It’s the most wonderful time of the year (again)! We’re not talking about Christmas in October. We’re talking about Prime Day! That’s right, there is a second Amazon Prime Day this year. The first occurred in the summer, and this new Prime Day is next week, October 11-12, 2022.
Prime Day usually only happens once annually, but because there’s been such a push for eCommerce businesses to get ahead of the holiday shopping rush, it makes sense that Amazon would want to do the same. In fact, they’re referring to this Prime Day as the Prime Early Access Sale. We work with many Amazon businesses and, because of that, we wanted to share our best tips for preparing for Prime Day. Let’s jump right in!
Why participate in Prime Day?
Amazon Prime is one of the largest eCommerce membership programs in the world, with over 200 million global users. If you have an Amazon business, participating in Prime Day can lead to an exponential increase in sales. That being said, the economic landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years. Consumers are searching for deals now more than ever, and are waiting until they find those deals to purchase. With that in mind, it’s important to capitalize on events like Prime Day to make the most out of offering your products at a discount.
How to prepare for Prime Day
As we said before, participating in Prime Day can lead to a huge surge in sales, but there is prep work that needs to be done beforehand.
Advertising
Here’s the honest truth: it’s harder than ever to get noticed in eCommerce. The market is saturated and competition is at an all-time high. In order to differentiate your brand from your competitors, you first have to be found. It’s no longer realistic to rely on completely organic growth. But don’t worry, there is a solution to this challenge: advertising. To be found and grow your revenue more quickly, you need advertising.
We’ve seen amazing growth and sales for our clients who implement Amazon advertising in combination with participation in Prime Day, but there are a few important things to keep in mind.
- Plan more ad spend for day one. During the first Prime Day of 2022, we saw that many brands spent more on advertising for day two, thinking that consumers would be buying more that day when the opposite turned out to be true. According to our own data, brands actually saw more revenue come in on the first day than they did on the second day. Day two was a more efficient use of ad spend and resulted in more revenue for our clients.
- Expect that your CPC (cost per click) will be higher for a while. Many brands who participated in Prime Day expected that their CPC would decrease as soon as Prime Day ended, but we found that wasn’t the case. In our experience, it took about one month before CPC began to decrease significantly.
It’s important to note that, though we mentioned that CPC will be higher post-Prime Day, the best way to counteract this is to run ads along with deals. In our experience, running ads along with deals will likely reduce your CPC and increase your sales and ROI.
Promotions
There is a specific window for submitting official Prime Day deals to Amazon and it has passed, but that doesn’t mean that your brand can’t benefit from Prime Day. If you’re unable to run an official Prime Day deal, you can still run a promotion on those two days. You do have to create your coupons in advance, but there’s still time for submission.
The benefit of creating a coupon is that Amazon will automatically merchandise your coupon. You can create coupons for a single product or a set of products, and your coupons are discoverable from the coupons page, search results, product detail pages, the All-Offers Display page, and in customers’ carts.
If you’re creating a coupon today for Prime Day next week, you’ll need to do some marketing to make sure your customers know you’re running a promotion. There are a couple of quick ways to do this:
- Social Media Marketing. Create posts on all of your brand’s social platforms that let your followers know what the discount is and how they can use it. If you utilize influencer marketing, this is a great time to get your influencers involved to promote your discount.
- Email Marketing. Consumers are already looking for deals for the upcoming holiday season, so it won’t be out of the norm for you to send an email highlighting your discount. Send out an email now, after you’ve created your coupon, and then send one again the day before Prime Day to remind your customers about your promotion.
There’s a lot of preparation involved in Prime Day, and it can seem like a daunting task, but the team here at Blue Wheel is here to help.
Did you know?
We are an advanced Amazon Advertising partner and have access to the full suite of Amazon tools and DSP. We also have a proprietary search term isolation tool called Companion that we use for our clients.
If you’re considering Amazon advertising but aren’t sure where to begin, the team at Blue Wheel would be happy to help!
Simply fill out the form below and we’ll get in touch to discuss your Amazon goals.
