Sales crossed $11 billion during Prime Day 2021 and are only expected to grow more this year. This event attracts millions of shoppers globally, and the sheer volume is proof of how seriously sellers need to prepare for it. Although the exact dates aren’t known yet, there is much to be learned from past trends and future predictions.
With more focus on the content and promotional aspect of Prime Day 2022, Pacvue recently held a webinar on ways to optimize your full eCommerce business. Hosted by Account Director of Retail Media, Rike Laitasalo with Director of Product Solutions, Alex Juday, this info-packed session covered inventory best practices, product detail page optimization, preparation, and post-mortem reporting for your team around Prime Day.
Here are the key takeaways:
Find and Fix Gaps in Your Product Detail Pages
Each year, Pacvue recaps the events of Prime Day and analyzes the positive and negative trends to help sellers get a head start for the upcoming sales. Focusing on your content strategy is one of the most consistent ways to see growth in visibility, sales, and profits.
“Content is king” is an overused phrase in the eCommerce industry for a reason. Doing your due diligence by perfecting your content strategy ahead of Prime Day puts you ahead of the competition. One tip would be to find, and fix, gaps in your product detail pages. Using sales persuasion techniques can help you improve your content and build high-converting product detail pages.
Automation on Amazon is another feature you should use to monitor key metrics, including the thousands of ASINs for content changes and retail readiness. This is easier said than done, given the popularity of out-of-stock issues during Prime Day sales last year. An easy way to combat this is to set up alerts for traffic, content, costs, and unavailability in inventory before the sale goes live.
Team Strategy for Prime Day
Although time-consuming, intensive research on past performance, target consumer behavior, and biggest competitors is key to success. Here are 3 ways in which you can prep your whole team:
1. Standardize templated & processes: This one-time investment will return hours in saved time each week when analyzing performance issues and doubling down on successful strategies.
2. Have a war room to stay in sync: The way that your team is going to feel in control throughout the sale is by working in silos with a clearly defined system in place. Having set responsibilities makes it easy for them to identify and mitigate unprecedented problems.
3. Create a system to consolidate your data: There are a ton of disparate data sources that generate reports for you to utilize, and it’s nearly impossible to manage everything manually. Retail, advertising, digital shelf insights, and your data are all irrelevant if you don’t turn them into actionable insights.
What to Monitor During the Event
Monitoring all your bases is key to a successful Prime Day. Once all your deals and promos are live, marketplace price tracking using software is essential to prevent revenue leakage. Whether you exceed your performance expectations or struggle to hit your targets, have a plan to alter your discounts and prevent a dip in sales.
One of the most vital things you must do is monitor the Buy Box to ensure 3P compliance. Experienced sellers know the value of keeping an eye on unauthorized third-party sellers and any counterfeit products that may be stealing your consumer base.
With every change to your strategy, one overlooked step is communicating them to the entire team well in advance. Your brand’s consistency drives returning customers, so keep your media team in the loop for all discounts and deals.
Post-Mortem Reporting
There are elevated levels of traffic for days after Prime Day that you can grab to drive more growth and push unsold stock. Post-mortem reporting is non-negotiable, and it includes 5 fundamental steps you can do to understand your business better and ensure continued profitability.
1. Performance evaluation to pinpoint what worked and what did not
2. Post-Prime Day promos to cross any milestones that you couldn’t while the sale was live
3. Product supply management according to your inventory strategy for upcoming sales
4. Remarketing to unsatisfied shoppers with surprise deals and limited-time offers
5. Future planning to get a head start for Cyber 5 & the holiday season
This allows you to create a cheat sheet that’s unique to your business, helps you understand the effectiveness of your promos, and skyrockets reach, both organic and paid, in the long run. A combination of micro and macro changes will guide your brand for Prime Day 2022.
The webinar went into great detail about each topic covered in this blog, from types of deals to review extraction plans to using AMC to solve top-of-the-funnel management. You can now listen to the entire recording for free here.
