In 2023, Prime Day sales reached an impressive $12.9 billion, surpassing previous years and setting new records​ (US About Amazon)​​ (Feedvisor)​. If you manage a brand or business of any size, leveraging the world’s largest marketplace and preparing for Amazon Prime Day is crucial.

The best-selling categories during Prime Day 2023 included home goods, beauty, and consumer electronics. It’s clear that consumer-packaged goods fare best for the two-day event, but any brand can capitalize on the opportunity if its store is optimized and prepared.

Why Brands Should Care So Much About Prime Day

Obviously, a successful Prime Day sale equates to more revenue. However, there’s an even bigger reason to invest in this big sales event called the flywheel effect.

The sales velocity that you gain during Prime Day can stick with you for days and weeks to come. This can improve your organic ranking for your keywords, which in turn can increase your sales, resulting in better keyword ranking and so on, creating a positive cycle to grow your sales.

The secret to your Cyber Week strategy may very well be the halo effect coming out of this July Prime Day.

Top 3 Areas of Focus for Prime Day

1. Inventory Management: Ensuring that you have well-stocked inventory is crucial to avoid stockouts during peak sales periods. This involves meticulous planning and forecasting to meet the heightened demand.
2. Competitive Pricing and Promotions: Implementing competitive pricing strategies and exclusive promotions for Prime Day is essential to attract and convert customers. This includes utilizing Prime-exclusive deals and discounts to stand out.
3. Marketing and Advertising: Leveraging robust marketing strategies, including both on-Amazon and off-Amazon advertising, is vital. This involves setting a sufficient ad budget, anticipating higher ACOS, and using social media and affiliate channels to drive traffic and boost sales.

Your Checklist to Get Ready for Prime Day

If you already have a successful Amazon store running, and you’re just trying to make sure you’re ready to make the most of Prime Day, this is your definitive to-do list:

• Run Prime Day Discounts: You need exclusive promos or coupons to gain traction. Your sales should be at least 20-40% to keep up with the competition.
• Synchronize Your Amazon Strategy: Don’t rely on Amazon’s promotion methods to get the word out about your sale. Your social media, paid search, influencer, and email marketing should all support your Prime Day offerings.
• Allocate Budget: Expect to use at least 50% of your normal monthly budget on Prime Day promotion.
• Take Advantage of Lightning Deals: Prime Day should already be full of exclusive sales, but you can create more hype around a specific item or offering by promoting a limited number available at that price or a specific time window for customers to take advantage.
• Add Extra Inventory: Prime Day may sound like a great opportunity to finish off your inventory, but an “Out of Stock” banner isn’t a great way to build customer loyalty. For special inventory funding, we recommend our partner Kickfurhter.
• Move Your Best Deals to the Top: Prime Day is about drinking from a fire hydrant. People want to be inundated with savings and throw everything in their carts in a frenzy. Don’t make people dig around to find the sales you’re most excited about.
• Use Shoppable Banner Modules: These allow brands to tag a specific product with an interactive touchpoint that leads the shopper directly to that specific product listing page.
• Update Lifestyle Images: If your shop uses lifestyle images, make sure they align with the demographics you’re advertising to right now. The demographics where you see the lowest CPA should see themselves reflected on your Amazon listings for effective marketing that builds customer trust and a sense of customer community.
• Educate New Visitors: Find creative ways to quickly educate first-time visitors about your product and its benefits. Keep your messaging succinct, use infographics to create compelling and informative visuals, and use imagery that illustrates your message. Your Amazon store should be as friendly to first-time visitors as long-time brand ambassadors.
• Check Image Resolutions: Each store on Amazon’s site should look as professional as Amazon itself. Keep in mind, most users don’t even realize there’s a distinction in their shopping. If something as basic as image resolution isn’t up to snuff, it will feel scammy to shoppers, and they’ll leave your store entirely for a competitor.
• Write SEO-Friendly Copy: Use an SEO checker to ensure your storefront copy will attract organic traffic. Look at the search queries that have already brought visitors to your pages and reiterate those queries in your page headers and paragraphs.
• Check Active SKUs: If you have a big store, this can be a tall order, but you need to run through every SKU listed on your Amazon storefront. Ensure none are missing and ensure no expired listings are still showing up.

If your Amazon presence is, perhaps, a bit lacking, there may be bigger things you need to address. These items will likely take longer.

• Check Your Product Listing SEO: Plenty of SEO opportunities can be improved on short notice, but every single product listing and page should be optimized for SEO, down to the nuance within a product description. If this isn’t something that’s always been top-of-mind during the development of your store, then going back to make these edits can be a big project.
• Write A+ Content: Every product description should be easy to read, written in appropriate head structures, with informative Q&As and FAQs, all without compromising your brand voice and tone. Again, if this isn’t something your developers have always been aware of, it can become a massive undertaking. Make the improvements you can before Prime Day, and continue to look for opportunities for improvement.

For both items, it may be best to bring in a professional to help audit and optimize your site. The experts at Hawke Media specialize in one digital marketing service at a time, so our Amazon Services team aren’t distracted by competing priorities. They’re on the Amazon platform all day, every day with brands like yours, so they know how to make the most of your Amazon store.

Challenges and Advice for Prime Day

Major Challenges: Recent challenges have included navigating increased seller fees such as inventory placement and low inventory level fees, which have impacted overall costs​ (Feedvisor)​. Additionally, increased competition has driven up advertising costs, making it more expensive to maintain visibility. Another major challenge is the inability to make last-minute updates during the Prime Day window, which can lead to potential deactivations of listings. Furthermore, compliance-related shutdowns have been a significant issue, necessitating a more proactive approach to ensure compliance with Amazon’s policies.

Overlooked Advice: Consistently overlooked advice includes the importance of utilizing social media and off-Amazon advertising to drive additional traffic to Prime Day deals. Many fail to recognize the impact of external traffic on Amazon sales. Additionally, understanding the value of strategic discounting—especially for items with thin margins—as a way to build sales history and improve future profitability is often ignored. Another overlooked aspect is setting bids, rules, and automations with proper thresholds for events like Prime Day, and maintaining a calm approach when ACOS spikes, remembering that attribution is delayed and high-converting assets should be allowed to perform within set budgets​ (US About Amazon)​​ (Feedvisor)​.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Preparing your Amazon store for Prime Day is an opportunity to amplify your visibility and boost your sales. With this checklist, you can maximize your reach and appeal to a broad spectrum of new and returning customers.

Remember, Prime Day isn’t just about the sales you make on the day itself; it’s about attracting new leads, making an impression, and turning them into loyal patrons through the holiday season and beyond. As you prepare for this significant event, stay focused on delivering value to your customers in every interaction. After all, Prime Day comes once a year, but a satisfied customer is the gift that keeps on giving. Here’s to a successful Prime Day that primes your business for long-term success!