Prime Day 2023 Success Roadmap: Preparation and Optimization for Maximum Results

 

Amazon’s Prime Day is upon us as shoppers are getting ready for the event and sellers are preparing for the massive event. This seasonal event is a make-or-break event for brands selling on the platform. Amazon invests massively in media promoting the event, and success stories emerge every year from brands like Instant Pot to Amazon products like the Echo Dot.

Prime Day is an opportunity for Amazon sellers to drive awareness and sales during a traditionally slow period. Understanding how shoppers search for products during the Prime Day runup period, through during the event, and post-event best practices are all essential pieces that will drive success.

Last year, Prime members purchased over 60,000 items per minute during the shopping event. Some best-selling categories include Consumer Electronics, Household Essentials, and Home. Some of the best-selling items include premium beauty brands, including Laneige and NuFACE; Apple Watch Series 7; Kids and Baby clothing from Simple Joys by Carters and accessories from Shark vacuums, air purifiers, and steam mops.

In this write-up, we will dive into some of the best practices you can implement today to help prepare your catalog for the massive event. We will cover inventory, listing optimization, SEO, promotional strategies, and advertising. Following this comprehensive roadmap will give you the necessary knowledge and techniques to thrive during Prime Day 2023.

 

Let’s get started 🙂

 

Essential Tips for Preparing Your Inventory for Prime Day

 

You can’t sell inventory you don’t have in stock—no matter the preparation of your listings, marketing campaigns, or advertising strategies. You can’t sell merchandise you don’t have available. Having adequate inventory is essential to meet the increased demand during the event. Here are some tips to prepare your inventory for Prime Day 2023:

 

1. Analyze Past Sales Data: Dive into your historical Prime Day sales data and other major shopping events to identify the best and worst-performing products. This analysis will help you prioritize your inventory and focusing where to discount and stock up. If you don’t have historical data, assume a 20% lift on your daily mean for the period.
2. Order inventory well in advance: Typically, it’s about 30 days out from the event, and Amazon will post notifications inside the platform, in newsletters, and in other outlets. This year, June 15th is the cutoff date for having inventory sent to fulfillment centers without risking your products being stuck in fulfillment centers and unavailable for sale. Outside of 2020, the event is typically scheduled for late June to mid-July.
3. Optimize Inventory Management: Leverage Amazon’s tools for keeping inventory available inside Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) inventory. In Seller and Vendor Central, some reports and dashboards let you know how much inventory you have and how long it takes before you are completely depleted.
4. Utilize Amazon FBA Services: Outside of the benefits you have with leveraging Amazon FBA services. Shoppers are expecting fast shipping. Amazon can fulfill orders same day, one day, and two days. Be sure to have your top sellers or products you hope to liquidate available via FBA to maximize your opportunity to convert shoppers.

 

Steps to Optimizing Your Listings for Prime Day

 

It’s essential that you prepare your Amazon assets for the major event. There will be a TON of traffic before, during, and after the event. It’s essential to ensure you represent your products in the most attractive way possible. While discounting your prices significantly attracts shoppers, a compelling product listing is equally as essential. Here’s how you can optimize your Amazon listing for Prime Day success:

 

1. Conduct a comprehensive listing audit: Review your title, bullets, images, and description to ensure they are up to date, compelling and effectively communicate unique selling points of your products. Consider tools like Helium 10 or Jungle Scout to get a quality score on your listing. A pro tip is to analyze your top competitors and review their reviews and questions to see if there is a unique opportunity to feature missing aspects from your competitors on your listings.
2. Use advertising data and keyword research: Review historical advertising data from past events to understand how shoppers search and what queries led to a conversion. Conduct additional research to establish any trends in shopping behavior and look for unique ways to showcase unique selling features about your product.
3. Split test and optimize early: Through manage my experiment and other tools, you can split test aspects of your listings like your title, bullets, main image, and A+ content testing KPIs like conversion rates and click-through rates. You can also leverage tools like Pick-fu to get feedback from actual shoppers off of the platform on images and features related to your product detail page.
4. Hire a Copywriter or use AI: We highly recommend leveraging a copywriter to romance your listing and leverage natural language, resulting in better click-through rates and conversion rates on your listings. If you don’t have the budget to hire a copywriter, consider leveraging some AI tools to assist you in your listing creation. Here are a bunch of tips on how to leverage ChatGPT to enhance your Amazon listings.

 

Prime Day Promotions, Coupons, and Strategies

 

Do you have to discount your products during Prime Day? No. You don’t. But your savings on the promotions will result in a lower sales velocity and less overall engagement. The reality is that shoppers are coming to the platform looking for deals. You don’t have to go crazy, but you should participate by offering something that will incentivize shoppers to purchase. These shoppers will start creating lists and looking around up to two weeks before the event after it is announced. Here is a bit about promotions and what we recommend for Prime Day:

 

1. Event day deals: Before the event, Amazon will allow you to claim promotions during the Prime Day event. These will be in the form of Deals of the Day or Lightning Deals. The fees will range from $150-$500 and will let you have special page placements on the platform and badges on your listings. The deals are time sensitive and can be canceled anytime before they go active. It’s best practice to claim them when they become available and decide when it’s closer to the event if you want to use them. Please note that not all products will be eligible for the deals.
2. Run deals for the entire week: Prime Day is not just a two-day event. Shoppers will be online, leveraging tools like Honey to allow shoppers to track prices and note if they are getting a good deal. Some shoppers will pull the trigger early in anticipation of the event. It’s best practice to run promotions the entire week of the event.
3. Leverage BOGOs & virtual bundles: This is an excellent way to increase your average order value. Virtual bundles do not require you to bundle inventory together physically, and it’s a great way to drive larger orders by putting together complementary products. Buy One Get One (BOGOs) can be used similarly and doesn’t necessarily mean free. It could be as simple as Buy One Get One 20% off. Use an image within the second or third spot to increase visibility.
4. Create a Deals subpage on your Storefront: Shoppers will find their way over to your storefront, whether from advertising or scrolling through your product detail pages. Have a deals page where you have all your products on promotion as an easy way to direct shoppers to the best value during the event.

 

Let’s wrap this up by talking about traditional discounts and their benefits. If you can’t or prefer not to run any Prime Day-exclusive discounts. Here are some promotions you can consider during the event.

 

Taking advantage of promotions during Prime Day is essential for meeting customer expectations. Participating in event day deals ensures that you will increase your visibility amongst in-market shoppers. But you can always leverage coupons and other no-fee promotions to maximize your potential on the event day.

 

Prime Day Advertising Strategies

 

Last year, according to Feedvisor, Prime Day saw a 381% increase in ad spend compared to 2021 and a 1,073% increase in ad sales. Advertising Cost of Sale decreased by about 47%, and total ROAS increased by 92% compared to 2021. CPCs increased 123% across all categories, with an average CPC of $0.96.

 

I share this data with you to highlight the importance of advertising on Prime Day. If you aren’t investing, you are missing out on an opportunity to get in front of in-market shoppers looking for your products. Yes. It will be more expensive than during normal shopping periods, but the return will be there.

 

Here are some basic advertising strategies you should use during the event:

 

1. Leverage all ad types in Sponsored Products: Be sure you are using Automatic and manual campaigns and actively keyword harvesting. Pull your search term report regularly and find keywords with reasonable click-through rates and returns. Add them into manual campaigns and play with bid placements to maximize top-of-search placements.
2. Leverage Sponsored Brand ads to own top-of-search: Noticing a theme here. Top-of-search will perform much better than other placements. Sponsored brand ads allow you to feature 3 products, including virtual bundles, and drive traffic to relevant storefront pages (and deal pages 😉).
3. Leverage Product Targeting strategies: Consider defensive and offensive strategies. On the defense, protect all of your listings with your products. Don’t lose out on sales because you think it’s a wasted investment. If you’re not advertising on your assets, your competitors are. They will steal sales from your brand, so protect your assets. On the offensive side, target your top competitor products in your category and try to overwhelm their listings with your products. Although Amazon doesn’t always present the most relevant products, consider creating a separate campaign or ad group dedicated to Amazon recommendations. They will perform better than you think.
4. Take advantage of Amazon DSP: If you can access it, leverage the platform to build relevant audiences you can retarget during the busy shopping event. DSP is an excellent way to build audiences by targeting shoppers on and off the platform on Amazon-owned and operated properties and many 3rd party suppliers.
5. Monitor spend and ensure you aren’t hitting budget caps: First, don’t use account-level budget caps. Account caps allow the campaigns that spend the fastest to eat your budget and don’t necessarily allow the most efficient campaigns to excel. Check your budgets periodically the entire week before, during, and after to ensure you aren’t running out of budget early in the day. Lastly, use campaign level caps to ensure the most efficient campaigns are allowed to spend the most.

Enhance Marketing Strategies for Prime Day

 

This Amazon event is an excellent opportunity to cross-pollinate from other platforms. I’d like to call out that most shoppers are omnichannel shoppers, and you won’t be cannibalizing other platforms. Cross-promoting the event by leveraging other marketing tactics like email, social advertising, and working with influencers will increase your reach and help build your brand awareness overall. Most Americans shop on Amazon and will search for your products regardless of where they initially discovered your brand. Here are some tactics you can use to help maximize your Amazon sales during the event:

 

1. Email marketing: Let your current customers know that the event is coming up and where they can find your products. It’s also an opportunity to provide exclusive deals or early access to Prime Day deals to generate sales and awareness of your participation in the event.
2. Influencer marketing: Whether you are working with Amazon associates or influencers through other platforms like Perpetua. Influencers have niche audiences that can help generate awareness of your product and deals being offered on the event day.
3. Social media advertising: Product discovery happens on and off Amazon, but consider driving awareness for your Prime Day deals by leveraging advertising solutions on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Be sure you have stellar assets before considering social media.
4. Search Ads: Leverage advertising on search engines like Google or Bing. A lot of product discovery happens on search engines. You can work with media companies to generate relevant content like Top 10 Kitchen Deals on Prime Day that drives traffic to your listings. You can promote those articles on relevant searches to help build traffic and increase sales.
5. Leverage Buy with Prime: Leverage the Buy with Prime feature on your website, which allows sellers to take advantage of Amazon’s fulfillment directly on their website. It allows shoppers to choose their fulfillment and payment method and run it through Amazon. Brands leveraging Buy with Prime see a 20% increase in conversion rates.

 

If you use any of these tactics you leverage, enroll your products into Amazon’s Brand Referral program to get a discount on your fees. Lastly, set up Amazon Attribution to track shoppers’ post-strategy behavior so you know which campaigns drove the best ROI.

 

Conclusion

 

In conclusion, preparing and optimizing your account for Prime Day 2023 is crucial for brands selling on Amazon. The event will bring a massive amount of Amazon shoppers to the platform. It is a huge opportunity for any brand to increase brand awareness and sales. When optimizing your listings and advertising campaigns, use natural language and consider using a copywriter or an AI solution. Enhancing marketing strategies beyond Amazon is also beneficial. Cross-promoting the event through email marketing, influencer marketing, social media advertising, search ads, and leveraging the Buy with Prime feature on websites can expand reach and increase sales.

 

By implementing these strategies and following the Prime Day success roadmap, sellers can position themselves for maximum results during Prime Day 2023. It is a valuable opportunity to capitalize on Amazon’s massive reach and drive significant sales and brand awareness.