The Countdown to Amazon Prime Day is On

Amazon Prime Day 2021 is nearly upon us with recently announced dates of June 21 and 22 for the annual shopping holiday. Now in its seventh year, Amazon Prime Day revenue continues to grow aggressively year-over-year, up 43 percent in 2020.

Prime Day can have a halo effect on a brand, increasing sales for specific products and others around it, creating a ripple effect that can last for 30 days or more following the event. You’ll want to take advantage of this unique opportunity for your brand to drive traffic to its Amazon listings for increase brand awareness and conversion.

By now, you’ve probably planned out your inventory, decided on your deals and locked down your coupons. You’re in the homestretch and just need to take care of the finishing touches that will help you have a successful Prime Day. This primer provides specific best practices for what brands can do to maximize the impact of Prime Day. The official countdown clock has begun, starting with T-minus 15.

Two Weeks Before Prime Day

Increase your marketing budget.

An important Share of Search consideration is that brand competition on Amazon will be fierce in the 15 days leading up to Prime Day. This is the reason why we recommend that brands increase their budgets to keep up with their competition.

While you can’t just flip a switch and improve your organic relevance, you can flip a switch by spending more money to drive your sponsored ads. Plan to double your budget in the 15 days leading up to Prime Day, or as much as your budget can support. This will result in increasing your monthly spend by about 25 percent.

To help guide your advertising decisions, you’ll also want to prioritize and understand where you’re winning organically. For example, if you’re already in first position on the Amazon Search page, you don’t need to waste your money by paying for a Sponsored Ad. You can instead allocate a portion of your budget to an area where you could use an extra boost.

Optimize your Amazon details page.

Think of your Amazon landing page the same way you would think about the landing page on your company website. Your Amazon landing page is the final impression you’re making on your customers so be sure it’s compelling. Take steps to ensure that your content is as engaging as possible. Create a natural journey for your customers by telling your brand story, helping them learn about the product and the benefit it offers. Highlight the features that make your product unique and stand-out against the competition. Also, be sure to focus on integrating keywords into your page in an organic-sounding way. Lastly, don’t forget to use hidden keywords for relevance against your competitors and keywords you weren’t able to organically insert into your detail page copy.­­­

The most engaged marketing placement on Amazon is the “Hero Quick Promo” - the image that appears on the Details Page, directly below your bullet points. Brands can make the most of this space by targeting competitors. If your competitors are bidding on keywords for which both their product and yours provides a solution, you may want to consider advertising against those keywords as well. Focus on the factors that differentiate you from your competitors and the unique value proposition that your brand can offer.

Two Days to Three Days Before Prime Day

Connect with customers outside of Amazon.

A few days before Prime Day, connect with your passionate followers through your owned and earned channels (e.g., websites, social media and email newsletters). Let your audience know what Prime Day Deals you will be offering to generate excitement. Remember to give them a clear call to action to purchase quickly once the deal goes live. Use this as an opportunity to let customers know that your Prime Day deal is coming and prompt them to add your product to their wish list. Customers get notifications when their wish list items go on sale. By encouraging them to add the deal to their wish list ahead of time, they’ll be “primed” to buy and get a reminder when Prime Day arrives. Alternately, you can encourage them to add the items to their shopping carts so that they’re ready to take advantage of a Prime Day “Lightning Deal” as soon as it goes live.

Use retargeting.

A few days before Prime Day, take advantage of the opportunity to target potential customers who browsed your items in the past but didn’t buy them. Use FOMO to your advantage with the “browsed but didn’t buy” group by letting them know about your limited-time Amazon Prime Day deals.

Test Amazon Posts.

Think of Amazon Posts as Amazon’s version of Pinterest – with the added bonus of making it easy to buy your products. Posts are a great way to highlight inspirational content that aligns with your brand narrative. You can re-purpose your existing social content to create content for Amazon posts.

The optimal timing for Amazon posts is one or two days before. You’ll want to avoid doing your Amazon Posts too soon (for example, two weeks before Prime Day) since people may forget by the time Prime Day rolls around.

On Prime Day

Be present on Amazon Live.

Think of Amazon Live as Amazon’s answer to QVC. It gives you an opportunity to demo your products in real time. Amazon Live can be a great way to engage with your customers and provide informative content. You can interact with potential customers directly through the chat box.

You can conduct product demos in Amazon Live to offer solutions to your customers and highlight your differentiating features. Ideally, you want your brand’s solution to resonate with your customers and make them think “Yes, I have that problem!” and get excited about the solution you can offer them.

It’s a good idea to have two people on your Amazon Live - one person to present the products and one person to moderate the chat feature so that you can quickly respond to questions in real-time and offer a seamless experience. Brands can also use an Influencer relationship for Amazon Live to generate excitement and make it easy for viewers to buy since the “Add to Cart” feature is right there.

Be sure to take advantage of the opportunity to highlight multiple products in the Product Carousel. If you’re just featuring one product, you can load photos of accessories that customers can buy alongside the product to drive opportunities for cross-selling.

After Prime Day

Analyze your success to prepare for Black Friday through Cyber Monday.

Analyze your promotions and advertising strategy to learn and adjust for future events.

Adjust your advertising.

After Prime Day, you’ll probably want to shift back to your normal levels of advertising but with an adjusted focus. You may want to take advantage of cross-selling opportunities by offering Vendor Powered coupons for accessories. After Prime Day, you can also consider shifting your focus to retargeting potential customers who fell into the “browsed but not bought” group.

Analyze your competition.

In addition to analyzing your own Prime Day promotions, take time to analyze your competition. Look at what they did right and how you can learn from their successes so that you can use those successes to inform your strategy for next year’s promotion.

Plan for Q4.

Lastly, use this opportunity to look ahead to Q4 to see what’s on the horizon and figure out ways to incorporate what you’ve learned from your Prime Day promotions to create a profitable Q4.

Amazon Prime Day can have benefits that last far beyond Prime Day. Don’t miss out on your golden opportunity to not only sell products on Prime Day but to create brand awareness and create lingering effects that will increase your brand’s sales for up to a month following the event.

Jamaal Hackett-Cook is director of partner success at Ideoclick, a company that makes e-commerce work for your brand with cutting-edge technologies, expert e-commerce services, and visionary leadership.