Summer is here, and with it comes Amazon’s most exciting and challenging event of the year: Prime Day in July! This event has become a globally renowned occasion and is now crucial for any seller offering their products on the Marketplace.
Before we mention some tips to prepare well for the upcoming Prime Day, let’s provide some data to set the context and show the significance of this event. This year marks the 10th edition of the event. In last year’s edition (2023), Amazon Prime members bought more than 375 million items worldwide and saved over $2.5 billion on millions of deals across Amazon stores, making it the biggest Prime Day event in Amazon’s history. Additionally, another milestone was achieved with record delivery speeds.
Whether you are a manufacturer or a seller on Amazon, Prime Day is a crucial moment. The massive increase in traffic on the marketplace offers an exceptional opportunity, not only to sell your products but also to strengthen your brand perception and ensure that buyers consider you when searching for specific products. However, as the name implies, the deals are for Prime users; users who regularly shop on Amazon and know very well how to take advantage of the event.
Therefore, preparing for the event is essential, or we could even say it is obvious, but there are many things that we need to have clear, planned, and executed for when the time comes. We will remind you of them so that you keep them in mind and don’t miss a single one!
1.Analyze the Past and User Behavior with Your Brand
We often underestimate the importance of learning from past events. In the context of Amazon and Prime Day, it is essential to analyze three specific moments:
- Prime Day in July 2023: A year has passed, and obviously, things change along with the situation of each seller and their products, but it still provides valuable information about traffic, conversions, advertising campaign behavior, types of promotions, etc.
- Prime Big Deal Days in October 2023: We have already had two years with this fall edition of Prime Day, which is almost identical in format to the one in July. The types of products sold may vary (for example, sunscreen is important now, but not relevant in October), but analyze your participation. If you didn’t do anything exceptional, look closely at the advertising and sales figures by product to find some relevant data.
- Black Friday 2023: Examine consumer behavior during this period to understand what worked and what didn’t and to extrapolate learnings. Black Friday is an event focused on Christmas gifts or high-priced products, but the types of promotions and Prime user behavior are very similar. Taking a look should not be an issue!
2.Analyze Your Retail Actions from Prime Day 2023
Evaluate what worked and what didn’t during last year’s Prime Day. It’s important to compare the same event that coincides in dates to draw precise and relevant conclusions. To conduct this analysis, consider:
- Your catalogue: What products did you highlight? Were they seasonal products? How did they compete with similar products from the competition? It’s essential to identify the catalog to support during the event for optimal results.
- Promotions: Examine which products you promoted and what types of discounts you offered. This way, you can analyze and observe which had better performance, which discount percentages worked, and whether the products were the right ones.
- Optimizations on detail pages: What improvements did you make to your product pages and what was their impact? Here, it is important to measure if conversions increased by taking advantage of the higher traffic to the detail page.
- New product launches: If you launched products during Prime Day, analyze whether they had the expected impact and, if not, identify the reasons. Perhaps it wasn’t the right time, you didn’t create variation listings when you had the opportunity, you didn’t have enough stock to meet demand, or you should have prepared the product earlier in terms of campaigns and traffic to achieve the desired results.
3.Analyze Your Advertising Campaigns
Advertising campaigns are crucial for success on Prime Day. Analyze:
- What worked and what didn’t in your previous advertising campaigns: formats, placements, audiences…
- The budget invested and its distribution across time slots. It is key to cover the 24 hours of the day and not run out of budget halfway through the morning. Therefore, you may need to increase the budget this year or distribute it differently.
- The best-performing strategies and KPIs used. This point is essential. Were your product detail pages heavily attacked? How did the generic strategy work? Were CPCs very high? Which keywords yielded the best results? And many other topics.
- If you followed the ideal advertising strategy covering lead-up + event + lead out check correctly the performance of the campaigns + their combination with the retail promos to optimize now with the results obtained.
4.Plan Your Strategy
Once you have analyzed the data and learned from past experiences, it is time to plan your strategy for Prime Day.
Here are four aspects you should focus on:
- Defining achievable goals: Set realistic, data-driven goals. Don’t overestimate your estimates. Don’t think you will sell what you haven’t sold all year just because it’s an event period.
- Managing promotions and catalogue: Identify your star products and apply attractive promotions to them. It’s not necessary to promote all your products. And keep in mind that when planning promotions, don’t focus only on products you haven’t been able to sell throughout the year because they are obsolete or old; people know what they want, event or not. Also, make sure the promotions are profitable; some sellers have sold a lot and then found out it wasn’t profitable after doing the math.
- Stock control: Ensure you have enough inventory available three weeks before Prime Day. It wouldn’t be the first time you run out of stock during the event without the ability to react. At Amazing, we recommend delivering materials by June 20th at the latest to avoid issues. And be careful not to fall short. In Vendor, you will have to wait for the PO, but in Seller, the stock control is in your hands, so do the math well and cover yourself.
- Advertising strategy: Ensure you have an adequate budget to cover all phases of the event. Use advertising campaigns to drive traffic to your products and define the correct KPIs to measure the success of each campaign.
In summary, success on Prime Day is not a matter of luck. It requires analysis, planning, estimation, tracking, and precise execution. Given the time and experience needed to do this correctly, having the help of a specialized agency, such as Amazing, can make a difference. If they are also an Amazon Advance Partner, you will have the additional advantage of receiving support from Amazon to understand the data and solve issues related to your campaigns. Prime Day is an exciting opportunity, so get ready to make the most of it!
