Why Amazon Prime Day 2021 is Going to be Exceptional?
- What Are Some Good Seller Goals for Prime Day?
- What Should I Expect from Prime Day?
- Seller Tips for Being Prepared on Prime Day
- Strategies You Need To Know for Prime Day 2021
- Wrap Up
When is Prime Day 2021?
DataHawk Research
Much of this comes from the increased popularity of Prime Day due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Online shopping has grown significantly since that time as people have become more reliant on it while they stay at home.
Whenever the date is, Amazon typically makes an announcement several weeks ahead of schedule. Keep an eye on your notifications through DataHawk’s News Round-Up to be ready for those announcements. Until that time, you should prepare as though this event will be starting in the middle of June.
What Are Some Good Seller Goals for Prime Day?
Amazon Prime Day is primarily for more people to utilize their Prime service. Given the deep discounts are exclusive to Prime members, Amazon encourages you to create deals with Prime exclusivity.
Reasonable goals for Prime Day 2021 should include the following:
- I want to earn X money
- I want to make X sales
- I want to get X profit
- I want to improve my brand’s sales rank by X slots
Remember that your goals need to measurable, attainable, and based on specific measurements. Otherwise, goals for any organization are virtually worthless.
What Should I Expect from Prime Day?
When creating goals for Amazon Prime Day, build them around the average number of sales and quantity you expect. There is a 200% increase in sales on Prime Day, with those sales continuing to be vital for the following two days:
DataHawk Research
This chart is essential because if you plan on meeting Prime Day’s average boost, you should ideally increase your inventory levels to three times your average to meet the demand. Amazon also agrees with this, telling you that they account for the fluctuation in storage during seasonal spikes.
You also might be understandably concerned about how to remain competitive in your product category, so you don’t end up paying storage fees. As we dig further into this topic, we will tell you about some ways to avoid getting stuck with the storage bill.
Seller Tips for Being Prepared on Prime Day
If you are new to prime day, here are some tips that you can steal for your business. These tips will help you get started to ensure you get better results during this event:
Be an FBA Seller and Have a Professional Selling Account
If you aren’t an FBA seller, you won’t be able to take advantage of this. A Professional Selling Account will also give you more potent tools to utilize Prime Day. These include analytics, advertisement, and data-driven tools.
Read the Intro to Prime Day PDF
To get an idea of how big Prime Day is, you should read the Intro PDF. You can find it under the heading on the linked page here. The PDF provides you the basics that include lightning deals, FBA information, and how to handle sponsored products.
This guide is also handy to provide you links on handling creating new product listings and inventory management. It gives a solid base for people who are entirely new to this system.
Create Coupons and Promo Codes
Amazon Prime Day’s big draw comes from deep discounts for prospective buyers. They expect the lowest prices available all year. The exclusive deals will draw people to the event of this sale. If you don’t know how to create coupons, here are some quick steps:
- Log in to Seller Central
- Go to “Advertising” and choose “Coupons”
- Select “Create a New Coupon”
- Using the menu on the left, scroll down and find the products you want to apply those coupons to
- Click “Add to Coupon” next to your target product
- The “Show Variations” option will allow you to select times where a coupon does and does not appear
- Select the amount you want off (percentage or money)
- Set a budget, pick a title, and choose a start/end date for your coupon
If you want to apply coupons to many of your products, you can use a spreadsheet to apply coupons in bulk.
If you’re going to edit your voucher, you will need to do so with more than six hours to spare. Do it within six or less, and Amazon will lock in your coupon. You can also advertise this sale within the same process.
Prepare Your Social Media Followers
If your business has a social media presence, be sure to inform them of various sales and lightning deals you have going on. If you’ve read our blog on the A10 Algorithm, you already know about the importance of drawing off-site traffic. The social media traffic is not traffic found from Amazon.
It’s best to remain particularly active so you might communicate with people during this day. There are a lot of moving parts during a sale this big. You want to be aware of all goings-on.
If you are like most (awaiting the announcement of the official dates chosen for this day), be sure to mention your plans to join the sale on social media. Tempt people by reminding them of the exclusive deals you plan on offering around this time.
If you don’t have a social media presence, now is the time to get one. Amazon encourages you to engage with your audience in multiple ways. A brand can be seen as a helpful entity if you produce the right content and engage with your audience.
Be an Amazon Brand
The rising popularity of Amazon-sponsored brands is growing as more people discover their advantages. Below is a quick list of advantages:
- Access to additional features, which includes Amazon Stores, Amazon Posts, and Sponsored Brands advertising
- Access to Amazon Brand Analytics for more profound and more insightful information
- Brand protections to remove infringing and inaccurate content that competitors may use to undermine you.
- It has 24/7 support from Amazon’s team of investigators
If you are competing with other brands on Amazon as an individual non-brand seller, you will almost always lose. Third-party sellers have even fewer advantages here.
Track What Your Competition Does
While Amazon brands have many advantages, there is still a strong preference for sponsored product advertising. Check out the graph below for details.
It’s important to follow what your competition is doing. From this table, we can see that the majority of your competition is likely investing in sponsored products. However, there is an increasing trend towards brand-based advertising. It’s important to keep up with the trends. With the improvement of the brand registry and inclusion of posts, it’s clear that Amazon will continue to have an increasing preference towards brand advertising.
Strategies You Need To Know for Prime Day 2021
- Inventory Management Tips
We mentioned earlier that the standard sales and quantity growth would go up three times the original amount (in popular cases). This data is super helpful to understand the trends following Prime Day as well. In this case, we go back to that chart again to look toward the days following.
For the most part, you can return to standard inventory levels. Let’s state an example:
If you typically have 100 pieces of inventory, Prime Day will expect you to have three times the original amount IF your item is among the most popular sales options. If you base this data on what similar ASINs do during Prime Day,
You can do this using our Advanced Amazon ASIN Tracker. With this data, you can determine whether you need 400 slots for inventory or 200 slots for your product list compared to your standard 100.
It is best not to fret over long-term stocking fees, as Amazon Prime Day is getting smaller. Provided that you follow our other tips here and stay aggressive, you will increase your likelihood of making massive sales. You are more likely to make sales while avoiding the dreaded stockout.
With Prime Day, it’s almost always better to overestimate.
- Buy Box Protection
Owning the buy box is paramount to being at the top of the competition. In this case, Amazon buy box protection comes from maintaining a quality sales record, good customer service, and high reviews. Once you’ve gotten this down, Amazon heavily encourages its consumers to get into pricing wars.
Price optimization is finding your price ceiling, price floor, and reasonable cost in the middle. To do this, you need to find out the most bottomless sales that your competitors follow. It’s best to assume they’ve also hit all of the other categories to meet the top ranking.
If you short on the lower price, you might end up losing out to your competitor. However, if you fail to make profit margins, you are throwing money in the garbage. Competitive pricing ensures that you change alongside your competition (sometimes by pennies).
Please keep a close eye on that buy box and be ready to change things when they come up. Otherwise, be ahead of schedule and create sales based on what the most popular competitive ASINs do to hit rank one.
- Organic Rankings
Organic rankings indicate your capabilities to rank for any search term on Amazon. The higher you are, the more stock and relevance Amazon puts in your product to meet the buyer’s intent. If you struggle to maintain organic rankings, you need to address this to remain competitive during Prime Day.
Part one of this issue is typically related to listing optimization. Listing optimization has you modifying your product description to meet target keywords best. Our Amazon SEO platform allows you to track and benchmark the effectiveness of your keywords.
Listing optimization also requires you to have appropriate titles and high-quality images. Be sure to double-check all of your listings to be sure you meet Amazon’s standards.
The second half of improving your rankings comes back to product bundling. Products that act as complements to each other are more likely to receive notice if they are together.
This process may also help some of your lower-performing products to gain some attention. Reviews can help draw attention to weaker listings propped up through bundles.
Be sure you familiarize yourself with Amazon’s Bundling Policy before listing any bundles. Below are a few examples of items that will not be approved:
- No books, music, video, video games, or DVD products (as primary items)
- They all must comply with general selling and listing policies
- Items must be highly complementary (grill and spatula, Yoga mat and DVD, etc.)
- The bundle must have its product identifier (UPC)
- PPC Strategy
The most robust PPC strategy for Amazon comes back to bidding for the top slot. PPC Campaigns are often about acquiring the best position to ensure a high level of responses and engagement.
When bidding on Amazon PPC, you are typically looking to gain a slot in either the “sponsored product” or “sponsored brand” category. Either way, an awareness of what to do during this process comes from our data on the subject.
ACOS, otherwise known as Advertising Cost of Sales, determines the balance between advertising dollars spent and what you earn.
Our findings have told us that Ad Spend is up about 150% for three days during Prime Day. Meanwhile, ACOS decreases by 10%. This situation is attributed to the massive increase in the number of impressions and higher conversion rates (17%).
The tables above and below provide evidence of this change.
Further information is revealed when comparing Sponsored Display and Sponsored Products advertisement efforts.
Sponsored Products Table
This factor becomes more interesting as we compare this data to sponsored display ads.
Sponsored Display Table
Our findings, displayed in the tables above and below, found that sponsored display ads and their ACOS drops by about 40% for investments on Prime Day. This process means that the cost is more effective and typically leads to a better long-term strategy.
- Amazon DSP
Our final piece of advice leads to diversified advertising, ensuring that you have a comprehensive list of potential targets. DSP allows you to create programmatic advertising that responds to changing events. This program applies to both on-site advertisers and those who use Amazon Seller Central.
Despite our best efforts, humans aren’t particularly great at responding to thousands of deals overtaking our product listings all at once. Having your products at the fulfillment center as an FBA seller isn’t enough. Instead, you need to program responses to advertising in given scenarios.
DSP is an automated media buying software that allows you to outbid your competition through automation. That ensures you spend where the funds are needed instead of speculating on what advertising works for you.
The system also allows you to create an engaging video via their platform. Amazon DSP has a list of pre-made templates to turn a several-week filming process into a few minutes. It would be best to use DSP in combination with sponsored display to create a diversified platform that does not rely on a single advertisement method.
Wrap Up
Whether your company wants a two-day or one-day sale, a nice discount provides your prospective buyers with another reason to stick around. People who are looking for a compelling strategy will want to be competitive and active. Being reactionary in this case will only lead you to get in the lower places.
By remaining active on social media and having your inventory ready, you won’t have to worry about fighting with the process and dealing with stockouts. This 48-hour event is an excellent opportunity for your team to come together to fulfill some of those business goals.
If you are struggling with where to start, DataHawk’s advertising team provides you with an excellent combined strategy to ensure your PPC campaigns’ effectiveness. Selecting the correct advertising method is one of the most complicated pieces of this process.
Below are some quick tips to ensure you are ready for the prime day:
- Don’t hesitate to pay for ads on Prime days. The earnings potential is great. If you don’t take advantage of it, your competition will.
- Sponsored Products are still an excellent and viable way to increase sales.
- Sponsored Display ads are easy and cheap, making them great for Prime Day.
- Sponsored Brand Advertising might be less popular, but Amazon provides members of their brand registry clear advantages. This year is the time to try it.
