Five Tips to Maximize Your Prime Day

It’s almost that time of year again, the elusive Amazon-created holiday known as “Prime Day.” We don’t know exactly when Prime Day 2020 will happen, but based on previous years, we anticipate it will fall in mid-October.

Prime Day is a massive sales opportunity for your business, which means it’s vital to be prepared. We’ve highlighted five tips that will help you get ahead of your competition and capture the sales you want.

1. Inventory Hydration

Make sure you are well stocked in fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) and/or your own warehouses for the surge in demand tied to Prime Day, and afterwards entering the holiday shopping season with Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM). Amazon’s most precious asset is their warehouse space, and we’ve seen in the past Amazon has cut off shipping inventory to FBA ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. A common question we get is, “how much of a surge should we expect?” There’s no way to predict this; if you have it, base your planning on previous years’ data, and prepare for “the worst” (a.k.a., the best-case scenario of lots of sales). This is the prudent course because the worst thing that can happen to you is stocking out and not generating sales that you would otherwise have realized. Stock up!

2. Listing Optimized

Amazon promotes Prime Day all over the world through radio, TV, online, etc., to push customers who are not Prime Members to join. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners estimates that Prime as 112 million users (not necessarily memberships, as different household members can use the same membership. Every year Prime Day leads to new Prime customers. For you, that means more customers and more searches for the products you sell. These extra eyeballs adds extra urgency to our guidance to optimize your listings. Give potential new customers a 11/10 experience with your products and your brand. Learn more about this in our previous articles (Retail Readiness Part 1, Part 2).

3. Deals

We always hear the famous “our brand never gets a spike during Prime Day” or “I hear Prime Day is a bust.” Most of the brands that say this don’t offer a solid deal and don’t treat Prime Day like BFCM. That’s poor strategy because Prime Day always ends being the biggest sales day of the year. Amazon is promoting deals to customers and that’s what they’re expecting, so make the investment in creating a solid promotion that entices a customer to buy your product vs. a competitor’s product.

Over the years, we’ve seen that our clients that do the best on Prime Day offer a minimum of 20% off, on average. Obviously, your product margins will vary category to category, but the aim is to give the best possible deal you can to capture new customers and, yes, steal customers from your competitors. We recommend coupons as the #1 promotion tool, unless you’re given a Deal of Day opportunity—take that every time! Finally, as a CPG brand, remember these holiday promo days are the BEST day to take advantage of since you want to get people re-purchasing your product consistently. Give the deal you know your customer expects.

4. Advertising

If you’re not already utilizing Amazon’s PPC ads, you need to. If you are, make sure that your campaigns are well built out and optimized.

• Utilize all Amazon PPC Ads: Sponsored Products Manual, Automatic Campaigns, Sponsored Display, and Sponsored Brands (if you’re Brand Registered).

• Based on your performance leading up to Prime Day, look back at the product level, which products need X amount of budget and which campaigns at the product level need the maximum amount of budget.

• Keyword Harvest and Keyword Research. Complete your Keyword Harvest prior to Prime Day to discover new keywords and ASINs that may need to be added to your Manual Campaigns and/or your Sponsored Display Ads. There are always new search terms popping up, so complete keyword research for your best-selling products to ensure you’re covering all your bases. PRO TIP: Create conquest campaigns, target your competitors highly searched branded terms to steal market share from them. Yes, these will come at a higher cost; however, it’s a great day to acquire a customer with a strong deal, so the ROI is there.

• Optimize your bids. As always, make sure you’re bidding aggressively on your top search terms for all your products to get your top spot on the digital shelf.

5. Monitor the Day(s)

Remember, despite the name, Prime Day isn’t just one day. Once Amazon promotes the official day, there will be a spike the week leading up to it and the week after. In 2019, Prime Day was 36 hours, but it really fell into two weeks of deals all over Amazon. What does that mean for you? Still setup a promotion leading up to the day, just not as aggressive. We also saw two years ago Amazon’s site had so much traffic that it crashed for a few hours (crazy, we know). So, prepare for the worst case scenario, anything can happen.

During Prime Day(s), monitor your account strictly in case:

• Any ASINs go down

• Amazon sends you a notification

• Customers inquire about your products

• Advertising issues.

Check your real-time sales and your advertising spend/sales throughout the day. CPCs will go up causing your budgets to run out faster and you won’t know exactly which keywords, ASINs, and campaigns are driving your sales perfectly since there’s a 48-hour lag in Ad sales data. You’re going to have to take a risk on budget and bidding, because you’re running blind in terms of data, but check your backend sales data at the ASIN level to see if it matches which campaigns show sales or spend. Look at the Amazon Search Engine Response Page to see if your Ads are displaying where you want them as well. If they are not showing up and you know it’s one of your money-making keywords, increase your bids.

The right preparation and planning can make Prime Day everything you want for your brand, and perhaps even more!