Prime Day is July 16 – 17. That’s next week. If you don’t have a plan, why not use this as an opportunity to try something new? And if your team is ready, here are some pointers to make sure you make the most of this unofficial Ecomm holiday.
Now, you may be in the midst of an annual panic about how to position yourself for success. Prime Day is a great opportunity to test approaches that just might work, flex your creativity, and post a strong week in revenue. It can also serve as the catalyst for a strong start to the back half of your year if you’re willing to get ambitious.
Get Aggressive
This is a high-energy moment for consumers. And while they’re getting barraged by ads and deals, you’re going to have to push through the crowd and say, “Here I am.” This is how you do that.
Email/SMS: If you’re going to send promotional emails, send a lot. Warm your audience with a special discount or a free gift for the first 100 customers, then sell, sell, and sell some more. People are eager to hit buy, assuming that you’ve been doing the work in 2024 to grow your audience. Capitalize on this window of opportunity and send a high volume of emails, bonus points if you segment your message based on interest lists. If 6-8 emails over 48 hours sounds like a lot, it is. But that’s what it takes to maximize the short-term revenue boost that’s possible. Ensure your copy is tailored to the event to establish urgency and remind your list this isn’t a normal volume trend.
Paid Ads: Push retargeting ads with the majority of your spend. And with the rest, push your highest LTV products instead of hunting down bargain shoppers. Adjust your copy and landing pages to support the two-day sales initiative if you can. For your Amazon ads, increase your bids and budgets as much as possible to accommodate the excess traffic during this short burst of opportunity, and run a price drop on your top-selling SKUs. This will generate the best chance for return on the additional spend without having to invest heavily in Prime Day promotions.
“Limited Time Only” and “Limited Edition”: Create significance by offering customers a short window to get their hands on a new product, a specific product bundle, or a brand focused gift for free. This doesn’t fit everyone’s business model, inventory, or Amazon setup. But if it does, find something unique to push. New product rollouts are a great way to generate brand recognition and excitement among your core customer base that can get the word out for future customers. FOMO is a great marketing tool.
Warm Up: Leverage Your Existing Assets
The reality is ecommerce brands that reap the greatest reward from Prime Day started getting ready minutes after sales ended last year, and you can certainly start doing that on July 18. But right now, you have to focus on what’s about to happen.
Here’s what you can do immediately:
Email: Send email to your lists teasing the promotion. If you have a most engaged customer segment within your audience list, ensure that group is aware of the sale and heavily incentivized to buy. If your product engages in cross-selling and product warming, leverage this sale as a significant one-time opportunity.
Organic Social: Remember to use attribution links for your Amazon business if that’s your priority on Prime Day. If you’re focusing on direct sales, flex your creative muscle and tease your own two-day event on social media channels in a fun and brand-friendly way. Don’t forget, you’re making up the rules here, so if you want to push the boundaries of Prime Day, you can. Do whatever makes the most sense for your customer’s journey.
Leverage Creative and Creators: This is a tall task considering the tight turnaround, but if your creative team or agency is capable of leveraging multi-channel content to support both audience warming and promotions, get ambitious as hell. Your influencer roster and any video assets on YouTube or TikTok might be particularly effective to leverage the increased traffic of younger shoppers checking product reviews prior to the big day.
Accept a Participation Trophy
If you don’t have a Prime Day plan — or any major online shopping event — don’t just sit on the bench. For most Amazon brands, simply increasing your bid and budget caps or temporarily dropping the price on a SKU can lift sales. An increase in traffic from high-intent users is an opportunity to build your brand and hammer in your differentiators. And if you only see a bump in traffic, that’s reason enough to celebrate because you can always catch them later via remarketing ads.
Use Prime Day as a Launch Pad for Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BF/CM)
The right time to start prepping for BF/CM was a year ago, but with the right plan you can still land the plane. Focus now on content, creative, pricing strategies, testing new platforms, experimenting with video. Build relationships with high LTV customers now so you’re not just fishing for bargain hunters on the day of. Because the worst thing to happen is you lose money. The danger to avoid? Setting the expectation that folks can wait to buy your products with the lowest margin.
We have a busy week ahead of us. Here at Logical, we’re those people who started getting ready for 2024 ecommerce holidays about five minutes after the sales stopped last year. And if you’d like to work with us to start prepping for next year, give us a shout. We’d love to talk about your Ecomm strategy.
