The word on the e-commerce street is that Amazon Prime Day is just around the corner – and things are starting to get serious. At BRANDED we know that at this time of year it can never be too soon to start preparing for Prime Day and there are some key factors to consider to ensure you make the most of this monster shopping event.
E-commerce businesses preparing for this year’s Amazon Prime Day are facing some unprecedented challenges, with global events affecting supply chains and hitting consumers’ spending power. It’s more important than ever to ensure you’re properly armed with a full toolkit to get the most out of this phenomenal sales opportunity.
Getting ready for a rush of shoppers and the increased sales that this brings means you need to stay alert, plan well ahead, and be highly organized. As a seller, everything you normally do to optimize, promote, and polish your brand needs to be done with extra diligence. Ensure all elements of your everyday sales practices are in sync – from your inventory to your customer service. After all, your Amazon Prime Day success is only going to be as good as the preparation you have put in.
So how can you prepare your brand for a profitable sales event and what do you need to know beforehand?
From tips on getting your product listings ready to analyzing your performance afterwards, BRANDED’s global e-commerce team has put together this must-read checklist to ensure your brand is completely clued up and ready for Amazon Prime Day.
What Can Amazon Prime Day Do For My Brand?
So, why is Amazon Prime Day so important for brands? In a nutshell, it’s pretty much the world championships of the e-commerce world. Prime Day is one of the best opportunities for high-quality promotion of your products, with unlimited potential for new customers, and a fantastic brand-building window.
In 2021, Amazon Prime Day saw $11.2 billion worth of sales and more than 250 million products sold, with an average spend per order of $47. Amazon Prime Day 2022 promises to be another fruitful year for brands as customers are increasingly keen to find bargains from both brands they know and trust and new brands they’re willing to try out.
While it’s key that e-commerce brands employ the right tactics to optimize sales during this super event online, your success doesn’t just need to be for Amazon Prime Day alone. It’s equally important to look beyond the event and consider what you can put in place to encourage long-term customers and repeat sales.
Before you start planning, think about what Prime Day means for your brand. What are your sales targets? Do you want to encourage more reviews to boost your Amazon rankings or widen your customer base? Are you trying to move some slow-selling stock or promote your bestsellers? Make sure your team understands what your ambitions are and set clear targets so you are all pulling together as one.
Whatever your strategy, the headline benefits of participating in Amazon Prime Day are twofold: eyeballs on your products and customer acquisition. Now, how to begin?
How to Get Your Brand Ready Before Amazon Prime Day
The first point to note about Amazon Prime Day is that your preparations need to start much earlier than you might think. If you haven’t started preparing yet, we suggest you do so right after finishing reading our tips!
Choose the Right Products for Maximum Sales
Identifying your brand’s most promising products for Prime Day is fundamental to success. The ideal products are ones that:
- Are easy to restock and are already in sufficient quantities
- Have a star-rating of 3.5 or better, with at least 15 good reviews
- Contain keyword-optimized content
- Have engaging and compelling images and/or video
- Represent your brand faithfully
When choosing which listings to include, it’s always worth looking through your previous performance across past Prime Days you’ve participated in. Judge which categories you’ve played well in, and if there is room for improvement, look into ways to increase your visibility and ranking through keyword optimization and bidding, increasing your budgets as necessary. Don’t be afraid to be competitive with your strategies when thinking about which of your products to include.
Prepare Your Offers
As an Amazon seller, you need to prepare what your offers will look like. Will you offer promotion codes, or woo your buyers with Amazon Lightning Deals? Whichever strategy you choose, remember that your customers are on the hunt for something that exceeds their expectations and makes them feel like they’ve got a real bargain.
To achieve this, consider offering multiple ways in which your customers can save money – variety can be a potent marketing tool. Let’s take a look at a few of the options:
Coupons:
These allow you to offer a discount on your listings that can last up to a year – BUT they do require you to have your product content up at least 3 weeks before Prime Day.
Coupons are best used to advertise groups of products and are a highly visible option that lets you easily track and monitor your campaign’s performance within a set advertising budget. If you want to use coupons as part of your strategy, you’ll want to start building these out now. It’s also worth noting that coupons are best received by buyers if you’re offering over 30% off the original price.
Lightning Deals:
Lightning deals are simple and easy for your customers to spot – your deal is presented right up front for buyers.
Even though your deal is only promoted for a few hours at a time – this limited offer type creates a sense of urgency as the deal timecounter runs down. Amazon also displays how fast a product is selling.
Deal of the Day:
These are 24-hour offers, running for one day only. These are best used to boost visibility for your newest products, or slow-moving listings. You have control over where ads for your offers are placed and which day they’re shown on.
Think about offering bundles – not only will it offer a variety of your products to your buyers and introduce them to products they may not have considered buying before, but it will seem like a great and generous deal and give your customers a positive impression of your brand.
Optimize Your Amazon Listings
If you haven’t already started doing this, it’s time to get on it! Optimizing your product listings will increase your ratings and visibility on Amazon’s search pages and ramp up your organic growth. Review your keywords, your descriptions and make sure that you’ve answered all questions regarding variables such as size and shape before they become a conversion blocker for your customers.
It’s a wise move to scrutinize everything about your listings, looking at them from a customer perspective and making sure your products and pages fit the user experience of Amazon’s Prime Day pages. Figure out what is going to differentiate your listing from your competitors – especially if they’re offering similar discounts.
Finally, don’t neglect your product images when optimizing – You may have noticed, but on Amazon Prime Day there is a serious amount of competition! If you make sure your images are top-quality they will pretty much sell themselves. Research shows that customers look at images before reading any listing text, and a strong visual is your chance to hook them before they move on to a competitor. If you want to add an extra layer of pizazz – consider amping up your listing by using videos or 360° images.
Remember, Prime Day is an opportunity for new customers to discover your brand. Make sure that your listings communicate with shoppers and tell your brand story. Ensure consistency in photo and/or video quality across your listings, branding and color schemes, descriptions, and more. Read more on the importance of branding for your Amazon business here.
Stock Levels & Shipping
Naturally, it is absolutely crucial to make sure you have enough stock to meet your customer’s demands. You will be (hopefully!) facing a rush on your products so increase your stock thresholds in anticipation.
If you’ve participated in other big-sales events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you should already have some idea of how much stock you can expect to move – use your data from these events to inform your inventory for Amazon Prime Day. But don’t forget! It’s a tricky balance between stocking enough products to meet demand and overstocking.
Once your stock levels are assured, it’s vital that you have the capacity to fulfill your orders! If you use FBA, make sure you have sent sufficient stock to Amazon so they can pick, pack and ship your products.
If you ship privately, consider whether you’ve enough resources and staff to get your items out in a timely manner. Contact your shipping partner and advise them about a potential surge in orders. Planning ahead on these matters will ensure that you won’t be facing any delays or mistakes.
In Summary:
- Identify which items you will include in your Amazon Prime Day sale – will they be your bestsellers or stock you want to shift?
- Prepare your offer types and submit your listings to Amazon with plenty of time
- Optimize your listing pages, product descriptions, and photos. Iron out any problems or inaccuracies that could form barriers to conversion. Tell your brand story.
- Increase your stock levels in advance of Prime Day, informed by your performance during previous big sales days. Contact your shipping partners to ensure a smooth delivery of your products.
In the Moment… The Day Of!
So, you’ve got your brand ready, your listings are optimized and your products look so good, they are practically selling themselves. Next – it’s the big event itself. But how do you get the most out of Amazon Prime Day to ensure this year is your best yet?
Advertising
If you’re offering some awesome deals on Prime Day – let your customers know about them! Visibility on Prime Day is of the utmost importance, so make sure to promote your sale across your usual marketing channels, on social media and anywhere you normally advertise.
Start boosting your listing visibility on and off Amazon through pay-per-click campaigns. Review your bidding strategy on your most important keywords to enhance your organic ranking in time for Prime Day. If you’re brand registered – well, great! Use your access to Amazon’s advanced advertising tools to really put some rockets on your campaign.
A key point here is to keep a keen eye on your budget throughout the day and what keywords you’re bidding on. Don’t run out of spending power in the first surge of Prime Day – ensure you’ve got the budget for the whole event, and that it’s cleverly spread out.
Top tip: on Prime Day, divert some of your off-market ad spend to Amazon to really take advantage of a captive buying audience – make full use of Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display and Sponsored Brands Video ads.
Don’t neglect your social media channels on Prime Day – create a buzz and promote your products and brand. Let your customers know that you’re taking part with engaging content and high-quality images. Let your buyers know how much they could save with your Amazon Prime Day deals and create a sense of community and anticipation.
Why not try automating your review requests? Your product reviews and ratings are essential for you to rank highly in Amazon’s search results and should form a key part of your marketing strategy. By fixing it so your customers are automatically asked for a review, you streamline this aspect of your tactics for an easy win.
Monitor Your Stock Levels
The big day is here and you’re seeing great demand for your products. Hopefully you were able to stock up well for your bestsellers. Now, it’s important that you monitor your inventory closely throughout Prime Day.
As you keep an eye on your stock levels, be reactive and keep pushing promotions on products that you still have in stock. Conversely, dial down promotions on products that you’re running out of – you don’t want to disappoint your customers! An OOS issue is one that is quite common in online reviews – your reviews and ratings during and after Prime Day are just as important as those during the normal sales year.
Be in close contact with your shipping partners – this is the day new customers discover your brand and an expedient service is an important part of their experience.
In Summary:
- Promote your offers across your marketing channels, including social media to attract more traffic to your listings.
- Keep track of your budget throughout the day & make sure you don’t overspend.
- Closely monitor your stock levels and react accordingly – keep pushing promotions for products where you have enough stock left.
The Aftermath
The big day has passed and you saw amazing success (we hope!). What to do next? First, one of the most fundamental things you need to do after Amazon Prime Day is fulfill those hoards of orders you’ve received. The ace up your sleeve here is to ensure your customers get the same level of service on Prime Day as they would at any other time. This is how you will impress existing customers and new customers alike – and increase the likelihood of repeat orders. Remember, a large percentage of reviews focus on the expedience & quality of service received, not just the product itself.
You should encourage customers to leave you good reviews (with photos if possible!). Amazon Prime Day offers brands rich pickings for happy buyers who’ve bagged themselves a bargain. Make the most of these good feelings and follow up with after sales communications, either through the Amazon ‘request a review’ button or use product inserts requesting feedback (you could also offer an incentive here). There is a lot of useful data you can gather from your Amazon Prime Day buyers that could influence your future brand strategies – this is a fantastic opportunity to find out more about who your customers are and how you can target them to optimize sales next time.
Next, evaluate your performance & learn from it! Measure your sales against your goals and see where, and how, your customers are converting. Look at which products have performed well, and whether there are any surprise hits you can capitalize on and continue promoting. Don’t forget to look at what hasn’t performed as well as you hoped and forensically analyze why that might have been.
Finally, don’t neglect your offsite web pages – now your customers have found you and seen your fantastic products they might want to find out more about you and what else you offer! Prepare for increased traffic, and think about what you can do to encourage direct purchases, such as new customer promotions.
Have a Great Prime Day!
BRANDED knows that as an Amazon e-commerce seller, Amazon Prime Day is one of the most important events in your e-commerce calendar. Not only do you have unparalleled access to new customers and a crucial window to accumulate great ratings and reviews but you’re boosting your sales while you do it. Amazon Prime Day is an incredible opportunity for building invaluable brand recognition and awareness – but only if you are properly prepared before, during, and after.
