Back in July 2015, Amazon launched its very own ‘discount day’ to celebrate its 20th birthday. This has since become an annual event and now competes with the likes of Black Friday and Cyber Monday in terms of sales periods. This year it falls on July 15th, if the leaks are to be believed.
Predictably, the initial discount day has grown into a 36-hour long period of slashed prices across Amazon’s entire range of departments. Prime Day is exclusive to Amazon Prime subscribers, who during this period have access to upwards of one million deals.
What Does this Mean for Advertisers?
Search volume and sales figures typically surge around Prime Day as people flood to Amazon for the best deals. Following Prime Day 2018, Amazon reported that the conversion rate for visits to amazon.com exceeded the average for the rest of the year by 37%.
This means that, to capitalise on the massive sales potential, advertisers need a Prime Day plan. In the same way you would structure a marketing strategy for Black Friday or the Boxing Day sales, planning ahead for Prime Day is essential for success.
5 Ways to Prepare for Prime Day
In light of this, we have put together our top five tips on how you can make sure you are primed for Prime Day:
1. Prepare Early
Ensure you know when Prime Day is (July 15th 2019) and when your deals will be live. Are they lightning deals exclusive to Prime Day itself? Or will they be live in the run up to the day itself and/or over the course of the following weeks?
Ideally, you don’t want to be setting new campaigns live on Prime Day itself, so early planning and preparation is crucial. As with other platforms, new Amazon campaigns benefit from an initial learning period - be sure to give them some to run time ahead of the sale.
2. Get Your Budget Right
Remember, if your competitors are doing it right, they will also be ramping up their activity for Prime Day. As a result, CPCs are going to rise, so you’ll need to ensure that your bids are high enough to compete (i.e. higher than usual) and your daily budgets are large enough to last the whole day.
The last thing you want is for your campaigns to stop serving mid-way through the day due to an exhausted budget!
3. Make Sure You Nail Keywords
Which of your ASINs (products) in particular are going to be running Prime Day deals? A clear understanding of this is essential when planning out your Prime Day campaigns, especially when it comes to keyword planning.
If your Prime Day products are already live in your current campaigns, use this to your advantage and research which keywords are currently performing well.
It is also important to note that on Prime Day users are known to be more deal driven in their searches. Amazon is a very product driven platform, meaning on the whole users tend to know exactly what they want when they search.
However, over the past few years Amazon has seen consumers’ searches on and around Prime Day shift to become more generic and deal driven as people browse for the best deals, rather than searching for a specific product.
4. Take a Multi-Channel Approach
Not all product discovery and research happens on Amazon. Your potential customers can be influenced by marketing efforts through other channels. It’s therefore important to take a multi-channel approach to Prime Day and leverage all digital platforms to enhance your Amazon sales.
For example, if your top Amazon deals aren’t available on your own website, consider sending traffic from your paid social ads through to Amazon during this period. Furthermore, running brand awareness campaigns across social channels ahead of Prime Day will work to build your brand and enhance your Prime Day results.
5. Review & Learn
After Prime Day it’s essential to look back and see what worked well for you and what perhaps didn’t go so well. How can you apply these learnings to enhance your standard campaigns and/or your campaigns for the next sale period? Black Friday, for instance.
If you want help optimising your Amazon campaigns ahead of Prime Day 2019, or just want to talk all things Amazon Advertising, get in touch with the SearchStar team today >>>
