Our Amazon Channel Lead, Umair Khan, delivers some tips for brands selling on Amazon
2019 saw Amazon announce its best ever Prime Day, reportedly selling 175m items and sales surpassing Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. Some advertisers on the platform increased investment by x3.8 and were rewarded with x5.8 the revenue.
Umair has created a checklist to prep for future Amazon sales events.
Content that converts
Reviews: A good review score (4+) is crucial to achieving conversion on the day. To prepare, look at negative feedback and reply to customer concerns promptly. Ask Amazon to remove (removal request) feedback that does not relate to the product e.g. reviews mentioning delivery problems.
Product detail pages: Make sure product pages are best in class (i.e. optimised images, descriptions using associated keywords) and leverage the value of A+ content. Address issues arising from customer reviews through product descriptions so everyone can make an informed purchase.
Demand vs supply (inventory management)
Prime Day can increase category sales by as much as 60%. When planning inventory levels, look at last year sales and advertising spend and align this year’s stock levels to an expected increase in generic sales. A good rule of thumb is to ensure that the maximum inventory you have can be sold in 12 weeks (to avoid returns and reduce storage fees).
Variants & Prime Day offers
Creating variants and specific Prime Day offers ensures your offer stands out and you don’t reduce the ASP (Amazon Selling Price) of existing products.
Prime Day promotions
These need to be submitted in advance (May). Start preparing from January and address content/reviews and products you’ll be submitting for promotions ahead of time. The discount on Prime Day needs to be 15-20% lower than the lowest offer made in the last 30 days and at least 20-30% discount from RRP. The best promotions observed this year surpassed this threshold offering up to 40-60% discounts. The same is true for all events on Amazon’s calendar.
Know your deals
There are lots of deals available to tap into for a limited period. An excellent way to achieve extra revenue push on the day.
Spotlight deals: Available to Prime customers until Amazon runs out of stock (a great deal mechanism to protect average margin during promotional periods).
Lightning deals: These improve product ranking and overall seller ranking. By introducing a deal for a limited time, you increase traffic to SKUs which in turn improve generic ranking/relevance for keywords/category.
Deal of the day: Only available on Vendor Central. Although not directly part of Prime Day, this is an alternative to LD’s (lightning deals) and SD’s (spotlight deals) and generates increased in traffic on Prime Day.
AMS targeted SP (sponsored products) & SB (sponsored brand) campaigns
Search ads generate three quarters of all sales on the platform so increasing Prime Day spend makes sense. Manufacturers, beware, keep an eye on ACOS (advertising cost of sales) and ROAS (return on advertising spend) when making decisions on spend. A good starting point is to align AMS strategy to predicted sales and increase spend should you surpass sales expectation.
Monitor budgets. Active campaign monitoring pays dividends when it comes to avoiding keywords heavily targeted by competitors.
Make use of dynamic bidding to maximise impressions on your products. Dynamic bidding is designed to ensure bids are never too high or never too low, so ensuring that the bid price meets your return on advertising spend (ROAS) requirements is essential to a healthy margin on Prime Day.
Social media (off-site campaigns). Use social media accounts and influencers to further drive traffic to your products. Always use affiliate links when targeting offsite traffic to monitor impact.
My advice: Learn all you can from Prime Day 2019 to prepare not just for next year, but also for Amazon’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday coming up this November.
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