Leveraging Amazon Prime Days 2019 – Part 1: Steps to drive and sustain sales

Amazon Prime Day – Amazon's annual shopping fiesta, is just two weeks away. It's the best time for sellers to make their mark and ride the momentum that comes from it. This time, Amazon announced that Prime Day will last 48 hours (15 – 16 July). That's two whole days for sellers to boost sales, drive traffic, and capture customers. Here's a step-by-step guide on how you can make the most of Amazon Prime Day 2019.

Step 1: Put your best product forward

Your product is your primary focus. You need to attract people to buy your product on Prime Day with the perfect listing and keep them coming back from more because of the value they received from the product.

Your product listing needs to stand out against your competitors to really drive sales. The best way to make your listing appealing is to keep it clean, clear, and concise. Max Hoffman, co-founder of BidX, recommends checking out the free Helium10 chrome extension to help evaluate your listing.

Here's a quick checklist to make sure your product is absolutely optimized (look out for tips you may have missed out – courtesy of past Global Sources Summit speakers)

1. Image

Your first 7 images should be presented in the following sequence – solo shot with white background, benefits graphic, features graphic, lifestyle shot x2, multi-panel/use cases, up close.

2. Backend keywords

Don't bloat your title and description with keywords, you can pack them in the backend. You need to make sure your title and description only include your primary keywords. Max suggests adding “prime day 2019 deals special offers” in your backend keywords as it will be frequently searched during the two days.

3. Product title

Use your title to place your top 5 keywords and keep it simple.

4. Product description

Make sure to highlight your benefits and features here. List the description in order from your biggest highlight down. You can also use this area to add in more primary keywords to really use the space optimally.

5. More details

Include all information a customer may require to make their purchasing decision. A good strategy for this would be to go through past customer inquiries and address them here.

6. Reviews

Contrary to what you might believe, this is not out of your hand. You can use product inserts to prompt customers to give you a good review (don't be too aggressive). You can also use Amazon Vine and Early Reviewer Program to generate reviews for your product.

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Make sure you've stocked up your inventory. Prime Day is a festival of sales so you should be prepared to sell fast. Whether you use FBA or your own warehousing/fulfilment arrangement, you need to prepare more inventory than usual. Remember, this is basically Christmas for Prime members, so stock up.

Step 2: Promotion strategy

Max says to expect your PPC campaign budgets to run dry sooner than you imagined on Amazon Prime Day. Don't let your competitors get ahead just because you didn't want to adjust your budget for two days. He further adds that with higher bids you won't just be boosting your sales but you'll be competing with fewer people at that bid level. Keep in mind that this shouldn't be seen as an extra cost because Prime Day will help boost sales anyway but rather an investment to make the most out of Prime Day to really leverage it during and after the event.

Another tip from Max to optimize your PPC campaign is by having a look at your keywords and conducting research on any missing ones. Look out for bad performing keywords as well and set them on negative while adding them as positive with a very small bid.

Don't forget to also look beyond your Amazon PPC. Make sure you're using all promotion types available at your disposal to go hard on your promotions.

Coupons are a great way to go for two reasons. Firstly, you know the customers buying on Amazon Prime Day are looking for the best deals possible. They want a bargain so a coupon code on top of the Prime Day sales is just icing on the already delicious cake. It's too sweet a deal to resist which means they are more likely to buy your product

The second reason coupon codes are so great is because when you give your customers a unique Amazon coupon code, you take them to a landing page to collect basic information such as their name and email address. This is important so you can capture these customers outside of Amazon and target them again later.

Facebook ads with a messenger bot (can be created easily with tools like Manychat) to drive additional traffic to your discounted product. Facebook messenger bot is an excellent tool not just to drive traffic on Amazon Prime Day but in general as well. In fact, chatbots can support you throughout your marketing funnel from generating leads to remarketing to abandoned carts. Learn how you can .

BidX is also offering a special “Boost” function for Prime Day. Upon activation, this new feature increases the keyword bids, ad group bids and budgets by a chosen percentage. When deactivating all values will get “restored”. You can individually select the campaign where you want to use it or you may use a bulk file to edit the Boost percentage for multiple campaigns and countries simultaneously. This is a perfect competitive advantage on sales events like Prime Day and Black Friday but also can be used while having lightning deals or launching new products. Learn everything about the new tool here.

Step 3: Keep the momentum going

More often than not, once Amazon Prime Day ends, sellers aren't able to maintain the level of sales at all. In fact, most of the sales will drop back to its original state after the annual sales fest. While expecting sales to remain at the same level as it was during the Prime Day sales might be unrealistic, if your sales drop back to what it was before Prime Day, you're not leveraging the event.

Keep up sales by using a post Prime Day promotion. Use coupon codes. Reach out to your Facebook and/or email lists and entice shoppers to come back by saying things like “in case you missed Prime Day” or “Prime Day might be over but the sales don't have to stop” to keep sales up.

With the new audience you've captured with your product inserts and unique Amazon coupon code, you can remarket to them and stay in touch by offering them post purchase ad-ons. You can upsell or cross sell other products or functions to go along with the product they purchased. You should also use this opportunity to build customer loyalty. Stay in touch with them and offer up relevant and valuable content and exclusive offers.

Learn more actionable content that you can put to use immediately to improve your eCommerce business throughout the year and during important moments such as Amazon Prime Day so you're always one step ahead at Global Sources Summit.

What is Global Sources Summit

Global Sources Summit is a 3-day conference for online and Amazon sellers sourcing private label products from China. The conference will be held 27-29 October 2019 in Hong Kong.

The Summit is co-located with Global Sources Fashion and Lifestyle trade show so you can also meet thousands of China suppliers at the same time.

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