Boosting Shipped COGS, Click Share, and Conversion Share via a Multi-service Approach

What We’re Celebrating:

GO dove into a wide array of retail, content, advertising, and data strategies to help a client achieve their highest monthly shipped cost of goods sold (COGS) ever, average a consistent +2% month-over-month (MoM) sales growth, and garner the #1 click share and conversion share on their top-performing item. We achieved this despite issues with inventory, budget, and variations.

Overview:

GO works with a client that began experiencing an array of issues:

• Lean Inventory. The brand recently changed manufacturers, and their new manufacturer has significantly higher lead times. Additionally, their brick-and-mortar channels, particularly Walmart, required more inventory, leaving fewer units for Amazon.

• Rattled Budget. We had to slow down spend on their highest-sales and highest-return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) products due to the inventory issues (before this, 40% of their budget was allocated to these items). Also, the ad budget decreased 19% year over year (YoY) due to funds being reallocated to Walmart and the cost of turning on Subscribe & Save.

• Variation Breaks. The brand’s variations kept breaking, and incorrect products were being included in the variations. This required manual reassembly from the GO team approximately every two weeks.

The client wanted to experience consistent sales growth despite these challenges, so GO implemented a variety of strategies across retail, content, advertising, and data to make this goal a reality.

The Challenge:

• The brand was lean on Amazon inventory, causing product availability and budget allocation issues.

• The brand's budget declined YoY, meaning our team needed to be more strategic and efficient with their advertising to experience growth.

• The brand’s variations were on the fritz, requiring manual reparation from our team, which ultimately took time away from identifying, developing, and executing other strategic optimizations.

The Strategy:

Overarching Approach

• We focused on building up one of the client’s main subcategories as opposed to focusing on their general category. We found this helped the brand perform well in the general category without the difficulty of going after the general category itself.

  • Our client’s products are showing up at the top of page one for a general category keyword because of how hard we went after their subcategory.

Retail

• We created and launched virtual bundles to drive exposure to the rest of the catalog by attaching less popular products with very popular products.

• We began implementing a Subscribe & Save promotional calendar, helping us more effectively take consumers out of the marketplace so we don’t have to convert them time and time again.

  • This helped us generate a +65% increase in Subscribe & Save subscriptions YoY.

• We optimized variations to improve the user experience, limiting the number of product tiles and opting for buttons instead of dropdowns to eliminate friction.

  • This helped us see a reduction in variation breaks.

Content

• We updated SEO to ensure we included top traffic-driving keywords in titles, bullet points, product descriptions, and the backend.

• We launched a new Brand Storefront with the support of our in-house creative team, GO Studio, to allow consumers to educate themselves on and shop for our client’s range of products.

• We elevated visual assets by incorporating lifestyle shots, videos, and graphics that show a variety of products the brand has to offer.

  • This boosted the client’s consideration metrics, increasing dwell time by +14%, CTR by +3.6 percentage points, and views by +24%.

Advertising

• We had to be wise with our spending due to the reduced budget and inventory limitations. We were diligent about allocating dollars towards items that were in stock and would drive the business long-term.

• ~80% of the budget that used to go to the highest-sales and highest-ROAS products was reinvested towards a different product in the client’s high-priority subcategory.

  • This product was a driving force in increasing purchases by 9% YoY due to its lower price point, higher ratings, and more reviews.

• We coordinated with the client to understand the amount of inventory across all sales channels to determine which products to advertise against.

Data

• We employed reports from an Amazon Account Executive to understand the client’s current reach versus the reach they could be achieving, enabling us to focus on brand exposure and visibility.

The Results:

Our GO team was efficient with our resources, driving growth despite leaner inventory, lower investment, and variation issues.

• We hit the brand’s highest monthly shipped COGS ever this year, and we’ve been maintaining a consistent MoM increase in their sales (+2% MoM on average).

• Shipped COGS for the brand’s main subcategory is up +54% YoY.

• We own the #1 click share and conversion share on their top-performing item.

Looking for an agency to generate growth for your brand?

Growth doesn’t come easy when you’re strapped with a wide variety of challenges. However, an effective and strategic Amazon agency can help you cut through these issues and implement tactics that ultimately lead your brand to success. Want to see how GO can make this happen for you? Get in touch.