Are you ready to make this year's Prime Day your biggest and most profitable yet on Amazon?
In this episode, Amazon experts Christine Shiloni and Jonathan Finkes join the podcast to share insider strategies and actionable tips to help you crush your Prime Day sales goals. From deal strategies to advertising tactics and inventory planning to post-Prime Day momentum, this episode covers everything you need to know to come out on top during Amazon's massive annual event.
Key topics and lessons include:
- Understanding the different Prime Day deal types (Lightning Deals, Best Deals, Prime Exclusive Discounts, Coupons) and how to select the right ones for your products.
- Aligning your discount strategy with your margins and inventory levels to maximize profitability.
- Crafting an aggressive but targeted advertising approach for Prime Day, including budget pacing, placement focus, and bid adjustments.
- Leveraging increased traffic post-Prime Day to gain new-to-brand customers and drive long-term growth.
- Preparing for a successful Q4 by capitalizing on learnings from Prime Day and gearing up for October Prime Day and holiday sales.
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Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(04:13) What to Expect and How to Prepare
(07:26) Strategies for Success
(13:30) Types of Deals and Discounts
(27:50) Understanding CPCs During Prime Day
(30:18) Post Prime Day: What To Do
(37:35) Deadlines To Consider
(41:43) Outro
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Connect With Brett:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce
- Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/
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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more.
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Other episodes you might enjoy:
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Transcript:
Brett:
You don't want to get so excited about Prime Day that you smashed through your ACOS goals. And yeah, the sales numbers look great, but your ACOS just got out of whack and now you gave all that extra margin to Uncle Jeff Bezos.
Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we're doing a deep dive into Prime Day, getting you prepped and ready to make this the biggest Prime Day ever for you and for your brand. I'm confident it's going to be the biggest Prime Day ever. They all are, but we want it to be the biggest Prime Day ever for you. And so that's what we're going to do here. I've got two esteemed OMG commerce experts. These guys are in the trenches day in and day out, making dreams come true on Amazon. We've got some great coverage on the ad side, the full Amazon brand management and Amazon strategy side. And so we're going to bring you the full perspective here today. And so I've got with me a return guest, Mr. Jonathan Finkes, lead specialist for Amazon ads. He knows everything about Amazon though as well. And so Jonathan, welcome back to the show and is this episode is the second appearance or third appearance for you? Just
Jonathan:
A second one. I know it was such a great experience. It feels like I've been around more often. But yeah, just the second one.
Brett:
All the fan mail, all the comments, all the people we want more. Jonathan, it just feels like you've been here more. So thanks for coming back. Super excited to have you. And then first time Miss Christine Shiloni. And Christine is our Amazon director. She's an Amazon strategist. She's been in the game a long time. She's led multiple groups, worked with lots of brands on the Amazon platform. If you've got an Amazon question, she's got an answer. And so she's here to talk about overall Amazon brand growth and strategy for Prime Day. So with that, Christine, welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time. Sure,
Christine:
Anytime. Looking forward to it.
Brett:
Going to be super fun. I love picking your brain talking strategy about new clients or new brands or whatever, and so can't wait to share with a broader audience all that you guys know about Amazon. So to kind of tee this up, just to give perspective, obviously we know this is the biggest day of the year. Last year, July 11th, 2023 was the biggest single day in Amazon's history. I think they said they sold 375 million products that day, Prime Day, which now is more of a Prime Days or multiple days to 12.9 billion last year. Those are the estimates from Statista up from 12 billion the year before. And so in the early days of Prime Day, it was kind of like a doubling almost every year. Obviously the growth has become slower. You have to slow down law of big numbers, but needless to say, it will be a monster day. Now, what are we expecting as far as timing, Christine, when do we anticipate Prime Day will happen and what might be a little bit different about the timing or the duration of Prime Day this year?
Christine:
So is now saying it's Prime Day week, so we can assume that might be starting on Sunday or Monday prior and maybe going through the following Sunday like they did for Cyber five. Usually Prime Day in July is the second week in July. Usually the first day is that Tuesday. So usually Tuesday and Wednesday are the biggest days. Usually if you're getting deal placement, those are the days that you want your placement because they probably have the most traffic. That's what Amazon's going to be pushing most likely with all of their advertising.
Brett:
So this year could likely be July 9th and 10th, kind of that week. That's the second week of July. July 1st falls on a Monday. So the eighth is also Monday. So kind of that ninth, 10th should
Start earlier maybe. Yeah. What should we expect? So we know this is a big day. We know there's going to be a lot of sales regardless of what you do, but Jonathan, I know you've got good data. We keep track multiple dashboards. We're tracking sales and performance across all the OMG clients. And so we've got a lot of data to pull from millions in ad spend and then sales. And so we're able to look at that data, but what could we or should we expect, what's kind of the range of performance? How do Prime Days compare to a normal sales day on Amazon?
Jonathan:
So one way that I like to break that down is kind of into two groups. We do have a decent amount of sellers who choose not to run any deals on Prime Day. So in the group of clients who do run deals, and this is going, the average pretty much holds true to every Prime Day that we've seen. We have all of them on file. What we see is a range in terms of total sales for each day of Prime Day averaging around a two, again, I think I said for those running deals. But for those running deals average about a 200% increase to the daily sales for those days compared to the average daily sales. But there is a really big range there because obviously each vertical's going to perform a little differently how well you're ranking in that vertical and how aggressive your deal is and how aggressive your deal is compared to other people's deals in your same category. And so even amongst those running deals, there are some who only saw a 50% increase to total sales, which still nice, but if you factor in still good,
Brett:
That's a heck
Jonathan:
Of a bump. Yeah, it's a good bump, but of course it's maybe not as big as you might be hearing elsewhere, like, oh, run promo and you're going to get a 500% increase, but on the high end we have seen thousand percent gain or more. And those are definitely the outliers, and that's why I say the average is closer to that 200%. And then for that group, that's not running any promos. We do actually, if they're well positioned in their vertical, at least showing up organically on page one, we typically see between a 30 to 50% increase in total sales, which is still very nice. You're still definitely seeing a big influx of traffic even without running a huge promo. And so those are definitely things to take into consideration.
Brett:
Yeah, it's super cool. I mean, it really does have the flavors of holiday where people are just buying. So whether you're discounting, whether you're not discounting, there's going to be more people with wallet open, ready to buy. It's an event that people plan for or when it happens, they're just, the money is freely flowing and so they're ready to make a purchase. Now, let's step back a little bit. So you talk about those that don't run a discount, those that do, those that don't run a discount still may be seeing 30 to 50% increase in daily sales during Prime Day of those that do run a deal, maybe as much as a thousand percent increase, but the amount you have to discount does really make a huge impact on your bottom line and your overall performance. So before we get into some of the specifics, what deals to run, what are some of the requirements with Lightning deals, Amazon preferred deals, things like that, let's step back and talk strategy first and we'll just continue with you Jonathan. Then Christina want your perspective as well. But as you're talking to clients about overall strategy for Prime Day, what are some of the discussion points that you're
Jonathan:
Having? So again, there's a lot of things to take into consideration there, but you kind of start from the top. You have to know what your margins are. So if you don't know what your margins are, and it's surprising, sometimes it's surprising that client doesn't know, but there's a lot of sellers who are running a very small tight ship and it's just them, maybe one person helping them, but a lot of people just run it by themselves. And so maybe they haven't calculated all the FBA fees into their margin percentages, but yeah, so you need to know your margins that you can know. How much room do you have to run that promotion? And then when it comes to deciding a promotion and how much, what you might choose to run, whether that's a lightning deal or best deal, or maybe just a prime exclusive discount, thinking about a promotion or choosing, maybe I don't want to run a promotion, you need to take into consideration where you're showing up organically as I was mentioning earlier, because if you're already showing up organically in the top three or top five, you're showing pretty prominently you're getting in front of a bunch of eyes.
Maybe if you see I'm in front of a bunch of eyes that don't have a lot of room on my margin, maybe I don't run a promo because I'm going to get a lot of extra traffic already up in top of search. But if you're not and you're in a really bad position, you might need to be more aggressive with that promotion to draw in more eyes, especially if you have the room and then of course, and that's married to your PPC strategy. If again, if you're not showing up super prominently and you're running a promo, if you're not aggressive with your ads, nobody's going to see it. You're on page two going to see it and you're running a great promo, that's where you're going to be one of those low end factors of maybe only plus 50%, even though you think you should have gotten that 200%. And so then you got to take into consideration the PPC strategy along with the promotional strategy, with really knowing your margins, knowing your business inside and out.
Brett:
Yeah, it really makes a ton of sense. I love that. Start with knowing your margins because, and just to give a quick example, just some super fast math, if we're selling an item for a hundred dollars and let's just say that our margins after everything is 50%, so we're making $50 per $100 sale. I know for a lot of brands you're like, well, I wish I had those kind of margins, but just for easy math. So every item we sell, we make 50 bucks. Now we're offering, let's say a 25% discount, which would be kind of a normal type discount. Well, that means that we've given half of our margin away, so now we need to at least double sales or we saw no net benefit in those additional sales. Now maybe you could make the case that we made a sale and so now we can sell that person multiple items.
So you could make that case for sure, but unless you're doubling sales, then it didn't pay off. It could get worse though. What if you're at a 30% margin? So you're making $30 now for every a hundred dollars sale and you have to give away 20%. Now you're giving away two thirds of your profits. Now you got to triple what you're doing in order just to make the same amount of money. And so that's where you got to kind think about margin. Love that. Christine, how do you have these conversations with clients from the strategy level, and we'll dig into tactics, tips, tidbits in a minute, but from a strategy level, how are you coaching on,
Christine:
First of all, if you're selling a consumable, like something that people, a supplement or something like that, that you have, subscribe and save, it could potentially be worth your while to run very tight margins or potentially even a loss leader to get people into the fold because they're going to hopefully enroll and subscribe and save. So you're going to have that business for the future. You don't have to pay for ads anymore for these people, for these clients, they're already in the fold. So that's one thing that you should definitely consider. Another thing you should consider is your inventory position. Where are you in a position where you could potentially be running out? Okay, so maybe you definitely don't want to run, run any deals at a lower price where you're not going to make the margin that you need on that specific inventory. Conversely, are you experiencing really high FBA fees? Maybe it's worth you running it a little bit tighter margin because now you're going to save money on the longterm storage fees and not have to do a removal order to save money on the backend that way. So those are a few things that clients should really look at on their end, and if the deal does take off, which that's what we all want, do we have the ability to restock rather quickly? Yeah,
Brett:
Yeah, that's great. Now you mentioned subscribe and save. Can you attach the Prime Day deal to subscription and subscription only or does it have to be for
Christine:
One time purchase as well? It's a one time purchase as well. So the deal is a one-time purchase, but hopes that you know what they loved, whatever it is that they purchased, that Amazon's going to be continuously serving them. Would you like to buy this again? You bought this on Friday? Yeah. Oh, I love that. And now they're in,
Brett:
Yeah, we see that a lot. We got the Amazon Echoes in our home, we got the Echo Show in our kitchen, and it's always reminding me like, Hey, do you need to order an espresso pods or you need to order toilet paper or whatever? Exactly. You need to order hot sauce. So it's really given those recommendations. So that makes a ton of sense, and if you kind of know your stick rate or your take rate on subscription, that can help you as you push into a deal because we know, hey, 20% or 30% or 50% of all people that purchase do end up subscribing and saving. So we factor that in as we're running our numbers on discounts. So okay, really, really cool. Let's talk discounts now a little bit, and I'll continue with you, Christine here. What are the options? So if we're considering, okay, I want to be in that category where I can raise sales 200 to a thousand percent type of thing by having a deal, what are my options for deals in terms of categories and what kind of discount do I need to be looking
Christine:
At? So the first option is Lightning Deals or slash best deals. So recently in the last few months, not every brand now has deals populating in the console to book deals. So my thought process on this is not running deals consistently. Amazon's like, okay, so now you're not going to get a deal. So other times consistently just run once a month or twice a month or something like that just to stay relevant with that.
Brett:
Yeah, because from Amazon's perspective, they want to say, Hey, I want these Prime Day needs to be huge for us, so we're going to do deals that we know are successful at other times of the year or time of
Christine:
The month. It could be one deals we know it's going to be doing Here're not doing well, then maybe you don't have deals showing up that way. So a lightning deal, Amazon, if you have it in your console and you've booked it for the Prime Day week, that's great. Amazon will pretty much determine the pricing for the product based on the last 45 to 30 day pricing of your product. So if you do end up with a lightning deal and you're lucky enough, you have it on that Tuesday, it's prime time, it's between 9:00 AM and 6:00 PM continuously, check that deal, make sure it's running at the price you need it to run at because that price will change. It will fluctuate up until the day of. So first of all, you need to add your inventory in there, make sure you have enough, and secondly, check that price because if you've done all your numbers, I know I can run this at 1999 and I can still make my margin and you look in your console two days before and they have it at 1599, okay, now you need to make a decision, am I running it or am I not running it?
So that's one option a best you can
Brett:
Pull the plug, right? So you'll see, you'll be given a little bit of time to say, okay, this is going to be the lightning deal. Are you good or not? And yeah, if you're going to be losing money on every sale,
Christine:
And that's not part of Amazon's algorithm, whether you are losing money or not, this is just what they're determining. Maybe it's based on all the other deals out there in that category, it's not a hundred percent clear. Another option is a best deal, which is usually seven days long. So for that, you really need to check your numbers because you can't stop it once it starts and it's seven days,
Brett:
So you can stop it before it starts, but once that train has left the station, you're on it. You're doing that deal,
Christine:
So you have to get that part. Another option is prime exclusive discounts. These don't have a cost, I didn't say lightning deal and best deals do come with a cost. They're between 300 to a thousand dollars a deal to run. So that also you have to factor that into your numbers to make sure you can cover that additional whatever Amazon deems a cost is thousand dollars say at the highest level,
Brett:
And they're going to let you know that upfront as well. So they're going to show, this is a lightning deal. This is what the price is going to be, and this is your cost to run it.
Christine:
Hop in your spreadsheet,
Brett:
Spread that out over how many units you think you'll sell and see, okay, how does this change the economics?
Christine:
Prime exclusive deals do not have a cost. That's a great option, but they do need to be at least 20% lower than your minimum price in the last 30 days. So that's number one. And if it's not, it's going to push you with referral price errors, and until you lower the price to what Amazon thinks it should be, then again, then it's not going to run. You can.
Brett:
So we can't play the game of we're going to hike the price up the day before by 20% and then do a 20% discount or whatever. No,
Christine:
That hasn't be done 45 days prior to that to let it really get through the system because that's what they want to avoid. And I completely agree with that.
Brett:
Totally understand. Yeah, it's
Christine:
20% the lowest price in the last 30 days. You have to have three and a half to four stars. You have to have seller feedback. And one interesting tip about a prime exclusive discount is if you're running that and you also are running the same product for a lightning deal or a best deal, the prime exclusive discount will automatically pause when your deal starts. Conversely, within a day, Amazon will now say, well, that's your lowest price in the last 30 days. So then your prime exclusive price may get hit and go down a little bit. So all things you just need to keep your eyes on. Lastly, an option. If you can't get a prime exclusive to stick, you didn't get a lightning deal, you can run coupons. You have a tag on your listing, it means you're participating and then a coupon, you can decide the discount, you can decide the ASINs that you're targeting, and at least you're in the game. Coupons, they do charge for every redemption. So that's something that you need to keep in mind, but for a coupon, you're controlling your destiny way more than you are with the other options. Or you say, let's just see what the traffic brings me. You can always add a coupon, take six hours to populate.
Brett:
So just have to do that basically day before, and we're in pretty good shape in that situation. Cool. So Jonathan, from the ad side as we're preparing for this, how are you coaching or when you're managing an account, growing an account, how are you doing things differently and maybe the strategies are slightly different between Lightning deal best Deal type of thing, prime exclusive and then coupon, whatcha seeing from our clients, and then how are you executing on the ad strategy based on
Jonathan:
That? Yeah, so the main point that I talked to with clients is kind of, Hey, what are you guys doing in terms of your promotional strategy? And so I can best align the advertising strategy with that promotional strategy. And if they don't necessarily have a promotional strategy or they wouldn't call it a strategy, they're just saying, oh yeah, it's 20% off on everything. Then the question is, okay, well do you guys have perhaps a budget that you want to hit or keep under a certain budget for the days of the event? And the main thing that I always recommend to all my clients is know, like we were saying earlier, if you know all your margins, you know exactly what you want to be hitting in terms of performance, you should really, if the funds are there, you should have an unlimited budget for the event. As we were saying earlier,
Brett:
If you're hitting performance targets, you're hitting your ACOS goals, you're making sales, it's growing, you're exceeding that 200% growth. You're approaching the thousand percent growth
Jonathan:
Keep. And especially with everyone is being more competitive on the events and striving for just getting another inch of market share. So if you, let's say you burn through that initial budget that you had set for yourself, but you're at good performance mark metrics that might happen by halfway through the day of day one or maybe three quarters of the way through day one. And if you just have set super tight budget restraints, stuff's going to turn off. And we typically see the normal cadence of a daily sales on a normal day. Normally peter's off after about 6:00 PM Eastern, but on Prime Day it can stay at the peak levels well until like 10:00 PM Eastern.
Brett:
Yeah, it's an event, man, where I'm getting home from work, I'm maybe eating dinner, putting the kids to bed, whatever, and then I'm shopping. That's my, it's
Jonathan:
Huge event. And really the budget really follows very closely in line, or sorry, the ad spend follows closely in line with what you see in the total sales side in that range. As I was saying, with deals, we'll see anywhere from 50 to a thousand percent growth in total sales. We'll equally see anywhere from that 50% to a thousand percent increase in ad spend for the days of the event. And with it, like Christine was saying, with it being Prime Day week, I'm not expecting the rest of any extra days to be that aggressive. I'm sure they'll see some lift, but really just the two big days that we historically have just called Prime Day one and Prime Day two, those two days would typically a very large lift again in ad spend. And so that's why I say if we can have that unlimited budget, but we want to hold and make sure we're really tight to those performance metrics, then budget rules are your friend right now, they're still only applicable to sponsored product ads.
Amazon hasn't pushed those out to sponsor brand or display ads, but for sponsored product, you can say, Hey, my budgets maybe I don't want to manually increase them too much just because I don't have the time to be checking in on the account every 30 minutes throughout Prime Day, but I'm going to say the budget is allowed to double or quadruple as long as the ACOS is under 30% or whatever that target metric is. So you don't have to be holding the hand of your campaigns all day long. If you're that super busy solo business owner who doesn't have time to be doing that, right? Or you
Brett:
Get a lot of campaigns running or whatnot, just hard to keep
Jonathan:
Track. You can let that budget rule do the work for you. But me on the agency side, I will be checking my accounts very frequently throughout the days to make sure that they're pacing well in line with budget goals. And there can be unexpected spikes. It's not just a perfect little bell curve in terms of total traffic. There could be a huge spike for one reason or another. It could be you're the first one to get a promo live because your lightning deal had the best slot in your vertical, or who knows, maybe there's a blog article that's writing about your product that you had no control over that, but it just explodes in some random hour that you thought was going to be really slow and then your campaigns run out because you get this huge flush of engagement. But that's a big thing,
Brett:
But that's a really good call out though, Jonathan. We kind of expect that, oh, okay, so it's Prime Day, so all the hours will be elevated, right? It's just going to be this consistent lift across the day. That's not really true. There's going to be spikes. There's going to be ebbs and flows. There's going to be pockets when people are shopping from home. And yet to your point, people will call out deals on blogs or my wife is part of a couple of Facebook groups, and so she gets notifications when certain things go on sale or whatever. And so yeah, someone mentions your product or your category at 3:00 PM Eastern on Tuesday, you could see a huge spike in sales. And if you're not paying attention, if you don't have the right budget rules and things in place, you'll burn through budget ads will pause, you'll lose opportunities
Jonathan:
For sales. And then kind of the final key to that in terms of the ad strategy again, is aligning it with your promotional. So if you're one of you want to run a deal, but you're kind running bare minimum deals or you're being really aggressive with your deals, syncing that up with your advertising strategy in terms of where and how aggressive you're going to be showing. And again, that also ties back to where you've been ranking organically because again, if you're ranking on the second page or the third page, you're going to have to be more aggressive with your ads to get your deal showcased in front of more eyes. And so the biggest, most important area to go after in that is the top of search placement, rest of search and detail pages. Those are good spots to be getting sales, but really you want to be getting people on that top of search.
If you have unlimited budget and you're able to spend more aggressively in all those categories, that's definitely the most aggressive hyper way to go after it. But if you need to focus in on go for that top of search, I don't recommend you hear online a lot, especially on a lot of YouTube videos talking about Amazon top search. They're like, oh, go plus 900% be crazy aggressive. You can set the bid low, but 900%, so it's like 1 cent bid becomes that exactly. But yeah, that's a little too much for my liking. And also almost eliminates the detail page and the rest of search targeting, which we still want to go after that of course. But I tell my clients to go more for a 30 to 50% for top of search. If they're wanting to be more aggressive, I might go to a hundred percent, but I like to fine tune it a little bit more so that we're still being aggressive against competitors on the rest of search and detail pages, but mostly focused on that top of search placement, but also knowing a lot of other people are going to be doing that as well.
And so of course you got to be closely watching the performance metrics, especially from the agency side on the day of in the lead up in the after, because you're making all these little tweaks and things can get a little hairy sometimes.
Brett:
And yeah, that's where if you go too wild on the percentage increases for top of search or whatnot, it can really have a compounding effect. And you don't want to get so excited about Prime Day that you smashed through your ACOS goals. And yeah, the sales numbers look great, but your ACOS just got out of whack and now you gave all that extra margin to Uncle Jeff Bezos, which you want to keep that in your pocket. And so I've got a couple more kind of nerdy ad questions here, and then I want to bounce over to Christine to talk about what to do after Prime Day, because I think we want to leverage as much as we can during Prime Day, but what do we do after Prime Day? And then we'll kind of close out with some tips and tidbits and little things to keep in mind. But Jonathan, on the ad side, what are we seeing in terms of how are CPCs increasing? How are conversion rates increasing? And those usually kind of go together, so you're paying more per click and you got to be really aggressive. You're spending more total, but conversion rates usually go up enough that it balances it out. So what are we kind seeing there?
Jonathan:
Yeah, so on the CCP C side, it really
Brett:
And more about the CPC side. If you don't have conversion rate metrics, that's not as important necessarily. But yeah, how much does CPC
Jonathan:
Increase don't have? Well, I do have conversion rate, but I don't have it on the, sorry, big spreadsheet here. So on the CPC side, typically we'll see about a 20% increase on the account as a whole, which that is skewed a lot because in a big account with a big, there's potentially a lot of products that you're not running promo on. Maybe you're just focusing on your hero product. And that's usually what we see is that clients will focus on maybe the top two to five hero products, depending on how many variations they have, but on a whole, usually about 20% increase in CPCs. But of course that can vary drastically for those top terms for those top products. When you're running big promos and competitors are running big promos, it's not uncommon to see the CPCs double in that time, especially with being more aggressive on top of search.
And if other people are similarly being aggressive on top of search, it can be a bit of a bidding war. And that's where you got to kind of stay on top of it because you could see, say you've set up to be a little bit more aggressive top of search if you're not actively watching the account, especially during peak hours, which is I would say starts after about 9:00 AM Eastern, if you're not checking in, it could be that there's a really aggressive competition in the start of the day or in the middle of the day or in the afternoon, maybe aligning with when another competitor's lightning deal is going active because it's just starting at some other random hour and you see the CPCs explode. So that is something to definitely keep a close eye on because of what you're saying that'll destroy margins. Conversion rates similar, we kind of have it on the account level data, but whichever product you're running the promo on, of course you're going to be seeing increased conversion rates, but I don't have an exact percentage jump there for you.
Brett:
Got it. Yeah. All good. So yeah, you just want to be really vigilant because you don't want to just see your margin evaporate with high CPCs. You want to make sure those CPCs are being counterbalanced by more people purchasing. So Christine, let's talk about what to do after prime base. We got all this traffic, maybe it's 50% increase, maybe it's 200% increase, maybe it's a thousand percent increase. How do we leverage that and get some longer lasting benefit or ongoing benefit? What do we do after
Christine:
Prime? So the first thing I would suggest, well, there's two things they can, it won't run simultaneously, but there's brand tailored promotions where you can target your brand cart abandoners for the last 90 days. These have to be set up about seven days prior. Set that up to target people that visited your page, but they abandoned the cart. There's that option. So those customers would receive on their product display page a discount, the minimum is 10%. That's probably not going to drive a lot of conversion, but you can go up to as high as you want. They're not costly to run at all, and they only show up to these customers that have done it. Now, Amazon has also added that feature for coupons. So there's a brand cart abandoner in the last seven days coupon that you can set up. So a coupon, you can target ASINs, it won't be account wide, the brand Tailored Promotions, it's for the whole account. You don't have any control over that at all. But the coupon, you can target ASINs, you can do it for specific ASINs, you can retarget the last seven days with a specific discount you can run.
Brett:
And again, that's going to be based on cart. So the brand tailored Cart, abandoner discount, that's where we're saying anybody added a cart during Prime Day or whatever time period. Now we're sending them a discount where if they now go to purchase, they'll see that discount and they'll be the only
Christine:
Ones discount, correct. The coupon I would think is probably going to run the same because it's the brand card, so it's probably the same exact data.
Brett:
Got it. But that's just where your specific products with
Christine:
Coupon around this product a deal. Maybe you run a lightning deal and you didn't get all the conversion that you wanted. You can opt in with another coupon for 'em. Another thing to keep in mind is shortly thereafter, Prime Day is October Prime Day. So you literally have until the end of August to get yourself in line for October Prime Day. That's about 45 days before the October Prime Day window is going to start. I would think that probably Amazon's going to start populating the deals in the ads console very soon after the July Prime Day is over. So keep your eye on that. I would say select as many deals as they're going to offer. You see what they end up giving you, and then you decide if you want to take it or not. But if you never pick it, opt out, you never have an option to have it. So pick it and then see where you are, inventory wise, margin wise, et cetera. And then you can discern if you want to run it or not. And then right after that, guess what? It's Christmas, it's Cyber five or Cyber 10. So this is really the start of the fun.
Brett:
It begins. It's so wild after Prime Day, basically you have 45 days before October Prime Day, then we're peak holiday shortly thereafter. Yeah, so it's going to be a fun ride for anyone selling on Amazon, starting here July and then moving forward. So Jonathan, what about for you? So on the ad side, what are we keeping in mind right after Prime Day or kind of the final hours of Prime Day and then ongoing, what are we doing with budgets, bids, making sure we continue success, but also making sure again, we don't burn through
Jonathan:
Budget. So first thing that I always do is make sure that any of those more aggressive adjustments, I'm thinking like top of search. And I mean that's really the main one is top search and maybe any manual bid adjustments themselves, reducing those, but not necessarily going all the way back to pre Prime Day levels. Because as Amazon always tells us, there's typically more traffic post Prime Day as people are still kind of seeing if maybe there's any deals still hanging around or they're bummed seeing something that somebody else got with the promo and then they're coming to see if that's again, still got the deal or maybe they're just checking it out. So you still want to try and capture some of the extra engagement that we see after Prime Day. But no, knowing that those shoppers have a lot less intent to buy just because they kind of built up to the hype of Prime Day.
There were a bunch of promos, and now they might be thinking, man, if I come a couple of days earlier, I would've saved like 30%, and maybe they're a little less likely to bite the bullet on that product. Now that being said, if you have longer promos running, of course you want to still be being moderately aggressive with those ads. Again, not as aggressive as on the event itself because getting back into, let's get back to our margins that we want to be operating at for the rest of the year. And then there are some ad types in terms of display ads and the views remarketing, purchase remarketing. And I like to, especially if you have a consumable product, setting those up knowing of course, what's the likely frequency repurchase rate, because if it's a 30 day supply of a supplement versus 180 day supply of a supplement, you're going to want to fine tune that targeting for that in terms of, Hey, I'm not going to show this ad to this person until it's been at least 160 days if they've got 180 day supply so that they start thinking about it again and knowing that and kind of aligning with that.
And then because there's so much more audience data, the display ads in terms of, because you can obviously target those audiences that saw or purchased your product well, you can also target audiences that saw or purchased competitor products, similar vertical products, and really that's an insane amount of audiences that they let you go after. And again, I do like to run those ads, but we have to align that with the client's strategy and goals going forward because those aren't necessarily going to be huge return on ad spend going after those. But that is how you grow getting more new to brand shoppers and continuing to feed that flywheel, and I like to call it a snowball. Keep snowballing that brand further, further and up.
Brett:
That's awesome. And this is one of those things where, man, you got to be diligent ahead of time to really get things laid out and prepared properly. You got to pay attention to all the details during Prime Day to make sure you're accelerating sales and not missing opportunities, but make sure that's not waste. And then have your game plan in place to make sure you can get an ongoing effect in more new to brand shoppers. Obviously, you won't keep the elevated sales of Prime Day going, but you'll get that elevation and then the new normal will be higher than it was before pre Prime Day. So let's do this. Let's talk about a few deadlines. We're basically out of time. You guys have done a fantastic job. It's been so fun. Let's talk about deadlines we need to be aware of. Let's talk about just tips or tricks or tidbits, kind of a grab bag of anything we need to know for Prime Day. So Christine, why don't you go first,
Christine:
Your prime exclusive discounts. Set them up as early as you can because you're going to have to deal with a lot of the referral price errors so that you can have it all set and ready to roll. You can get it to your ads team, you don't have to worry about it. Check your pricing for your lightning deals and best deals. They will adjust continuously. So just make sure you're really checking that and make sure you keep your eye on the prize, which is going to be October Prime Day and Christmas. So set yourself up, build your organic rank, make sure your listings are ready to go. If you don't have time and you can't really optimize your entire listing, all your infographics and everything, do some keyword research, drop some new search terms in the backend, do something just to give yourself a little bit more of an advantage of the next guy. If you can do some other title optimizations, et cetera, start working on that. Get yourself ranked in the algorithms for maybe some new keywords and you're ready to go and enjoy the ride.
Brett:
Love it, Jonathan. Sorry, I enjoy the ride. I think, what was last piece? Enjoy the ride. Dude, it's so fun. We get so excited when holiday rolls around. It's like our Super Bowl for the whole D two C space for Amazon sellers. We get a couple of Super Bowls, right? We get July Prime Day, October Prime Day and holiday. So I geek out about this. We have a little dashboard we watch internally. We're watching how the sales grow and what clients are crushing it. And so yeah, I'm excited to watch how things go, and I know all our clients are going to be ready. All the OMG clients are going to be ready to take full advantage. So Jonathan, from you, any other tips, tricks, tidbits, any kind of last bits of advice?
Jonathan:
Yeah, from PPC side, it's really not anything fancy or flashy. It's really about, as I've been saying in a common thread throughout the call is like it's a cohesive strategy, but the whole brand PPC can't stand alone. Just perfect brand management in terms of your listings and detail pages can't stand alone. You have to know your margins and align that with your promotional strategy and your PPC strategy. From the ads side, it's really about consistency, being consistent with making sure the ads are pushing in the direction in terms of performance that you want to be going towards. But also you have to know that if you're just going for purely an ACOS number, you're probably going to end up bidding yourself down and down and down until you're getting no impressions and your ad sales have dried up and you're wondering why you're not getting any new to brand orders. And that's a delicate balance of give and take because of course, you can't just infinitely scale your ACO because of course that's going to eat into your margins at one point or another. But yeah, it's just about being consistent and staying focused on your goals and using the ads to help you get there. Got
Brett:
To be ready to play ball, man. You got to be ready to step up a little bit or you're going to miss out on Prime Day. And hey, I would say you got to choose the right partners, and that's where shameless plug for team OMG. If you're listening to this and you're like, dang, I need people like Christine and Jonathan managing my business on Amazon and helping it grow, then we would love to talk to you. And so obviously, based on when you're listening to this, maybe a little bit late for Prime Day, kind of depends on when you're listening, but reach out to us mg commerce.com, click on that. Let's talk button, request a free strategy session. We'd love to talk to you. If you're a growing brand, successful brand and just looking to get bigger and more successful on Amazon, we would love to chat with you, Christine and Jonathan, ladies and gentlemen. Hey, you guys crushed it. That was super fun. I'm so impressed. Thanks, Brett. There's going to be calls for people to be like, Hey, we want more. Christina and Jonathan, get this bright guy out of here, new co-host Christina. Jonathan, you're going to have to go
Christine:
Through my agent for that, most likely.
Brett:
Yeah. Okay. Get me in touch, connect me with your people and yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. Alright, thanks guys. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. If you've not given us that review on iTunes, we would love that. Makes our day, helps other people discover this show as well. If you listen to this and you think, Hey, I know somebody that could really use these insights, please share this episode with them. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.
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