It is well known as a fact that repeated sales are the core of every successful ecommerce business model. Amazon marketplace also knows this really well, which is why they developed the Prime program. Back in 2015, on their 20th birthday, they decided to start the Prime day and promised their customers that they will have more deals than they do on Black Friday. Year after year, each Prime day became more and more successful, ending with results such as 771 sold items per second. That’s a lot of sales. Now, everyone wants a piece of that cake and you need a strategy to stand out from the competition.

Having a Prime Membership on Amazon will really help you gain a thorough understanding of the Prime member’s mindset. There are a couple of big advantages given to Prime members: free same-day delivery on more than 1 million items, Prime rewards percentages off (for example Wholefoods discounts for Prime members), instant access to video streaming, music streaming, unlimited photo storage, access to the Kindle owners lending library, early access to lightning deals, membership sharing and more.To make sure you’re completely ready for the 2019 Prime Day, here are 10 tips we received from Amazon’s employees about how to prepare for the big day.

1. DOUBLE CHECK YOUR PRODUCT LISTINGS

Recently Amazon announced that ASINs that violate new Amazon title guidelines will be suppressed from search. The new rules you have to stick to are: having your first 50 characters identical as your product label, and making the product titles shorter than 200 characters in general. Getting listings suppressed will start on July 22nd so you should definitely look into that before that day and specially before the Prime day.

Additionally as part of general product listing optimization, make sure that your product listings have all the necessary elements: product title should have relevant keywords in them (no caps, no exclamation marks, or unreadable signs), main image of the product on a white background, 2 – 5 alternative images to highlight product features, lifestyle use and similar uses. Make sure that your bullet points are under 120 characters each; outlining customer benefits of using your product. You also have 500 characters to write a good quality product description so make sure to use the most out of it. Add the targeted keywords to your “generic keywords” field.

2. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE ENOUGH INVENTORY

Hopefully, you’ve planned your sales for July and you have all your products well in stock. Amazon will always give a better rank to the seller that has more inventory to sell; because more inventory means the higher probability for sales velocity. This is one factor that doesn’t count performance; in other words – the amount of inventory is 100% under your control so make sure to replenish your stock before Prime Day to ensure higher ranking.

3. LEVERAGE THE PRIME DAY TRAFFIC TO GENERATE BRAND AWARENESS

If you’re a brand owner enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry program, make sure that your storefront and EBC content reflect your brand in the best possible light, before Prime Day. On Prime Day, it is expected that visitors will spend much, much more time on Amazon, and you should develop a strategy to use this opportunity to drive them to your storefront and generate brand awareness for new-to-brand visitors. One of the strategies we use for our clients consists of a couple of combined elements: first, we make sure that the brand look and feel is very consistent to the one they have on their ecommerce website.

Then we improve their EBCs to reflect the product features on an ASIN level. We agree around individual discounts that will be approved on Prime Day for each ASIN, and then make sure we show it on the storefront as one of the drivers of initial sales. Once we have all of that in place, we optimize the Sponsored Brand ads to target relevant category keywords in order to show our ad in front of users who never interacted with the brand before. Once they click on our ad; we incentivize them with discounts to make a purchase. Each new-to-brand purchase will be followed by a strategy to generate reviews and repeated sales.

4. STAY COMPETITIVE DURING PEAK BY CONSISTENTLY INCREASING YOUR BIDS

Many sellers will fight for the same customer attention you are fighting for. Make sure that you are on top of this situation by consistently raising your bids during the Prime Day, to stay in the first results of the search results page. Additionally, a best practice recommended by Amazon is that you increase your daily campaign budgets by 200% during Prime Day.

After the peak passed, you can always bring your budgets back to normal.

5. USE PACKAGING INSERTS TO NURTURE NEW-TO-BRAND CUSTOMERS

Prime day is a great opportunity for you to generate reviews from new and existing customers. You can implement packaging inserts as part of your branding strategy, to improve customer experience and endorse their willingness to leave a review. What is a packaging insert? It could be anything that is complementary to your product that adds additional value and invites your customers to action. It is very, very important you do this right and avoid any methods that could be interpreted as trying to divert sales away from Amazon.

So, here are a couple of useful examples of how you can use packaging inserts to build a stronger connection with your customers while respecting Amazon’s rules. You can add a free short book outlining how to use your products (i.e. adding a short recipe book along with a spiralizer product), providing a warranty as an extra value to your product, adding small cards with short messages asking politely for their feedback. Each of these packaging inserts should be followed by automated email review. That way you are consistently present in their lives: offline and online and you’re more likely to generate a review.

6. LIGHTNING DEALS, COUPONS AND DEALS OF THE DAY

Usually, signing up for lightning deals required a thorough plan long-before the actual Prime day. If you missed this opportunity for any reason, there are alternative options you can use. If you don’t have a lightning deal on some of your products, one of the greatest hacks you can use to boost your product’s visibility is to add coupons to it.

Utilizing coupons with your products enables you visibility on Amazon on Amazon’s Coupons home page, in their search results page, product pages, on the shopping cart, Offer Listings page, in your storefront, and in your Sponsored Products ads. That is quite some coverage with an interesting unique-selling proposition. Just make sure that the perceived value of the discount is interesting enough to drive their attention away from lightning deals.

Additionally, as a Vendor, you can use the “deal of the day” option to make your product more prominent on the search results page.

AFTER PRIME DAY

Congratulations! You’ve taken the necessary steps and made most out of the Prime day for your products. If some parts of your plan didn’t exactly turn out how you wanted them to be – accept them, learn your lessons from them and move on. Amazon’s internal sources say that customers stay engaged and ready to continue shopping even after Prime day ends. From their sources, the shoppers generated higher category search volume 14 days after the Prime day, versus the 14 days before.

That information is interesting and tells you to keep advertising at an increased budget for at least two more weeks after the Prime day. Advertise continuously to stay discoverable to the new customer base you’ve built during the Prime day – and focus on applying your newly learned lessons to the next big dates in the year: Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas.

Feel like you need help? Ask for your free consultation with one of our experts today.

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