Reading Time: 12 minutesAmazon Prime Day, running between July 8 and July 11th this year, is one of the most important online shopping days — taking its position right alongside Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Hallmark holidays like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.
For consumers, Amazon Prime Day marks a day of excellent deals and discounts. But for sellers, it’s an opportunity to dramatically increase Average Order Value (AOV). Around occasions like these, there’s a tendency to over-spend as consumers think they are getting more value for their money if they purchase items on this day than some other. This psychological inclination means that consumers end up ignoring their own regular budgetary requirements — and splurge more than usual.
To put it in perspective, last year’s Prime Day generated over $14.2 billion in sales, up around 11% year over year. The first day of the event alone brought in over $7 billion for businesses on Amazon, up 11.7% from the previous year (2023).
For businesses well-prepared for Prime Day (Prepared-for-Prime) in 2024, conversion rates also surged by up to 35%. Meanwhile, Ad spend skyrocketed by approximately 500%, boosting revenue from ads by 468%.
In other words, if you own an Amazon storefront, you simply can’t sleep on marketing for Prime Day.
To help you, we have compiled a list of time-tested ad and marketing strategies that will help you sell out like crazy. We have also factored in latest trends and developments to give you complete and actionable strategies that actually work.
But first, let’s talk about the significance of Prime Day.
Why Prime Day Should Matter for Every Amazon Storefront
Your brand should consider Prime Day to be more than just a simple selling point for your products. While it is a unique opportunity to tap into the surge demand from millions of customers and drive your sales — it is also a perfect place to establish relationships with new customers and nurture old ones. If you make each touchpoint with your brand count and make the overall experience memorable, your brand will benefit from lasting visibility and long-term customer loyalty too.
Here are details on why you should prioritize a tight Prime Day ad strategy:
Prime Day = Sales Lift
In 2024, brands saw an average 47% increase in orders on Prime Day compared to normal month rates. This boost was also visible for brands that were not offering any significant discounts. So how did it happen?
This surge can be attributed to the halo effect of millions of shoppers with high shopping intent flooding Amazon stores. If you play your cards right, you can ride this wave and target getting the highest single-day sales you have ever had on Amazon.
Win Yourself New Customers
2024 Prime Day data showed that over 30% of the purchases made during the event were by first-time buyers. This influx of new-to-brand customers is a golden opportunity to funnel new customers down your customer acquisition pipeline and to establish relationships with them that stay long after the purchase.
Get Your Brand Unbeaten Exposure
Discounts may get you some organic exposure, of course. But targeted ads for Prime Day can give your brand the kind of exposure that can be the breakthrough for your business.
Sponsored Brands ad impressions surged by 15% in 2024 Prime Day, while Sponsored Display retargeting boosted view-through conversions by 20%. That means you can place your brand image into the minds of many more customers with a relatively similar ad budget as your regular campaigns.
Build Brand Loyalty That Lasts
Sure, Prime Day will get you those short-term sales. However, the true opportunity lies in making them return to your store again. Here, increasing Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) should be the long-term goal.
But how do you do that? Start by creating a great first impression. Present your products and details transparently, deliver on time, and provide products that have decent quality.
Once you deliver a good initial experience, you can retarget these customers after Prime Day and send them targeted offers. For example, if they bought sunglasses, and other goods related to summer holidays — it’s likely they can use some sunscreen or a hat. Curated offers work much better than random ones, so be sure to personalize emails based on customer interests.
If sending a customized offer after an initial purchase feels way too soon — a great way to establish a midway touchpoint is to request feedback through email or SMS. You can build on this with targeted offers later on.
Beat Your Competition
Being well-prepared for Prime Day means not scrambling to keep up with your competitors at the last minute. Well-prepared brands in 2024’s Prime Day got 50% more market share than those that began preparations in Prime Week.
Building Prime Day ad and marketing campaign strategies right now will help you get an edge over your competitors.
General Advice for ANY Prime Day Strategy: As this is a one-time event in a year, your focus should be on strategies that target customers with the highest buyer intent. For instance, run ads for only the most longword keywords if your budget is limited as they tend to have the highest conversion rates.
Prepping for Prime Day: How to Get Ready, Fast
Prime Day is just around the corner. You don’t have time to build on extensive strategies that gradually push for more sales. You need a highly targeted ad campaign that is ready to deliver immediately.
How do you do that? It means checking past ad performance, optimizing your budget, fixing your visuals, building or refining your campaigns, and checking your inventory.
Here’s what you need to know:
Audit Your Existing Data and Infrastructure
What you do right now will determine your results later, so start with the basics.
Some questions you need to ask yourself include:
- Are your product listings okay?
- Have you checked your inventory?
- What has worked in the past?
- Does your team know what to do during the preparation period and on Prime Day? Can they pack and ship orders on time?
For your historical performance checks, review your data from the past three or more years, including on regular days, Prime Day, holidays, and more. This check will help you to capture trends at peak hours, which products sold well and when, and customer engagement.
You also need to check your inventory and price listings for all your products. First, ensure that you can meet demand on Prime Day to keep up with the momentum. Additionally, consider not buying too much to avoid tying up cash that could be used elsewhere.
Next, you need to test your systems to ensure they can withstand the pressure on Prime Day. That includes your ad dashboard, checkouts, reporting pipelines, and analytics tools (Amazon Marketing Cloud, etc.)
Lastly, your team needs to know what they will handle, including monitoring your business’s performance and providing customer support. This step helps you avoid confusion.
Pro Tip: Prepare to serve at least 10% more customers than what you saw during your past peak shopping days. This gives you room to rehearse out the flow with your team in advance.
Plan Your Keywords, Visuals, and Other Creatives
You still have time to find what best matches your brand image and what consumers might search for on Prime Day.
Begin with deep keyword research to find high-intent and high-volume keywords to help you optimize your content accordingly. Consider finding ‘window-shopping’ terms consumers begin using before Prime Day.
You can use tools like Helium 10 and the native Amazon Search Term Report to filter through millions of keywords customers tend to use.
Find out more about how to know your Amazon target market here.
Next, create headlines and visuals that scream urgency to encourage engagement. For example, you can use call-outs like ‘Limited Time Offer’ or ‘30% Offer. Ends Soon.’ This creates what Gen-Z calls FOMO (or “Fear of Missing Out”), which encourages immediate action.
Also make sure the headlines match your brand voice and communicate its unique selling proposition (USP). For example, if your product is superior in terms of quality, you should focus on that as you can’t compete on just price in that case.
Finally, don’t launch a campaign without testing out your ad assets. When you are dealing with high-volume shopping events like Prime Day, even a conversion rate increase or decrease of a few percent can mean a big revenue gain or loss.
Conduct A/B tests for your images, videos, titles, and price points. Set aside a small budget for this purpose and select ones which have the best performance.
Refine Your Campaigns
If you are short on time and can’t do thorough A/B tests in time for Prime Day, a reliable way to adjust your campaigns is looking at what has worked in the past. If you have existing campaigns for certain product lines, you can refine those campaigns to suit your goals for Prime Day.
You can also consider building fresh campaigns specifically for Prime Day to isolate your business’s performance during the event. Use past performance on your best campaigns to refine targeting.
On-Amazon Advertising Channels That Drive Clicks and Sales
Now that you know what to do to prepare, you need to learn what ad channels you can use to improve your campaigns. Some on-Amazon channels include:
Make Your Products Unmissable with Sponsored Products Ads
You can use Amazon Sponsored Products to promote your best-selling products to customers who are looking for the best deals.
Create Single-Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGs) for your top products to maximize relevance and quality scores. You can also cluster keywords that have similar search intents for your other products to manage time.
Recommended Bidding Strategies: To win auctions, use Dynamic Bids-Up Only during high-demand windows. This optimizes your budget to show ads more during those periods. You can also increase your ads’ visibility by making other adjustments, like top-of-search placement bids.
Sponsored Brands
You can use this channel to sell your brand image and increase upsells in your store.
Here’s how to do this:
- Use proper creatives, including a custom headline with your brand voice, a tagline, and some of your best-selling products.
- Create Prime Day banners for your store with exclusive offers.
- Finally, use urgency triggers for your top deals, which can boost CTR by 25%.
Sponsored Display for Retargeting
Strategies here can help you retarget shoppers who bounced off your page or those who have abandoned their carts. You can retarget based on your audience types, including page viewers and past purchasers.
Use retargeting ads with engaging headlines like ‘Still thinking it over?’ to encourage actions from potential customers. Sponsored Display can also work for impressions off Amazon, where your ads display on other platforms, including social media.
Don’t Sleep on Off-Amazon Ad Strategies
Off-Amazon strategies are also as important as on-Amazon ones. Have you seen those reels or TikToks where people show you their Amazon best buys? That type of influencer marketing can drive really targeted traffic to your storefront in time for Amazon Prime Day.
Here are some strategies you must use alongside paid campaigns to see peak revenue:
Social Media Ads
Sell your Prime Day deals on social media platforms, including TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Notably, TikTok ads increased engagement for Prime Day promotions by 22% last year.
You can use short-form videos and images with a countdown to Prime Day to encourage potential consumers to think of your products before they go on Amazon.
Emails and CRM
The aim of using these options is to make your loyal customer base repeat spenders on Prime Day. You should divide your consumers based on loyalty. That is, one-time buyers from repeat spenders. Also, take note of cart abandoners and those who bounce off the page before taking any actions.
You can offer your loyal customers early access to your product deals on Prime Day. Repeat spenders spend more than other buyers on Prime Day.
Send email reminders to all your customers before and on Prime Day to encourage purchases.
Partnerships
Partner with influencers and affiliate marketers by offering them deals and freebies. Choose micro-influencers instead of major influencers to drive engagement, offering up to 3.2x more engagement and authenticity.
Cross-Channel Messaging
Employing cross-channel messaging to spread your brand voice everywhere. Use the same visuals, taglines, headlines, colors, and more throughout your channels.
You can also schedule your off-Amazon ads to pause once you finish your set budget to avoid overspending.
Paid Search and Display Off-Amazon
The goal is to capture consumers comparing prices elsewhere. You can bid on keywords shoppers might use to search for deals on Prime Day, such as ‘Amazon Pet Carrier Prime Day.’
One tool that will come in handy for paid search is Google Ads.
You can also pay to have your ads displayed on other websites. For example, you can have your pet carrier ad appear to readers on a blog related to caring for pets.
Creative and Messaging Tips to Help Your Ads Convert
Since you now know what advertising strategies you can use before and during Prime Day, it is time to learn creative and messaging tips that will help your Prime Day ads convert.
Write Headlines That Sell
Let go of the boring ways and use headlines that are complete showstoppers. It could be offering that once-in-a-lifetime deal or speaking directly to the consumers’ needs. Keep it short, sweet, urgent, and provide proof. For example, “Best Prime Day Deal in Tech.“
Pick Images That Complement Your Message
Your copy will fall flat if it doesn’t have the right creative image to accompany it. Use a good background and have a greater focus on the product you are advertising to show customers what it’s like to use the product. That makes a big difference in whether they buy or not.
You can also use text overlays for the deals you are offering or other product details.
That being said, don’t clutter your image with too many details. Keep the design clean and any in-image text legible. You want the cohesive messaging to be focused. If there’s too much going on in one visual, it can be a hit-and-a-miss.
Use Urgency and Scarcity to Your Advantage
You need to let the consumer know that your deals are limited. Use terms like ‘Only 5 Left in Stock’ or ‘Deal Ends in Two Hours.’ As we mentioned previously, this creates a psychological scarcity that makes customers want to act more swiftly.
Consistency Is Key
This phrase does not apply only to your relationships — you need to keep your brand voice and image consistent in your visuals and messaging to stay top of mind for your customers too.
Do this by having similar banners across all your socials, use the same voice when messaging customers, and build the trust customers need in your business.
Budgeting Smarter for Prime Day
It can be quite a setback when you overspend in areas that will not get you the profit you need for Prime Day campaigns as this effectively reduces your budget for campaigns that have high return on investment. Smart budgeting allows you to plan for situations like this in advance.
Here’s how to do it:
Set Realistic Goals
You have to be realistic about how well your business can perform against the competition on Prime Day. Depending on your ad and marketing campaign, you can set upper and lower performance limit goals. Also, consider product margin when setting your goals.
For ROAS, set your expectations lower for prospecting campaigns and higher for retargeting campaigns.
Balance Your On and Off Amazon Ad Spend
Know the purpose of your on- and off-Amazon ads. Then, set the budget accordingly.
This step will vary depending on your business’s goals for Prime Day. Consider using off-Amazon ads to capture consumer attention and on-Amazon ads to close the deals.
Adjust in Real-Time
Shift your budget around in real-time to avoid spending on campaigns that do not fuel conversion rates. You can use tools like Perpetua and Quartile for this.
Alternatively, you can have someone from your team monitoring hourly performance and redirect budgets from underperforming ads.
Forecast Your Possible Outcomes
Use tools like DataHawk to simulate different outcomes from your campaigns, including what type of budget best suits a campaign.
You should also plot your spending plan for the upcoming Prime Day against your spending on previous events to identify top performers and underperformers.
Monitor Your Metrics Like a Hawk on Prime Day
You need to keep an eye on all your metrics to know when to pause bids, redirect budget, or pull the plug on a campaign. Here are some things to check:
Hourly Monitoring
Check the impressions, CTR, ACOS, spend per hour, CPC, and orders every one to two hours. It can help you know when to trigger bid cuts or pause your campaign.
Automate
Automating processes on Prime Day can reduce the chances of things going awry on the actual dates. Tools like Amazon Bid+, Helium 10, and Teikametrics can help.
How to use these? Set rules depending on your expected outcomes. For example, increase the bids if CTR rises by 5%. There are extensive guides available on their websites to help you utilize them effectively.
Set Alerts
You should be notified when you hit targets or drop below your limits. You can use email, Slack, or other third-party tools to monitor and send alerts as your ad campaigns run.
Pivot If Things Go Sideways
You need to know that things don’t always work out the way you want them to. For that reason:
- Have backup campaigns ready in case your running ones do not perform to the optimum level.
- Have an additional budget to reallocate, especially for your best-performing campaigns.
- Be ready to adjust other factors like messaging during Prime Day.
- Have extra inventory and workforce on hand to meet the surge demand.
How to Learn from Your Amazon Marketing for the Future
After the frenzy is over, make some time to sit down, reflect on the performance on Prime Day, learn from it, and scale for future campaigns. How do you achieve this?
Measure All Metrics
You can’t plan if you don’t report on your Prime Day performance. Measure every important metric during and after Prime Day, from ROAS to cost-per-click. This will help you set benchmarks for the future.
Setting a goal to increase your this year’s performance by 5-10% should be a good starting point.
Tools You Can Use: Use Amazon Attribution, DataHawk, Google Analytics
Focus on Increments
While you can celebrate your boosted sales, there is more to focus on beyond that. You should ask yourself these questions:
- How many new customers did we manage to get?
- What products gained the most attention?
- How does Prime Day performance compare to regular days?
- What metrics had the most changes?
- Which campaigns performed best?
This way, you know what to improve and set the goals for your future campaigns.
Scale Your Winners
It only makes sense to redirect your budget to campaigns that get you the most bang for your buck, right?
Redirect your finances and time to top campaigns, promotion types, and products. Additionally, do not forget about retargeting your customers from Prime Day when scaling your ads and marketing campaigns.
Pro Tip: Don’t forget to make note of any logistical challenges you faced during Prime Day and set systems that prevent them from reoccurring. For example, if you had delayed orders because you didn’t have enough crew to handle the huge surge in orders during Prime Day — take it as a lesson to automate some tasks or hire additional seasonal workforce. You can also start planning for the next big events, including holidays in a similar fashion.
Tools That Can Help: Google Analytics, Amazon Attribution, Google Data Studio, Amazon Brand Analytics, and emails (for surveys after the event)
You Have a Plan for Prime Day Now. What Next?
Firstly, congrats on being a strategic brand that is not going into such a major online shopping event with zero preparedness. It’s such a waste!
But now that Prime Day is almost here, it is time to take action. Here’s a summary of tasks you need to do (and the order in which you need to do them) :
- Auditing your systems and data
- Setting up your dashboards
- Running A/B tests to find the best options
- Looking for the most favorable automation and monitoring tools to suit your Prime Day activities
- Getting your team ready
- Creating those showstopping visuals for your campaigns
Afterward, squeeze every little detail from Prime Day into planning for the future success of your business and ad campaigns.
Need a reliable Amazon ad partner to take over and make your campaigns a success in such a short time? We can help.
Vizion Interactive recognizes how important it is for you to achieve success on Prime Day and afterward. Contact us today for Prime Day ad campaign building, audits, A/B testing, email marketing, retargeting, and more.
At Vizion Interactive, we have the expertise, experience, and enthusiasm to get results and keep clients happy! Learn more about how our status as a Google Partner, along with our PPC Management, Google Shopping Ads, Social Media Advertising, Amazon Advertising, and other Paid Media services can increase sales and boost your ROI. But don’t just take our word for it, check out what our clients have to say, along with our case studies.
