Amazon Prime Day, the hottest online sale of the year, is almost upon us!
This event is a massive revenue opportunity for smart brands, seeing $11.2bn global sales over 175m items purchased in 2021.
So, with less than three weeks to go, it’s crucial to make sure you’ve got everything in place so you can maximise your sales during the event – and maintain your momentum afterwards too.
Here’s our expert checklist to help you get prepared, stay agile and capitalise on this golden opportunity to supercharge your profits.
First, ask “Why”
The key to a successful Prime Day result for your brand is to have clarity on why you’re participating.
By knowing what you want to achieve, you can let your strategy guide your actions through the event.
For example, you might be looking to gain extra market share by enticing new customers in with tasty discounts.
You could be taking part simply because all your competitors are, and you don’t want to lose volume and market share to them.
Or your driving motive might be clearance – shifting surplus stock, or making room in storage.
Whatever you think Prime Day can do for your brand, being clear on your why will allow you to make better decisions about which products you’ll focus on, how much budget you’ll assign and how you’ll set up your ad campaigns to hit the right stages of the funnel for your overall objectives.
Submit your deals (and not just Prime Day deals)
We know the main Prime deals window closed weeks ago, but there are still options to consider.
Shoppers are always price-conscious, so introducing vouchers or using price reductions will help you enjoy the benefits of the upturn in traffic even on products that aren’t part of your main Prime Day offering.
Stock, stock, stock!
We can’t emphasise this enough!
Affecting your sales performance – and your rankings – there’s nothing worse than running out of stock in the middle of a successful Prime Day.
Though the FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) inventory date has passed, there’s still time to prepare your operational capability for FBM (Fulfilled by Merchant) and SFP (Seller Fulfilled Prime) orders.
Make sure you’ve got enough inventory in place to cope with a sales surge during the event – and afterwards, when you might need to restock quickly to maintain the momentum you’ve built.
Get retail-ready
Perfecting your listings plays a big part in maximising sales through Prime Day.
It’s crucial to get every element optimised to an A1 position, so take a look at your:
Images – choose high-quality, mobile-and-Amazon-friendly images which sell your product’s features and benefits.
Titles and listing content – optimise all your copy for clarity and conversion with attention-grabbing titles that are mobile-friendly, and concise listings that make good use of bullet points and feature your keywords.
EBC (Enhanced Brand Content) – EBC drives greater engagement and conversions, so make sure yours is as good as it can possibly be.
Tidy up your Ads structure
In our recent Prime Day webinar, we were joined by Amazon Ads’ Hannah Fitton who shared some invaluable insider tips and tricks on how to get Prime Day ready.
Amongst them, she outlined these three crucial tasks to undertake during the event:
- Make sure your bids and budgets are prepared upfront.
- Continually monitor the performance of your ads to understand opportunities for real-time adjustments.
- Analyse and optimise in-flight.
As you can see, the key to running successful Prime Day ads is being as agile as possible as the event unfolds.
You want to be able to optimise your active ads and move spend quickly and efficiently.
It’s hard to do this if your Ads structure is cluttered with dead ads and drafts, so make sure to spend time trimming what’s not needed so you can be fast and flexible when it counts.
Assign the right Ads Budget
As with your stock levels, you don’t want to find that high-performing ads have stopped running in the middle of Prime Day because you didn’t give them enough budget.
But how much is enough?
Hannah says you can look to your past performance for the answer, setting higher budgets where you may have run low before.
You can also use historical data to estimate budgets – multiplying your previous cost-per-click, click-to-conversion ratio and how many clicks you have as a goal.
To help you stay on top of your budget management through Prime Day (and beyond), Amazon’s Budget Rules feature is a fantastic tool.
Available for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Display (via the Ads console and API) and Sponsored Brands (currently API only), you can set Budget Rules to automatically boost your budgets based on:
- Schedule-based rules – can be set to automatically increase daily budgets for fixed periods or recommended events, like Prime Day or Black Friday. During events, Amazon will notify you of recommended budgets based on historical shopping activity.
- Performance-based rules – these automatically increase your budget if your campaign hits a performance threshold that you set. Metrics you can use include ACOS, click-through rate (CTR), conversion rates (CVR) and return on ad spend (ROAS).
Or, as long as your ACOS is performing, you could take our CEO Andrew Banks’ advice and simply set an unlimited budget to your ads for Prime Day to avoid issues – you can still cap your daily spend at campaign level.
Launch a Prime Day StoreFront
We’re big fans of Amazon StoreFronts.
A brilliant way to engage your customer and cross-sell your products, they really come into their own for events like Prime Day.
Using Amazon’s scheduling and versioning feature, you can create a Prime Day specific version of your Store – a great way to showcase the deals you have on and the value you’re offering through the event.
Top tip – Use a Sponsored Brands campaign to drive traffic into your Prime Day Store.
What could your brand achieve this Prime Day?
There are plenty of tips here to help you supercharge your sales this Prime Day – but we understand that the process can be overwhelming, with lots to get right to reap the rewards of this golden opportunity for your brand.
Our team of e-commerce and retail experts have years of experience of maximising Amazon sales for our brand clients every day, not just Prime Day.
Get in touch today and let’s chat about how we can help drive the growth you’ve dreamt of.
