bottom line, right? Eventually, yeah, that time has come. And so for us as a company and our stage of evolution is really now establish those baselines, know those numbers so that in the future we can really start to see are we being successful? Hey, we sold a whole bunch on Amazon. Well, so what could we have done better? Did we do better last year? Did we give away all of our profitability? So stick with the coupons this year and really focus on establishing a baseline so that we know when we're being successful in years in the future.
Brett Curry:
Love that coupons, establish that baseline. Look at virtual bundles, look at how you're doing this. Fantastic Connor, brilliant insights, a way to weave the brand story through this man. Really appreciate it. And hey, everybody out there, go buy a tool belt, man. Somebody in your life that needs a tool belt. My brother-in-law's a contractor, I'm aided by my recommendation. He's like, oh, I'm a Diamondback tool belt fan, for sure. Yeah, look at that. Showing off the product. I love it. And so really, really good stuff. Check it out on Amazon. So Connor, thank you so much, Luba. I want to let you wrap up here with a couple of final thoughts on prepping here and also want to mention, if you're looking at this and you feel like, man, I've got the team, I got the plan, I got everything. Awesome. Crush it. I can't wait to hear about your success. If you're like, well, wait a minute, I would like a Luba and or a Jonathan on my team to help me. There's a short window to do that, but there is a little bit of time and so we'd love to do some last minute planning and prep to help you crush the holidays. And so you can GoCommerce click on Let's Talk, we'll do a strategy session for you, a little prep time for the holidays, but Luba closing thoughts as we get everybody ready for Q4 closing tips and thoughts,
Luba Ilyasova:
Closing thoughts. Don't do promotions, coupons, deals, or anything else just for the sake of creating a deal on them.
Brett Curry:
Just you feel like you have.
Luba Ilyasova:
Yes. And then two weeks later saying, well, we run a lightning deal and it didn't work. The reality today on Amazon without external traffic, without that external push, your deal is not going to perform. That's just cold, hard truth. So if you are running a coupon at the very, very list or a deal or any kind of promotion, at the very least, pretty much every brand today has access to creator connections where you can go and set up 10% commission, create a connection campaign, make sure that you put in word deal promotion Black Friday into the title because that's the only searchable field for affiliates and just have that evergreen because you can go in and you can change it if you have a little bit more time. LTA helps you to scale it. The least low effort is create a connection. The higher level is paying up with LTA and really growing because Amazon is all about the brand. Just slapping a coupon on doesn't work without brand identity, brand equity and external. Amazon wants your external traffic. Whenever you do Amazon, always ask what does Amazon wants. Average conversion of a consumer when they land on Amazon is close to 70%. That's why Amazon is giving you 10% referral bonus back because they want you
Brett Curry:
That external traffic. If you provide it, they will reward you for it. Yes.
Luba Ilyasova:
Well, whenever the brand says, I tried a deal last year and it didn't work well, what did you do outside of putting the deal together and running ads? That's the last
Brett Curry:
Thought. Protect your margins. Make this a profitable holiday season. In the end, that's all that's going to matter. It's what you get to keep if you're building a brand or business to one day sell, that's all a future buyer really cares about. They want to see growth and some other things as well. But without profits there, you don't have a very strong case. And so last minute lever I'm going to pull is let's talk about our sponsor. So a MZ prep, KPAC, hello, tax seller, candy lta, and three cults. Check them out. We'll send out some unique offers from them as well as we send out these resources that Luba has expert put together, I promise you you want some more Luba in your Amazon business. And so we'll send out these resources. Thanks once again to Connor Crook, to Luba to Jonathan. And as we mentioned, if we can be of assistance last minute here, let us know omg commerce.com. And with that, we'll wrap up. Thanks everybody and good luck this holiday season. See everybody.
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