Key Takeaways:
- Offering compelling deals and price discounts is the most powerful conversion tool during Prime Day.
- Prime Day should be viewed as an investment in your brand, impacting metrics like Best Seller Rank (BSR) and organic search relevance.
- Participating in Prime Day can lead to long-lasting effects, elevating your brand's visibility and sales performance throughout the year.
- Leverage Amazon's search dominance to build brand awareness and get in front of customers who spend the day browsing.
- Even if your brand won't be the top performer, participating in Prime Day is worth it for exposure and product discoverability.
- Build your Prime Day strategy based on desired outcomes and strike a balance between optimizing for discoverability and conversion.
Prime Day is just around the corner, and brands selling on Amazon are eagerly waiting to see if the months of planning will pay off. To help brands build a successful Prime Day strategy, we spoke to Chad Zottoli (Senior Director of Amazon Marketplace) and Keeleigh Marr (Amazon Channel Manager) to gather key takeaways that brands can use to inform their next Prime Day strategy and maximize their sales potential.
1. Get Aggressive
With economic pressures driving consumer behavior towards even more cost-conscious spending, offering compelling deals and price discounts is crucial. Brands should be as aggressive as possible on pricing if conversion is the central Prime Day goal.
Keeleigh Marr: “If brands want to really drive Prime Day sales, they need to think about the best offers they can provide to customers. Prime Day is the day to double down on a “deal heavy” strategy. The bottom line is customers are looking at deal days as the opportunity to make their dollar go a little bit further, so your conversion factor during Prime Day is often directly correlated with how aggressive your discounts are.”
2. Invest in Prime Day to See a Return the Rest of the Year
While the short-term goal of Prime Day is to generate sales and revenue, our channel experts emphasize that it should also be viewed as an investment in your brand. The two-day sales lift is just the beginning. By participating in Prime Day, you can positively impact metrics like Best Seller Rank (BSR) and organic search relevance. Staying competitive during this high-traffic event can have long-lasting effects, elevating your brand's visibility and sales performance throughout the year.
Keeleigh M.: “We saw a great example of the power of investing in Prime Day with a brand that offered a 50% discount. Despite the initial discomfort, this brand saw a significant jump in their category ranking on Amazon, going from #337 to #1 within 48 hours. The long-term payoff from their investment on Prime Day far exceeded their expectations.
It's an opportunity to almost jump the line and then continue that momentum. It's your chance to reset the level of where you stand on organic search rank and BSR.”
Smart brands use Prime Day as a catalyst for better rankings from elevated traffic, then continue the work on average traffic days to maintain momentum.
Chad Zottoli: “Amazon search is based on relevance. It's based on traffic and number of clicks, just like Google. So, the more relevant you are, the higher you're going to rank in search for X-period of time. If brands invest in [Prime Days], and they shoot up rankings, as long as they continue fueling that fire, they're going to see their rate continue to remain high."
3. Leverage Amazon's Search Dominance to Build Your Brand Awareness
Amazon's Search has surpassed Google as the number one search platform for products.
Understanding this, brands should think of Prime Day as an awareness opportunity just as much as a revenue opportunity. By participating in Prime Day programing, you have the chance to get in front of customers who spend the day browsing.
It is easy to get into an “all-or-nothing” mindset during sales days. It can be discouraging if your brand is not in competition for the number one spot via price reduction or ad spend. Even if your brand won’t be the all-star, just playing the game is worth it for the exposure.
Chad Z.: “If a customer is searching for a particular product, statistically they're going on Amazon first and then the rest of the internet. And that is on a normal day. On Prime Day, this dynamic gets turned up. So having a strong presence on the number one product search engine (Amazon) on the days people are doing the highest amount of product searching (Prime Days), it's easy to see the value there for product discoverability.”
4. Build Your Strategy Based on Desired Outcomes
Building a winning strategy requires a case-by-case approach. It's not simply a matter of cranking up advertising spend to the ceiling or lowering product prices to the absolute basement. Brands must carefully evaluate their specific goals and circumstances. Investing in advertising can improve discoverability, while pricing strategies may influence conversion rates. The key lies in identifying specific goals for brands or individual products, then working backwards from those goals to strike a good balance between optimizing for discoverability vs conversion.
Keeleigh M.: “Brands looking to track the metric with the largest long-term impact, Best Seller Rank (and its improvement) will tell you just where you stack up to the competition.
If a brand is looking to increase sales dramatically during the event, metrics such as redemption rate, conversion, and GMV will be the most telling of performance. Based on our historical performance, if you choose to run a promotion during Prime Days, 20-25% off is a really large sweet spot.”
Example:
On average we see:
Prime Day at Spreetail
Spreetail’s Amazon Marketplace Team acts like a coach to our Brand Partners on leading up to, and on Prime Day. Brands often have a loose idea of what a good Prime Day looks like for them but need help correctly pulling all the right levers to achieve a clear desired outcome.
Keeleigh: "If your goal is to just have a wild time for two days, we can tell you how to get there. If you are more interested in discoverability of your new item/product launch, or long-term improvement of your BSR, we can help get you there too."
If you are interested in partnering with Spreetail to help build your Prime Day Strategy, get started by talking to our buyers.
B2B Creative Marketing Manager
