Last year, Prime Day brought in nearly $11 billion in total ecommerce sales, making it the biggest day for digital sales in 2021 — and Prime Day 2022, could be even bigger. This year is a crucial time to get in front of new customers in the competitive ecommerce market.
The big question is: Are you Prime Day ready?
From an end-to-end channel management approach, the following post will outline what you should do before Prime Day to maximize sales and make this your most successful Prime Day yet.
What is Amazon Prime Day?
Before we dive in, it’s important to understand why Prime Day is one of the biggest shopping events of the year and how it has evolved.
Amazon launched Prime Day in 2015 to celebrate its 20th anniversary. The first Amazon Prime Day was a one-day retail holiday for Prime members. Since then, Prime Day has overtaken Black Friday and Cyber Monday as the biggest annual sales event on Amazon, with better deals on more products resulting in increased sales (and Prime memberships).
According to Adobe Analytics data, the self-made shopping holiday brought in nearly $5.6 billion on Monday and $5.4 billion on Tuesday, making Monday the biggest day for digital sales in 2021.
According to Tinuiti’s 2021 client data, US Amazon advertisers increased Sponsored Products spend by 16% relative to last Prime Day (October 13-14, 2020), and ramped up Sponsored Brands investment by 22%. Cost per click jumped 19% for Sponsored Products, but just 4% for Sponsored Brands, as brands competed for shoppers on the busy sales ‘holiday.’
(Check out our full 2021 Prime Day recap here)
While the ecommerce landscape looks different this year than any before, we can still expect Prime Day 2022 to be a big event for Prime members and Amazon sellers alike.
The Prime Day 2022 Checklist
Recently, top ecommerce experts gathered at Tinuiti’s Prime Day Prep Panel to share their best-kept secret strategies for prepping brands for guaranteed Prime Day success.
From buttoned-up operations to eye-catching creative and savvy advertising tactics, we’ve compiled the ultimate checklist to ensure you are Prime Day ready.
Tip: Choose your products wisely
The ideal products for Prime Day deals are ones that:
- Are in stock and easily replenishable
- Have at least 15 reviews
- Have a 3.5-star rating or higher
- Include optimized images
- Include branded and keyword-optimized content
In addition to choosing the right products, make sure that your product listings are optimized for conversions.
“From an operational standpoint, detail page content for images and copy descriptions are going to differentiate your product from a large selection of heavily discounted products; brands should optimize their detail pages to ensure maximum conversion.”
– Emily Leung, Brand Services Specialist at Tinuiti
Tip: Create a subcategory page devoted to Prime
If you have an Amazon Store, consider creating a dedicated Prime Day subcategory. Use it to feature your Prime Day deals and discounts, and treat it as your landing page for all things Prime Day. When you have Prime Day ads on Amazon, pointing users to a specific landing page makes it easier for them to convert into customers.
Looking for ideas? Check out these “8 Modern Amazon Store Examples that Inform, Engage, and Inspire“.
Tip: Check your inventory levels and historical performance
We say it every year and we will say it again: Don’t stock out!
Make sure you have enough inventory for your promoted products and best sellers. You can generally expect Black Friday and Cyber Monday numbers to fall in line with Prime Day’s, so if you have data from those sales events, use it to determine your inventory strategy for Prime Day.
“Understand what your historical performance is for previous Prime Days. If you notice that you’re not the best player in a certain category [from previous experience] that’s a good indication you should look into a different category to perform. If you don’t have historical performance, then be ready to be competitive. Increase your keyword bids, increase your campaign budgets. Just make sure you are ready.”
– Ben Gemkow, Team Strategist, Marketplaces at Tinuiti
Know that there’s a balance between keeping enough inventory in stock to meet demand and overstocking.
Tip: Set up and test your Amazon advertising campaigns early
Stay on top of your campaigns. Set aside time leading up to and during Prime Day to check on and manage your ad campaigns. Pay close attention to your bids and budget. Make sure you have the budget to capitalize on the full Prime Day opportunity, so you don’t run out in the first few hours.
Brands should leverage the additional traffic coming to Amazon as well as the higher conversion rates by approaching tentpole events like Prime Day with a three-tiered approach. A well-rounded advertising strategy that targets different areas of the advertising funnel during the lead-up period, the promotional period, and the lead-out period will allow you to maximize your reach to meet return and awareness-based goals.
Using Search and Display together to form your Prime Day tactics allows you to not only capture the demand of those who are actively searching on Amazon but also to generate demand by layering in mid and upper-funnel strategies.
You can also use past Prime Day campaigns and metrics to guide you, though keep in mind that the ecommerce landscape and consumer preferences look different this year.
Every brand should prepare for Prime Day by building out and testing all campaign types and betas that Amazon has made available to advertisers. Prime Day is extremely competitive, so it’s essential to know which campaigns we are especially interested in throttling to make the most out of the increased traffic.
“I specifically recommend building out video in Sponsored Brands. We have found that, on average, we are seeing quadruple the click-through rate (CTR) for our clients versus the original Sponsored Brands ads. It’s a great way to stand out while taking advantage of the opportunity to showcase how to use a product and send traffic back to a storefront to tie everything together.”
– Meghan Andrade, Director of Business Development, Amazon & Marketplaces at Tinuiti
Tip: Leverage influencers and their platforms
Influencers are a valuable tool for brands, as they can influence an entirely new audience of individuals to trust your brand. Typically, individuals are more likely to buy something their favorite influencer promotes than something they see randomly online.
According to eMarketer, 81 percent of advertisers who have used influencer marketing judged it to be effective. Amazon also offers it’s own resource of social influencers through the Amazon Influencer Program.
Building relationships with influencers who align and resonate with your brand and creating campaigns that speak to that influencer’s followers is virtually a bulletproof strategy.
“Influencers are incredibly effective for brands because they are authentic storytellers who emotionally connect with and are trusted by their audiences. But that is just one piece of the Influencer puzzle. Tinuiti understands the magic in omnichannel integration with other digital marketing tactics and the ability to measure Influencer performance beyond vanity metricsーtruly making it a full-funnel driver. The integration across functions including Social, Affiliate, and ecommerce create a larger amplification in a highly competitive space for brands to grow their business.”
– Crystal Duncan, SVP, Head of Influencer Marketing
Using other platforms to advertise your upcoming Prime Day deals is another strategy many companies have adopted. Instagram, Facebook, and Google Ads are all ideal choices, as these platforms are massive and full of potential customers.
Priyanka Bohra, Director of Marketing and Business Partnerships for Sellerapp, says that “Google Ads is one of the best ways to drive external traffic to your Amazon product listings via a landing page.”
You can learn more about Tinuiti’s Omnichannel Performance Influencer Practice here.
Tip: Invest in Amazon Direct Fulfillment ASAP
One way to make the most of Prime Day 2022 is to invest in Amazon Direct Fulfillment. Amazon Direct Fulfillment allows vendors to use EDI (electronic data interchange) to automatically share real-time inventory information for their entire product catalog with Amazon.
If you don’t have Direct Fulfillment set up as a backup to FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon), you might miss out on sales. When Amazon warehouses are out of stock, customers cannot order your product before Amazon receives your inventory.
Pro-tip: For vendors that are capable of direct fulfillment, we recommend that your Direct Fulfillment connection is set up correctly and you are ready to utilize this program for Prime Day and in Q4. If you are not currently using Amazon’s Direct Fulfillment program, you can get started by following the instructions within your Warehouse Settings in Vendor Central.
Some of the benefits of Direct Fulfillment include:
- Products are displayed as “Ships and Sold by Amazon”
- You can make your entire catalog available to customers
- You don’t have to wait for a purchase order to start selling products. Direct Fulfillment lets Amazon pull in the inventory directly from EDI and show shoppers that your product is available.
- You’re protected from out-of-stock issues
- Amazon handles all customer service requests and returns for you
- Amazon pays all shipping fees
To set up Direct Fulfillment, go to the Warehouse Settings in your Vendor Central account and follow the on-screen instructions to set up a Direct Fulfillment warehouse.
Now that you know what you need to do before the event, let’s talk about the big day.
What to do on Prime Day
Visibility is a significant player in Prime Day success. It’s critical to ensure that all of your deals are live and running correctly. You’ll also want to monitor your budget and use it correctly.
“I typically increase my budget campaign caps by 50% on Prime Day, but throughout the day I’ll be monitoring spend and checking in often to make sure that all campaign budgets are still available and running. If you hit your budget cap too early – your ad won’t be served to shoppers and that’s the last thing any brand would want on Prime Day.”
– Ben Gemkow, Team Strategist, Marketplaces at Tinuiti
Sellers are looking for ways to improve ROI during Prime Day. This includes separating low converting keywords, tracking conversions, targeting competitive products, and identifying the change in keyword trends and search volumes. Staying on top of this will maximize visibility. In addition, bidding higher will result in a higher rank, and staying on top of your budget allows you to bid higher.
Best Practices: Post-Prime Day
Each Prime Day is an opportunity to learn more about your brand and optimize it. Here’s a couple area to be mindful of:
Analytics: One of the best things a seller can do after Prime Day is pay attention to actions. Dig up analytics and demographics from your Prime Day event and check to see if there was a noticeable increase in things such as new customers or new search items. The goal is to identify your successes and failures and make the changes necessary (or mimic the actions that produced positive results for your brand) to facilitate future growth.
Reviews: Pay attention to the quality of reviews, not necessarily the quantity. It’s essential to see what people are saying, so you have the opportunity to improve and adapt. After the event, taking a good look at your reviews can affect future strategies and changes, product developments, listing changes, updates, etc. Another good practice is paying attention to competitors’ reviews and seeing what their customers are saying. Doing this can give sellers an upper hand to improve and shine in areas where their competitors may not and win over a more extensive following.
Learn More
Want to learn more on how to prepare for Prime Day? If you missed our 2022 Live Panel, you can view it on-demand here. The panel of experts from Tinuiti, eComEngine, SellerApp, and Salsify cover everything you need to know to have a successful Prime Day including:
- How to not only increase your sales, but increase your brand awareness on Prime Day
- How to use new, super-effective Amazon features—like Sponsored Brands Video—to increase click through rate and get your product in front of new customers
- A comprehensive checklist of the steps for success on Prime Day
- The KPIs you should be looking at to determine Prime Day success (hint: it’s not just sales)
- And more!
