7 Tips for a Successful Amazon Prime Day
Next week (July 15-16) sees the return of Amazon Prime Day, which last year proved to be the biggest shopping event in history with more than 100 million items purchased worldwide. With Amazon Prime membership continuing to see double-digit growth, Amazon.com expects to sell even more products this year on Prime Day.
The event is a huge opportunity for any companies currently selling on Amazon. Traffic to Amazon increases exponentially over the two days, with Amazon Prime and regular consumers alike all searching for great deals. As a seller, how can you make the most out of Amazon Prime Day? Here are seven tips:
1. Check that your listing title includes a generic product description.
Prime Day customers are experienced shoppers and know that not all the products they want will be in Prime Day Deals. Customers often fill up their shopping carts with a variety of deal and nondeal items throughout the event.
With this in mind, making sure your product is as visible as possible in searches needs to be your first priority. Make sure you include a generic product description of what your product is within the title. Even if people haven’t heard of your brand, they will know what type of product they're looking for!
2. Use the bullet points to sell.
The five bullet points are arguably the most important feature of an Amazon listing. Make the most of them by telling consumers the benefits they’ll get from the key attributes of the product.
And remember, simply listing product features isn't enough. You need to sell the product. This is why Amazon places the customer buy-box next to the bullet points. More often than not, it’s the bullet points that close the deal.
3. Participate in Amazon Prime Day Lightning Deals.
The overall idea behind Amazon Prime Day is to offer Prime customers hundreds of exclusive discounts on popular, quality products. To be able to do so, your product(s) need to have a certain number of positive reviews and a three-star rating or higher. You must also reduce the price of the item by at least 40 percent.
If you meet the criteria, you can then choose the quantity of stock you want to sell and submit the deal in advance of Prime Day to Amazon, which then reviews the deal and decides when to schedule it during the sales event.
4. Increase keyword bid strategy throughout the Prime Day promotion.
If you already use Amazon’s display and brand keyword advertising tools in seller central, make sure you allocate extra budget for the two-day duration to ensure your products are promoted above organic search results.
You’ll reap the benefits of a low advertising cost of sale (ACOS) as consumer intentions will be to buy, not browse, during Prime Day.
5. Use Amazon money-off coupons to attract Prime and non-Prime customers.
Regular Amazon and Prime Day customers use the wish list to keep track of products they’ll be looking to buy at discount during Prime Day. As an alternative to Prime Day deals, sellers can make their products more attractive during the sale by adding a money-off coupon to the listing. A glance at the wish list will display the discount on offer to the shopper.
Couponed listings also stand out in search rankings, making them a great way for non-Prime Day customers to purchase discounted products. As a seller, you're in control of offering a percentage discount or a flat $5, $10, $15, etc., off the list price, making this a very useful sales strategy.
6. Utilize Enhanced Brand Content to improve the buyer experience.
Registering your brand with Amazon unlocks a range of Amazon Marketing Service tools. One of these is the ability to publish your own customized content in your listing.
If you’ve ever scrolled down an Amazon listing and seen polished, detailed, aspirational imagery of a product, you’re looking at Enhanced Brand Content. Expanded marketing reinforces the content outlined in the bullet points further up on your listing. You can build and publish your own content in Amazon seller central.
7. Use online channels to drive sales.
Amazon’s massive marketing campaign for Prime Day has a ripple effect that stimulates online shopping in general. For the first time this year, eBay is running hugely discounted deals during Amazon Prime Day.
Other online retailers are joining in too, so make sure you don’t miss out by driving demand to Amazon and eBay during the promotions using your social media channels. Alternatively, if you sell directly to consumers, prepare and get promoting your own online sales event during Amazon Prime Day.
Michael Bull is head of digital marketing at brookscomm, a digital marketing agency.
