The Prime Day is the most exciting sales event of the year for Amazon merchants next to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Last year more than 175 million items were sold at this event. A growth of 75% compared to previous year. Not surprising, because attractive instant offers increase customers' willingness to buy. On Prime Day 2019 approximately two billion US dollars in sales were made by small and medium-sized companies. Therefore it is especially worthwhile for sellers and vendors to invest some extra time to get ready for this event and to take full advantage of Prime Day to sell their products. This article will tell you what you need to consider during the preparation and delivers insights from the last Prime Days.
When does the Amazon Prime Day 2020 take place?
First things first: Due to the effects of the Corona pandemic, the Prime Day was postponed this year. There is still no final statement from Amazon on when it will take place exactly. Some sources say September and some October. At this point we cannot give you a date (we speculate in week 42 between the 12th and 18th of October), but we have good news for you: Although the exact date has not yet been fixed, you should start your preparations now, because it is certain that the Prime Day will take place this year.
How can merchants prepare for Amazon Prime Day?
Even before the actual Prime Day, you should address customers who are searching for your products. Increase your sales with offers and increase the number of buyers who do not yet know or have not bought your brand. On Prime Day, it is quite possible that the number of "new-to-brand shoppers" will increase by a factor of nine. Use remarketing afterwards to increase your conversions even more.
What should you do now?
Since your top-selling products will most likely also be the main sales drivers during the Prime Day, it is most important to focus on polishing your bestsellers first. Check out the titles, bullets, images, description and all other aspects of the product detail pages to ensure that your products are presented in the best possible way. Take your time and make them as appealing as possible. We recommend using the free Helium10 Chrome extension, which will evaluate your offer and assist you in this task.
If you are running special Prime Day promotions, don’t forget to stock up your inventory since you might be out of stock very fast and lose further sales. Have a look at the negative reviews and general questions on your account. Customers appreciate your help with their questions and will tolerate a negative review easier, if you give an explanation.
What PPC tactics can sellers use to optimise sales on Amazon Prime Day?
Prime Day promises a huge traffic boost, but you should already start advertising your brand and making offers two to three weeks in advance. On Prime Day itself, you should start with a portfolio that is optimally tailored to the Prime Day shoppers. The huge rush on Prime Day could lead to the fact that your campaign budget is spent earlier than expected. Therefore, you should increase your bids and budgets for Prime Day in advance. It would be more than frustrating if your sales were going really well and then suddenly your budget runs out because you forgot to increase it. Please do not be afraid to increase your bids. The bid increases will help you become more visible and increase your sales. If you have already sold and advertised on Prime Day 2019, look at your advertising data from that day and draw your conclusions for this year. In BidX you can access all your historical data since your registration.
You can optimize your PPC campaigns by reviewing your keywords and searching for missing keywords. Pay attention to poor performing keywords and set them to negative while adding them as positive with a very low bid.
If you take a look at the AMX500 index, you will notice that the CPC rises sharply on Prime Day and the ACoS is particularly low on Prime Day (July 15th). The low ACoS is mainly due to an increased shopping cart value, since many customers would like to purchase their expensive bluetooth headphones at a discount
What other promotion strategies can sellers use on Prime Day?
- Apply for Amazon Prime Deals (application period is over for this year)
- Coupons are a good way to generate a lot of attention. Since most of the shoppers are looking for good prices on Prime Day it might really help boost your sales even without a huge discount.
- Use Sponsored Brands to guide shoppers to your Brand Store
- Advertisers using Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Products in combination achieve a 30% higher impression share in their product category.
- If you use a store instead of a landing page, you can increase the dwell time by 520% and raise the ROAS by up to 23%.
How can sellers sustain the surge of sales after the event?
Quite remarkable is that the number of sales on Prime Day is on average 2.4 times higher than on other, regular sales days - in 2018 it was only 1.6 times high. When reviewing the figures for the past year, it is clear that the majority of sales will return to their origins after Prime Day.
Thus, it is not easy for sellers to maintain the buying mood. One way of securing this momentum is an after-prime day promotion with vouchers at Amazon, but also reactivating subscribers on social media with special offers is an excellent approach. This allows users who missed the Prime Day to be activated. For up to three weeks after the big "discount battle", additional sales can be generated with these tactics.
BidX is offering a special “Boost” function for the Prime Day. What does it do and how can sellers use it?
Last year BidX developed a new feature called Boost to temporarily push your ads. On activation it increases the keyword bids, ad group bids and budgets by a chosen percentage. When deactivating all values will get “restored”. You can individually select the campaign where you want to use it or you may use a bulk file to edit the Boost percentage for multiple campaigns and countries simultaneously. This is a perfect competitive advantage on sales events like Prime Day and Black Friday but also can be used while having lightning deals or launching new products. To learn everything about it, check our Boost-Tutorial.
Tip: Schedule your Boost!
About BidX
BidX offers an efficient SaaS solution for merchants on Amazon to automate and optimize PPC advertisements. The merchant uses his advertising budget more efficiently, increases profit and is relieved of a considerable amount of time. Relative advertising costs are reduced by up to 32% in the first 8 weeks alone. Numerous international merchants and agencies from 42 countries are relying on the solution, which has been set up globally from the beginning.
