Bulk operations drives efficiency for Wpromote and FIVE STAR

A brand-agency partnership

FIVE STAR provides durable, innovative school supplies to empower students who strive to succeed both socially and academically. For over 35 years, FIVE STAR, part of ACCO Brands, has been a leader in the notebook, binder, and folder categories. In April 2020, FIVE STAR enlisted Wpromote to support their Amazon business. Wpromote is a full service digital agency, delivering ROI-focused digital campaigns. Founded in 2001, Wpromote has grown to 450+ employees across 8 US offices, and recently ranked as the #1 leader in the 2019 Forrester Performance Marketing Wave report.

New school challenges

Wpromote was tasked with converting FIVE STAR’s success from brick-and-mortar retail stores to Amazon, and to drive strategic positioning as the premier notebook brand. FIVE STAR also sought organic category growth and wanted to surpass the sales of the previous year.

To achieve these goals, Wpromote recognized the need to support FIVE STAR’s efficiency across their entire catalogue, and focus on both keyword expansion and identification of products best suited for success on Amazon. On top of this, the pandemic brought change to back-to-school shopping, which historically had been measured in a predictable busy period lasting a few weeks. Tasked with testing and launching new strategies with limited time, Wpromote had to act quickly to position FIVE STAR before the back-to-school rush.

A full-funnel strategy driven by bulk operations

To accomplish FIVE STAR’s goals on Amazon, Wpromote heavily leveraged Sponsored Products and took a full-funnel approach through Sponsored Brands. Knowing they needed to manage campaigns at scale and optimize quickly during campaigns, Wpromote used Amazon Ads' bulk operations tools so they could accomplish the goals set out by FIVE STAR.

Using Sponsored Products, Wpromote leveraged a campaign structure that allowed the testing of hundreds of products against thousands of targeted keywords. The team was able to optimize the best products for individual auctions. To stay top of mind on shopping results, they also used Sponsored Products targeting.

For a full-funnel marketing strategy, Sponsored Brands enabled FIVE STAR to display in key placements on Amazon and help the brand increase visibility with customers.

With thousands of keyword optimizations to manage, Wpromote turned to Amazon Ads' bulk operations tools to help. Initially, FIVE STAR assembled and uploaded 550 campaigns to bulksheets, Amazon Ads' format for bulk operations, in total taking just a few hours (a process that normally would have taken days longer without the tool). Once the campaigns were live, Wpromote used bulksheets to make product optimizations quickly and at scale. This allowed for continued optimizations across products throughout the campaign run times. Saving time through bulksheets allowed Wpromote to test new products and categories on Amazon Ads and complete an extensive analysis on FIVE STAR’s KPIs to identify strategic opportunities to further the company’s advertising efforts.

In addition, Amazon Attribution was used to measure shopping activity and sales performance of non-Amazon campaigns, including social media sources, to their business on Amazon.

Efficient results

From August 2019 to August 2020, Wpromote’s operational efficiency increased 73% through the use of bulk operations.

quoteUpWithout the bulk upload feature, we would not have been able to scale FIVE STAR so quickly and efficiently before the start of the 2020 academic year. The use of bulk operations has been instrumental in our success.quoteDown
– Eduardo Suarez, Associate Director, Wpromote

Through Wpromote’s bulk operations strategy, FIVE STAR achieved a 31% decrease in cost-per-click and a 26% increase in conversion rates.