What started as a way to boost sales during slow summer months has turned into two of the largest shopping days of the year: Prime Day.

More accurately, the event is 48 hours of lightning deals, promos, coupons, and shopping frenzies.

Prime Day is a great way to attract new customers and gain momentum that can impact your business. But, it’s not without risk or peril. It's not uncommon for things to break or go wrong in the lead-up to Prime Day or during the event itself.

In this episode, two OMG experts are joining me to talk about maximizing Prime Day sales. If you sell on Amazon, this is a MUST-watch episode. The insights are not only applicable to this Prime Day 2023 but will boost your success for future Prime Days, as well as upcoming holidays.

What we cover:

• Pricing Strategy - Raising your prices is a no-no in Amazon’s book. Lowering prices is almost always welcomed from Amazon’s perspective but could be detrimental to your business. Here’s how you should think about pricing strategy leading up to Prime Day.
• Listing Optimization - While you don’t want to make big changes leading up to the event, you do want to give your listings a boost. Here’s what you should consider changing and what you shouldn’t.
• Overall Ad Strategy - Your ad strategy could make or break your Prime Day performance. How should you approach bidding and budgeting, and what factors should shape your ad strategy?
• Post-Prime Day Ad Strategies - How can you get new customers who learned about your brand during Prime Day to… 1. Buy again, and 2. Buy other products you sell? By running great ads.
• How much caffeine should you consume while watching and managing Prime Day performance?
• Plus, extra tips and bonuses like Amazon Live, Amazon Influencers, Amazon Posts, and more that could give you an edge.

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Transcript:

Brett:

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 is going to be a very special episode. We're talking Prime Day 2023. We're going to get you ready some last minute prep ways we can leverage Prime Day now, but also how we think about post Prime day because there's lots of opportunities right after Prime Day as well. And I love episodes like this one. I just love Prime Day and love Amazon in general. But the main reason I love this episode is because I'm not the only one from OMG on the show. So this is part of the OMG Experts series and we have got two bonafide legit marketing OGs and Veterans of the Space and key OMG commerce team members. So we've got Rachael Cowden and Rachael is an ABM specialist, which stands for Amazon Brand Management. Been with OMG for going on two years, did five years of marketing and copywriting prior to that. And she understands what it takes to market products on Amazon, how to optimize listings and optimize sales, and she's just a wealth of knowledge. So Rachael, welcome to the show and how's it going?

Rachael:

Good, thanks for having me. It's first podcast. So first podcast,

Brett:

Exciting. You look so comfortable, so confident. Yeah, like you were born to do podcasts.

Rachael:

Thank you. It's because of you.

Brett:

So good, good. It's going to be awesome. And then the next OMG expert, Mr. Jonathan think. And Jonathan has been with OMG for five years. Y'all five years is an eternity in the online space. All the clients that work with Jonathan Love him. He is a master of Amazon ads. He understands Amazon in general. He's just a good business strategist as well. And also, I don't know if it's going to come up on the podcast, no pressure. He's kind of a master of puns, so his pun game is on point. He's one of the only guys and one of the only people at OMG that can trade puns. Kind of Barb for Barb with co-founder Chris Brewer. So anyway, Jonathan, how's it going man? And welcome to the show.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, going good. Thanks for having me. But also, same as Rachael, my first podcast as well.

Brett:

First podcast. I feel bad guys, I feel bad that we've, I've been doing podcasts so long and I haven't had you guys on until right now, but hey, we're getting started and we're here today. So that's all that matters. So what's the vibe like both in the Amazon department and the vibe with clients here as we kind of enter the home stretch approaching prime day, people excited, people nervous, there's a lot of energy with what's going on here as we're prepping.

Speaker 3:

I think it's a mix of both really. Especially for my clients. There are a couple accounts that are seeing some nice upswings leading into Prime Day and they're seeing some steady year over year growth right now where earlier the year we had seen downtrend. So I think it's a mixed optimism because they know it was soft earlier, but it's looking decent now. So I think there's a hopeful, hopeful it'll be real good.

Brett:

Yeah, so interesting. I want to unpack that just a little bit, but go ahead Rachael. Cause you had something there too.

Rachael:

Yeah, no, I was just going to echo that. It's nervousness but also excitement. And for me on the ABM side, a lot of our prep goes in a little bit before prime day, so you're pushing through some of those big changes and so we're kind of coming off of doing a bunch of big things to get ready for the event and now it's just seeing how it all unfolds and monitoring everything as we head into.

Brett:

Yeah, really great point. If you're doing all of your prep now, I hate to inform you, you're late on a lot of things, so we'll be talking about some last minute prep today, plus some of the things we'll share, we'll definitely apply for next prime day because say this Prime day's not going anywhere and so you got to be ready for next prime day as well. But yeah, a lot on the Amazon brand management side, you got to plan early, some of the ad pieces, there are a few levers we can pull kind of last minute, but some of that has to happen early. So let's talk a little bit about Prime Day by the numbers over the last couple years and then I want you guys to share from your perspective, because you guys were in, were in the trenches last year and curious, we'll get some takeaways from last year and some expectations for this year and then we'll get into some of the prep items.

So a little bit of info on Prime Day. It did start in 2015 as a way for Amazon to celebrate their 20th anniversary, and it was really a way to get sales in what is usually the slowest month of the year. July July's a pretty bad month for retail in general, and so Prime Day began humble beginnings, but actually not super humble if you think about it, 900 million in sales that first year on the Prime day event, but it's grown steadily. Biggest growth, probably no surprise to anyone, was from 2019 to 2020. So during the pandemic we all were shopping at home, prime Day exploded, 7.16 billion in sales in 2019. Jumped all the way up to 10 billion in 2020. Actually, again, that wasn't the largest percentage growth though, was it? Anyway, it was a huge jump. And then in 2021 it was 11 billion, 11.19 billion and the last year, 12.09 billion. So last couple years has been growing at about eight 9% a year, which is still staggering when you think that for a two day event it's 12 billion in sales. To give you a little bit of respect, I looked up the total annual sales. All right, and I'm just going to throw this out here for you guys. No prep here. I did not give you guys any numbers ahead of time. So this may be wildly off. What do you think JC Penney legacy retailer, how much business does JCPenney do annually?

Rachael:

That's a great question. Literally no

Brett:

Idea. Like JC Penny, I haven't thought about them for years. It's a good

Rachael:

Point

Speaker 3:

Still. Yeah, I have not been in one since the nineties. Let's,

Brett:

Dude, it was the place to be in the nineties, man. They like apparel. All the cool kids are wearing stuff from JC Penny. I aspired to wear stuff from JC Penney as a youngster, and now I'm not even sure where the closest JC Penney is, but yeah, go ahead, Jonathan.

Speaker 3:

I was going to say like 5 billion, which it's, I don't even know if that's crazy Glow or

Brett:

That's, that's actually remarkably close. It's like seven point, I actually wrote down now a word I put it like 7.9 billion a year per year is what JCPenney does. Amazon during the prime day event, 12.9 billion, all done in that short window, which is pretty crazy to think about. And so for that kind of volume to be happening, and for Amazon still to be growing at eight, 10% per year is crazy. So a couple things from last year that were interesting, and I want to get perspective from you guys. 300 million items purchased last Prime Day. The math breaks down to about 60,000 items purchased per minute, which is wild, and I don't think this was reflected for the OMG group of clients, but busiest shopping day was 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM on Wednesday, July 13th. Last year was on the 12th and the 13th. And so it was a really interesting year last year, and we saw kind of a different mix of products being sold last year versus previous years. What do you guys remember about Prime Day last year that stood out to you?

Rachael:

Yeah, yeah. I'll piggyback off of what you said about a different mix of products is that that's absolutely what we saw and that instead of people splurging on some of those more expensive high-end items, people were hunting for the deals they were looking for, what was discounted and what do they need. We talked a lot about how there are things like diapers that was doing great on a lightning deal, and that's just because, so the people were really more deal oriented in this past event,

Brett:

Which deals are always important, but last year it was especially true. What do you remember about last year?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, my main takeaway was just the disparity from the two prime days prior because 2020 and 2021 were just such unique years for e-commerce and really exploded. And then 2022 was kind of Amazon's first return back to a normal schedule. And so it underwhelmed a little bit just compared to the explosiveness of the two years prior. And Rachael was saying there's just that category of vertical shift, and we also saw kind of a bigger push towards travel related stuff because all the lockdowns were pretty much done and nobody was really worried about that anymore. And so there's definitely emphasis on that, which there always is in summer, but I think it was a little bit more extreme because people were just still itching to get out at summer.

Brett:

Totally agree. There were just some interesting things happening last year. E-comm was slowing down quite a bit. People were getting outside, inflation was kicking in, so you had people really looking for bargains and deals and looking for staple items rather than luxury goods. So likely prime day wasn't as great as you had hoped last year if you didn't have a killer deal and if you were more in the luxury category, obviously there were exceptions, but last year was a unique year for sure. Now, Jonathan, you said something interesting a little bit ago where first part of this year was flat, but we've seen some things break loose the last couple months. I've got the unique perspective. I get to watch kind of the d TOC side of OMG commerce. So we manage between Google and Amazon over a hundred million in ad spend. So I'm going to look at a lot of data, a lot of Google ad spend and really April and May of this year have seen some significant growth for a lot of our clients that were up like 20% year over year, April and May 1st half of the year, pretty flat.

We saw the same thing with ad spend up about 20% year over year where January, February, March we're a little bit flat. So it'll be interesting to see will 2023 look more like previous years or will it look more like last year? Anything you guys are hearing or seeing in the industry or any thoughts you have on what this year's prime day could be like. And we're not holding you to it if you no one can predict the future. So if we're wrong here, it's okay. It's just fun to make guesses.

Rachael:

Yeah, I don't know. I would always anticipate to see something similar to the switch last year is that people are still going to be on the hunt, but Jonathan, what do you think? Inflation's

Brett:

Still real, right? Inflation is still I, and then I think it's come down a little, but it's still people are feeling the pinch, so likely going to be in leaning into deals and maybe some staples again too. What say you Jonathan?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, definitely. I'm kind of an internal skeptic in terms of doom and gloom. I'm like, yeah, this economy is terrible but it's, it's been doing better, but there is still almo at least a month until prime day hits. So a lot can happen in a month, but past two months have been trending really nicely. So I'm optimistic, I think should be stronger than last year. But I don't think going to be crazy explosive like we were saying, 20 20, 20 21,

Brett:

It might not be the same explosive growth we've had in years past. And part of that's just the law of large numbers. Part of that is inflation driven. Part of that is just because where else can Amazon really grow in the United States? Everybody's a prime member already that wants to be or that is able to be. And so I think it will grow. It'll likely be in those single digit areas would be my guess. And that eight 9% maybe pushing 10% growth, but I'm very curious to see what the product mix is going to look like. Will it be more staples? Will we see some luxury things kind of sneaking in? And so that will be interesting to observe. So let's talk guys as we're doing our final prep here. I know one of the pieces of advice that you guys give, and I think this is extremely wise and prudent, is don't make huge changes. We want to maximize prime day. We want to get in there and tinker with things and optimize things and improve things. But you could go too far and you can make too many changes and you can actually set yourself up for failure if you do that. So Rachael, I'm going to start with you. What does that look like on the overall channel management side of things or we would call Amazon brand management b m, what does that look like? Don't make huge changes leaning up to private day.

Rachael:

So I kind of split this up between price and then your storefront and your listings. So price wise, some people like increasing the price. It may sound like a good idea, right? Because you up your price than you can offer steeper discounts make more money, but it's not that simple because the buy box on Amazon is driven by having the lowest price. So if you raise your price too high and you're not matching that on your website or you're selling on other channels, you could lose the buy box, which would be detrimental to your conversions into your sales during this really high traffic event. If you have virtual bundles, those can become unavailable if you're messing with the price. And really it's just pricing. You've heard this on this podcast before, but pricing is not one size fits all totally. And so it's definitely more you need to be more strategic about it and just raising it might not be what's best for you for your category or for your overall profitability.

It does in terms of increasing, in terms of decreasing, I mean that can still work if you are not competitive for your category or you've noticed that perhaps you could go down, this is definitely something you could do because Amazon loves to be the cheapest, but you really want to keep in mind your margins because if you have deals set up, which the deal deadline already passed, but you should still be monitoring those. But if you have them set up and then you decrease the price of your product, you may have to offer even a lower price and you may decrease your profitability even more by making that change that you feel like is really simple, but it's actually not.

Brett:

Yeah, I love the discussion of price and there's so much that goes into this and I think we've got to keep in mind what is Amazon trying to optimize for here? Amazon is the most customer-centric on the planet. That's their goal. That's what they're aiming for. So they want to be low price. And to your point a minute ago, if you raise your prices on Amazon and they're lower elsewhere, even if no one else is selling your products on Amazon, Amazon may remove that buy box telling customers, wait a minute, don't buy it here. We don't want you to have disappointment, we want you to trust us. Go buy it elsewhere. And so you can really shoot yourself in the foot, but decreasing price, Amazon's like, yes, we love that, we love giving people a deal, but here's what I'm a big believer in. It does not make sense to lose money on sales if there's not a real strategic play and a strategic follow up and something on the back end. We're going to be monetizing that You want to hit your margin, you want to hit your number. So yes, discount or else prime day will probably be pretty disappointing, but don't discount to the point where you're not making any money or losing money. That's just not good business in my opinion. But pricing strategy, very, very important. Jonathan, from the ad side of things, how does adjusting the price or playing with the price impact ad performance and especially leading up to prime day,

Speaker 3:

So that's obviously going to be pretty impactful to your conversion rates. And so then that's going to, if you're bringing the price down, that should improve your conversion rate, which should lead to lower overall a cost because you're getting that conversion in less number of clicks where opposite, if you're increasing your price, then that could decrease your conversion rate. So you're going to have ACOs going up or row is going down depending on which one you're looking at there. And obviously whichever direction you're going is either going to make you more competitive against your competitors or less. So then you might see different ad types, the product targeting where you're maybe showing on a competitor detail page or just showing up alongside competitors both through sponsored product ads or display ads and even sponsor brand's, product target. Now you just could see drastic swings in the performance there where if you're increasing price, those showing up against a competitor who's a lower price that's going to should drastically reduce that performance. And then opposite, if you're cutting price, you might see those pop up because your competitors are seeing those side by side.

Brett:

So it could really change the math of your campaign. So maybe raising prices are fine and then the lowering conversion rate is offset by more dollars at the higher price. So maybe that's worth it, maybe a little bit of a decrease, increases conversion rate and actually make things better. And conversion rate is super important for Amazon because that that's part of the algorithm. They look at which ad should we show and which product should we show for this and where should we rank you for this, that sell through rate, that conversion rate is super, super important. So let's pause a minute and I want to kind of just hear from you, Jonathan, on let's talk overall strategy. So where should we be thinking as we're approaching prime day? It's rapidly approaching or may be here maybe past depending on when you're listening to this, but talk to me about the overall ad strategy for prime day. What are some of the tips, some of the things we need to consider?

Speaker 3:

So first off, every brand is different. So you really have to know your brand and kind of the condition of where you are and your journey. If you're at a stage of aggressive growth or just steady growth or you're really like all your costs are increasing, you're really trying to cut waste aggressively. But in the lead up to prime day, you want to be paying attention to how your ads are already performing. Are they maxing out budgets because they're definitely going to be spending more on prime day. And if you're wanting to be aggressive or eke out, just whatever growth you can at a good clip, definitely consider putting in the budget rules so that way you can say, as long as this campaign is hitting my ROAS or ACOs goal, I'm okay with it increasing the budget. And you could control that amount. You could say increase by 25% or a hundred percent or whatever you're looking to do as long as it's at those efficiency markers.

And then in terms of bid strategies with placement modifiers, I wouldn't be making any drastic adjustments to placement modifiers if I'm in the conservative bucket or even in just the stable bucket. But if I'm looking to be aggressive growth, definitely look at increasing top of search because that's where bulk of new brand sales are going to be coming through. And if you're running deals alongside that, you know really want to be showing up fairly aggressively and the top of search placements are one of the best positions for that. And then the bid strategy, whether it's bid up and down, bid down only or fixed bids, again, aggressive is the only one I would do bid up and down, but we really kind of shy away from that because it can get a little wild really fast.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, totally love that. And I, I love that you talked about that there's no real one size fits all, kind of depends on how you are growing as a brand and what your objectives are. You don't need prime day to break all the records for you. If that's not where you're at, if you're more of a steady growth or profitable growth mindset, then just take a little bit of a bump from prime day. You don't need to go nuts here necessarily. And so one thing also, and you nailed it, right? It's a couple things. You're needing to increase budget, you're always going to need to spend more. If you want to capture that, those extra shoppers on prime day, you're also going to need to bid more because competitors are going to be bidding more and those clicks are going to be more competitive. And so you got to, you'll look at increasing both. What kind of increases are we typically looking at there? So if we take our typical daily budget, how much does that increase during prime day? Look at our typical bids, how much are those increasing during prime day? What does that look like, Jonathan?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, on average the budget, granted, I'm going to put this in two buckets, whether you're running deals or you're not running deals, if you're not running deals, we typically see the budget increased by one to two x. If you are running deals that could go anywhere from two to six x is the highest that I've seen. But it kind of depends on where you were already pacing beforehand and how insane your deals are. If you're running in a crazy deal, you can just explode in traffic. And we've seen that in the past where it's like just, yeah. So that's a huge manipulator there in terms of the budget and then CPCs on an account on an account wide basis, CPCs don't increase too drastically. I think the average is 10 to 25%, but closer to that 10 and then at an individual target level,

Brett:

Conversion rate's also increased too though, so it's worth paying a little bit more for the click because your conversion rate's going to be higher.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And then I was just going to say that kind of at an individual target level that there's always that one term that's like, that's the biggest term for your product. And that term, if you're in a super competitive category like protein powder or wireless keyboard or something like that, that term could go up significantly more. That just kind of depends on the deals that other people are running and that just how aggressive they're doing their adjustments.

Brett:

Awesome. Okay, cool. So we talked about don't get too crazy on price increases maybe okay to get price decreases. Talked about how that impacted ads and some overall ad strategy. Let's talk back to the principle of don't change too much, but I know Rachael, you had that broken down by storefront and listing as well. So what should we not be changing or how should we be thinking about our storefront, our listings leading up to prime day?

Rachael:

So right now it's about a month from prime day, but people probably listen this like what, two weeks before? So you still have time to do some things, but you don't want to sync all of your time into redoing all of your listings, redoing your entire storefront or all of your a plus content because it takes a lot of your time to strategically build that out. And B, it takes a lot of time to approve it. Last year we were seeing a plus content take up to seven days to get approved. So that's just an example of how long that stuff can be waiting on Amazon's end. So you can sneak a little keyword changes in there into your listings. Can you pull the search term report from Amazon? Can you do something quick through a plugin like Helium 10 to get some keywords into your listing, scatter them throughout. That's not a full overall overhaul, but it's something small you can do that can help. Can you add something small to your A plus content, maybe a comparison chart. It may still take a while to add in there, but on the chances it does get approved, that's a great little extra and it's also not going to be business critical if it doesn't go through.

Brett:

Yeah, good risk reward there if it goes through probably a nice little bump if it doesn't go through.

Rachael:

Yeah, you can also try and create a brand story that's a, it's a newer a plus content widget that's being offered but takes up a lot of real estate on your page. So talk us a

Brett:

Little bit about brand story if you would, Rachael, what does it look like and why should we do this? For those that don't dunno.

Rachael:

Yeah, love. So it, it'll go right above your a plus content and where a plus content is ASIN specific brand story is just brand specific. So it'll show on all of your asin. So it's just one module and it's just a really easy to set up slider that basically has, you can either have a text, text box, a picture, or a little grid of products. And so you can basically just really intro your brand, maybe showcase some lifestyle images or some of your, whatever best images you have, give a little bit about your brand and then highlight some of your best selling products. So showing up on the product detail page very prominently. And then also just really easy to set up. I mean you could do a quick version of this in about an hour. And once again, kind of a good risk reward. If it doesn't get approved, then it's not the end of the world and you can even leverage that in the future to perhaps get access to premium a plus content as that's a requirement.

Brett:

Love it, love it. Well it's also cool and I, I'll talk about this just really quickly, and Jonathan, you and I were talking about this too, the risk of buying some noname brand. And I was at a conference, I got to speak of the event in Austin, Texas recently, and they were just talking about all the random, weird, almost inappropriate names of brands that come up across Amazon. And I remember buying a projector from this kind of weird acronym brand from overseas. And I bought it because I had good reviews and then I got it and it was a piece of junk and I was really disappointed, really angry, set it back, which is all fine. Amazon took care of me, but it really got me thinking, I want to pay attention to the brand, I want to buy from good brands. And I do think that's a trend on Amazon.

People want to buy from good brands and if you want to go to the next level growing your Amazon business, you got to get a transition from just being a seller of stuff to being a brand builder and one, getting people to search for you by brand later and brand story that gives you a chance to do that, gives you a chance to tell your story and show why your brand is awesome, build some trust, share the story behind your product and behind your brand. And so yeah, I'm a big fan of brand story doesn't always explode the business or anything, but it's worth doing. And yeah, good risk reward there for sure. Cool. And then what about storefront and videos on listings and things like that?

Rachael:

So adding videos to your listings is very easy. You can add several and that'll show within on that product detail page along with images, but it can also show on some competitors' listings as well in the videos related to this product. So very

Brett:

Quick and easy not ok, so talk about that for a minute. So I create a video video demonstration of my product and it's on my ASIN or my product detail page, but that could show up, then Amazon could show that on a competitor's product detail page in the related product section, is that what you said?

Rachael:

Yeah, so it'll be closer down the page, close to the reviews, but basically if the competitor has their own videos, some of those will show there, but then you can also, there will be a sliding carousel of other videos and if you have one, one that's not an

Brett:

App replacement, that's just Amazon putting your video there.

Rachael:

Correct.

Brett:

Interesting. And just a reminder, Amazon doesn't care about your brand, they care about the customer and they care about customer being happy and they care about Amazon as a brand. And so love that. If my video is showing up on my competitors asin, not so much the reverse, but that's kind of cool. And then yeah, what about storefront? How important is storefront during prime day and what are we thinking about there?

Rachael:

Yeah, so similar to listings a plus content, if you spend a lot of time building something out, it might not get approved, but one really quick and easy thing you can do is add a dynamic deals page to your storefront. This is you just add the page, you set it to all the ASINs in your catalog, and then basically if that ASIN is on sale, it'll show on the page. If it's not, it won't. And so it's just kind of set it and forget it and then you can use that link later for whatever you want to just maybe highlight some deals you have. Sure. On

Brett:

Amazon, sure that deals link on email or on social media or wherever to try to get people to that deals page. Yeah, really, really great. Jonathan, how do you think about this? Are there, from the ad side, are you very often making recommendations for hey b m team or Hey client, could you make this change to the storefront? Could you make this change to a listing or are you saying don't touch anything for the most part? What's your perspective from the ad side?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, there's not a huge, if the team has already gone through the account and it's fairly well set up, the only time I'm dropping recommendations is if I'm noticing something from a software tool that I'm using that's kind of self auditing, a detail page. If I'm looking into a product that's maybe slowed in sales or we're trying to can increase or there's some other issue and I see Helium 10 telling me that here it's got an eight out of 10 score, I'm like, what are these two points? And then kind of toss that over to the team like hey, these two things could really improve the listing. And then also if something's just struggling with conversion rate, maybe sales are fine, but conversion rates dipped or something like that. Looking at what's playing into that because PPC obviously plays its own role, but the detail page and the backend, Merck murkiness of a B M stuff is a really huge driver of conversion rate and filling into Amazon's algorithm. So wanting that to all be buttoned up is huge in terms of P B C, performance and overall performance.

Brett:

Love it. So one of the things we talked about as we're kind of prepping and putting the notes together is you got to watch your stuff, you got to be diligent, you got to be paying attention during Prime day. One of the things we like to talk about is you're approaching holiday season and Prime Day is that type of shopping frenzy where every hour of prime day is several days or a day of normal business or whatever. For some people those two days are a week or a month of normal sales. So you've got to be paying attention, you got to be diligent to what's going on. So what does that look like, Rachael? What should we be watching? What should we be paying attention to make sure things don't break?

Rachael:

Yeah, so first on the listings, one of the things we notice all the time leading up to Prime Day is that variations tend to break apart. This is really heavy in the month or two. Is that,

Brett:

Is Amazon messing with us? Is that just like someone is bored and they're like, I want to make cellars sweat and I want people to have some sleepless nights, so here we go.

Rachael:

Yeah, it feels like that. I feel validated. Hearing that no mean sometimes they'll give you a reason, but a lot of times it doesn't make sense and a lot of times you can work around it, you have to be watching and you have to be on it as soon as you notice the problem. So variations breaking apart. I mean when you think about why we vary the in improved bestseller ranking, your increased overall reviews and just the overall better customer experience, you don't want to be missing any of that during prime day, especially after prime day. Cause you want to be able to benefit from whatever ranking boost or whatever you get from your sales on Prime day. So just watch it, track it. If it's broken, submit that flat file and get it fixed. Contact Amazon support, use that, call me now function. And just be really diligent to try and get that fixed. And then make sure when you get them set back up, if they break apart that your reviews are mapping correctly, every single product is showing the same number of reviews that you have a sub node and you have your category listed in there. Because like I said, you don't want to miss out on any of those bumps that you could be getting from the high traffic event. So just

Brett:

Watching those. Cool. Talk about that just really briefly. So Noe and category, sometimes those get shifted or sometimes those may change without you wanting them to leading up to Prime Day.

Rachael:

Yeah, they can change. And if they change leading up to Prime day, I mean trying to move your product to a different category, it can take a lot of time, a lot of case logging. So if your product gets moved and it's not ranking as well, you might need to evaluate, okay, do I need to do a case logging push for this post prime day? But sometimes the category can get dropped entirely, your product won't be showing in anything. So that's more where you should be in at least something. So with that extra urgency, you might be able to get your product slotted into somewhere and then post prime day be able to follow up on getting it in the best possible place, but you want to be somewhere.

Brett:

Yeah, totally makes sense. Any favorite war stories or examples of things that broken or went down right before Prime day? We got it fixed, we got it working. Anything there that would be either inspirational or just helpful validating for someone who's gone through war stories of their own?

Rachael:

Yeah, it just, you're not alone. It happens all the time. Last year we had a client who they had both a, they were in two categories because they were part of launchpads, they were able to be in both one of those unique categories. But anyway, they both got dropped and it was ridiculously stressful. We're calling, we're following up, we're getting the same answers, but basically persistence paid off. And it's not fun to be the one that has to call in all the time. You don't want to be a bother, you don't want to be rude, but you need to advocate for yourself and advocate for your client. And it did pay off. We got into both categories and they were number one in the category for a long time. Dang. So

Brett:

Went from being, it was good booted to number one in those categories. And I'm guessing that had a pretty nice impact for prime day sales.

Rachael:

Yes, 100%. And it's just good to share the good news with the client too and be able to celebrate that

Brett:

Together. Absolutely. That's where clients are like, thank you, we love you. Now it seems like you almost have to channel your inner five or six year old where you're like bugging mom for something where I was like, mom, mom, can I have this now? Mom, what about now mom, mom. That's kind of what you have to be like with Amazon support sometimes, right? To actually get them to do something.

Rachael:

Yeah. Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. So it's just got to keep pressing, keep

Brett:

Poking, persistence, just dial up, be comfortable being annoying and you just got to do it until it works. Jonathan, what do we need to be watching? What stuff do we need to be paying attention to from the ad side? Because again, every hour critical, every day is monumental. So what are we watching for on the ad side that we might need to tweak as we go?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, for sure. Definitely pulse checking throughout the day. If you're running deals, you want to be in there really starting from eight or nine, 9:00 AM Eastern, you want to be in your account at least once every hour. And in those initial hours you can kind of gauge the velocity of that. But the main things we're checking on are the campaigns running out of budgets If we're in that aggressive or growth mindset, if we do see budgets pacing out, then we're going to throw in those budget rules if I haven't done that already, to make sure that they can scale if we have the room and the budget to be able to be scaling. And then also kind of a pulse check on the sales trajectory. Is that looking kind of how we think it should be going roughly? And if it's drastically lower, kind of digging in quickly to see what's going on there. Maybe there's something wrong with the listing and you can obviously go into the inventory manager and kind of quickly run through that. So if something's not eligible for advertising or anything like that. And then also pulse, checking the ad data, which day of hour of that data is going to change a lot.

Brett:

But it's incomplete, isn't it? Yeah,

Speaker 3:

Yeah. It's very incomplete. But if you see that your A cause is like FI 200, 500%, that should be a red flag. If you are wanting to be that aggressive, which I can't imagine someone would want to be at 500%, but if you're wanting to, okay, but most people are not. So that design, okay, there's something that's really exploding here in terms of traffic and not getting the conversions that we really want, at least through the PPC side. So looking to make a cut there to mitigate the hemorrhaging basically is the main thing that I'm pulse checking is are all the products good? And are we kind of pacing in line with metrics and goals and looking at that again, almost every hour between nine Eastern, eight, 9:00 AM and 8:00 PM is kind of like, that's the bulk of the action.

Brett:

That's the bulk of the volume, isn't it? I'm just trying to picture what does your personal setup look like during the prime day event? Do you have Red Bull or Monster Energy on one side and a cup of coffee on the other? And Jonathan, you probably got some protein there cause I know you're working out and pounding the protein are, what are we taking eyedrops to keep our eyes from drying out, staring at the screen all day? How do you guys set up and how do you guys keep the energy during prime day?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, a big part is really the lead up. If you've got everything really buttoned up in terms of all my budget rules are already in place, so I'm not worried in terms if it's hitting the conversion level that I want, it's going to be increasing that budget. And generally I'll set that to a very healthy level of double or triple the daily budget at, and that's at the campaign level. And then that should be running smoothly. It's not going to be increasing if it's a terrible ACOs. And then yeah, I, I'll, I'll actually have a window tab open of all my accounts so I can quickly pull through any of them. And then early on it is a little stressful going into the prime day, but within that first surge hour between eight and, well, I guess it's more than an hour, I'm going to say eight and 11:00 AM within that initial surge, you can kind of get a feel for which account might be a trouble account or which ones are going to be pretty smooth. And the ones that are smooth, I still look at them every hour just to make sure they're still smooth, but they're not causing me much stress throughout the day. If all the deals are going good and nothing dramatic happens, just again, having all those tabs open and just watching.

Brett:

So really preparation is key. Obviously getting things set up so that we're there to capitalize. Because I think one way to think about this is it, it's not so much that we need to be fearful of something breaking or something not going well or an ad campaign needed to be adjusted because that stuff happens, right? It's just going to happen. But the real danger is finding out too late and not being able to adjust it in the moment and still capitalize on prime day sales. So Jonathan, are you telling me you're not upping your caffeine intake at all during prime day? You're just cool as a cucumber, you, you're primed, no pun intended, but you're ready, or are you increasing your caffeine consumption?

Speaker 3:

Not normally a caffeine person. I have one cup of green tea per day, so maybe I'll have that a little bit earlier in the day than I usually do. But no, I'm pretty much good to go. I have that protein in the morning and that sustains me through the dark hours.

Brett:

Good. Pure energy. I have found, and I think this is true, people that consume less caffeine or no caffeine, probably a better baseline energy than those of us that crush the campaign or crush the caffeine. Anything you do, Rachael, are you are pounding water, are you drink, are you loading up on vitamins? What's your personal, how do you get ready for prime day?

Rachael:

Wow. Well, I can't say I drink a lot of caffeine now because I want to be one of those healthy people with great energy.

Brett:

I drink a lot of caffeine, so no judgment at all. Yeah,

Rachael:

Perfect. I do drink a lot of water and I'm very proud of that. So water, definitely coffee a hundred percent. But I guess I'll just go more the social route in that team, O M G, the Amazon team here. We will be on Slack, we'll be messaging and even something as simple guys today is crazy. Just a simple check-in like that. It helps to know it's two days, we're all in it together. We have some support if we need it from our coworkers. Really that comradery throughout the day just to know, hey, we're all experiencing this, we're all trying to do our best.

Brett:

Yeah, it it's super fun. It's like the Super Bowl or secondary Super Bowl, if you count holiday is the primary or whatever. But I try, it's hard for me because I want to know all the details and my instinct is to bug you guys and like, Hey, how's this going? Hey, what's this account doing? Hey Jonathan, how's this going? But I don't want to do that because I want you to do your thing and I want you to be able to make the most of it and I'll get details later, but it's an exciting time. It's a super fun time for sure. So awesome. All right, let's keep on rocking here. So we're watching our stuff, which is important, and then let's talk about deals, coupons, promos. We'll look at it from the ad side and from the overall channel side, but what are some things we need to think about Rachael when it comes to deals and promos and things like that?

Rachael:

Yeah, this is quite possibly, this is my number one tip, or this is what I would say is the most important, is to watch out for deal stacking, because I've seen this happen every year. It's just a really small thing that could basically ruin your profitability. So Amazon will let you set up whatever deal you want, they want you to be the cheapest. You can have coupons, you can have promos, you can have prime exclusive discounts, lightning deals, whatever. They'll let you set those up and they'll let you set them up at the same time. So when it comes to Prime Day will have customers who maybe have a coupon still running, they didn't know about, they've got some sort of promo, some sort of promo code that they had going for an influencer campaign that maybe they're not paying attention to. And then suddenly customers can buy a product at what they thought was going to be like 25% off for Prime day.

They're really getting it like 50% off because some of these things are stacking. So my hot tip is to go in and check everything. The coupons are separate from the promo. So go into your coupon dashboard, go into your promo dashboard, see everything that's live, pull reports to see what you're doing and make sure you're very aware of how much stuff you're running. Because that we've seen it. And even the most seasoned sellers, suddenly they were letting products go for like 60% off, which really is not what they anticipated. And with that much more traffic and that many more people buying it, it can become a problem if you're not paying attention. So

Brett:

Yeah, it can actually be bad, can be detrimental for your brand to sell it for two cheap and that kind of erodes brand value. And then at a 60% discount, plus you add in ad costs and FBA fees and all that, you're not making money. You're likely losing a lot of money. And so that is not the way to maximize prime day for sure. Jonathan, how do you think about deals, coupons, promos, deals, things like that? How are you wanting to coordinate with the team ahead of time to make sure ad strategy lines up with deals? What does that look like?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think the main thing, and I sort of touched a little bit on this earlier was if we're running deals and depending on how aggressive they are, but really any deal is a good deal for prime day and getting increased traffic and just becoming more competitive. And with that competitive edge, really pushing on the product targeting so that we're showing against competitors because you know, have such a, normally a tight niche or a tight group for the top of sponsored product placement, really kind of like the top four to 10 sponsored positions are really what you're jostling for. But there's a huge sea of products that people are landing on, whether that's directly for that vertical or maybe it's in the same ca category and that the categories can get really broad. So being more aggressive with that product targeting and having that kind of positioned, well, obviously you don't want to be 500% ACOs bad, but being aggressive with that in line with the deals and the similar level of aggression. If our deals really good, I want to be showing up against the whole category. Anybody who's adjacent to this product line, I really want to be out there and kind of showcasing our deal to as many people as possible because we think this is going to be a big hot prime day item.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that, love that so much. And so we got to coordinate, think about the deal strategy, deal structure, make sure we're not giving away margin, make sure we're maximizing things on the ad side, and then keeping track as we go. So a couple things we need to be watching out for some kind of sneaky things, some fees that could be creeping in some other stuff that could make us an unhappy camper at the end of prime day. What else we need to be watching for Rachael?

Rachael:

So fees is great because is, it's an increased fee for prime day. So typically a lightning deal, you can run that for about $150. Prime day will be 300 to 500, 500 if your deal is selected for those two prime days. Which is also another thing to keep in mind is that if you have already selected a lightning deal for the prime day window, that prime day window could be the Sunday after prime day. So it might not actually be the Tuesday and Wednesday or whatever day it ends up being this year. So you want to keep that in mind, is that worth you keeping and you running, you also want to keep your stock in mind because there's that fee, or do you even have enough products to support that? Are they going to run out and you're basically going to pay that fee and not be able to make that back in your sales. And then you also, this is not exactly related to lightning deals, but you also just want to make sure that for whatever promo you're running, you have your reference prices listed in your listing. This is a little sneaky thing that a lot of people, you don't have to do it when you set up your listing, but if you don't, some of these deals could be suppressed day of during the event and then you have to wait whatever for prime exclusive discounts, like the six hours for it to get updated. And

Brett:

So talk through reference pricing. Is that just where someone could see this was the normal price, what the price was, is what the price is now? Is that what that is? Yeah,

Rachael:

Yeah. So it's, if you've seen the listings that has basically the strike through price, what is 1899 now is like 1299. It's because that's, they're playing with the reference price is there. So you can put the exact same price in there for 1899 for both listing and reference price, and it'll just show that on your page. But if you don't have that for Amazon to reference for your discounts, they could get suppressed and you don't want that. And

Brett:

Everybody wants a deal. We buy for emotional reasons because we want a product or what it could do for us or how it would make us feel, but we back it up with logic and we're looking for deals, especially on prime day. So seeing that strike through price of, hey, I'm saving 10%, 20%, 30%, that can be enough to help push someone over the edge and make them buy. And I love what you were just kind of to go back to this because this goes back to the deal thing, Jonathan, you talked about product targeting. People are kind of ruthless when they're shopping around holiday or prime day. This is, I'm going to this picture in my head of, you know, go to the local market and you're haggling with merchants. You're trying to talk this guy down and that guy down. And you're like, that's sort of what we've become during these deals where it's like, I'm maybe not brand loyal, maybe I am, but maybe I'm not.

I'm looking at this product. But then if you're targeting that product with your add and you're a little cheaper and maybe the reviews are good, maybe it looks about the same, I'm going to go with that. So there are lots of opportunities here to kind of capitalize on that and hopefully steal some customers away, which is kind of the name of the game for right now. So let's do this. Let's talk about post prime day. Cause you guys have both kind of alluded to that where yes, the benefit is in these two days being monster sales days, but how do we leverage that? How do we ride that wave and continue to ride it even after prime day is over? So let's talk a little bit about that and then we got a few little extra bonus things that we'll kind of share in addition to that. But what is your post Prime day game going to look like? And we'll start with you, Jonathan, on the ad side.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, definitely. So yeah, first, right out the gate you, the day after, which is normally a Thursday, but whatever day that is, I want to make sure that I am adjusting all the kind of aggressive parameters that I put in place for prime day. If I changed my top of search modifiers from in normal of like 15% and I'm bumped it up to 50, I'm probably going to be dialing that back. I might not go all the way back to where I had it because we're still expecting to see higher volume post prime day, at least in that, the finish out the week, maybe even the week beyond. But I'm going to definitely draw that down because I don't want to be as aggressive the day after as I was on the day. And also, if my deals are all done, definitely don't want to be that aggressive. The budget rules should be

Brett:

Fine. Say you want to all your, you want to take all your profits, all that extra you just made from prime day, just give it back to Amazon with ad fees. So you want want to not do that,

Speaker 3:

Right? Yeah, yeah. The budget rules should be fine. If you set in that parameter of like, it's got to be hitting this ACOs or this roas and you're still okay with that, that should still be fine to be there. But if you want to get rid of it, make sure you turn that off. Another big thing is thinking about remarketing efforts because you probably saw a pretty huge surge in traffic and

Brett:

A lot of new customers probably,

Speaker 3:

Right? A lot of new customers, most likely you have a few other items that are kind of next ancillary to the item that they bought. So you want to be, you know, want to remarket to those people and show them the other items in your product portfolio or if it's a consumable set up that remarketing for however many days out it takes to consume that product. Whether it's 30 days because 30 servings, but definitely be setting up those ads if they're not already in place. And yeah, and definitely with that, any products that individually, maybe you have one product out of your portfolios a hundred, that one really exploded, then that one's the one that you should really focus the remarketing on. The other ones that didn't get the huge burst in volume aren't going to have the same audience to be referencing from. So make sure you're not just blanket launching that remarketing effort. Cause you're probably going to see bad performance on something that didn't get any boost.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. And that's just one of those ways where you can say, Hey, all right, we got new shoppers, we got new customers, we got new activity. How do we get them to buy more? How do we get them to buy more often? So looking at, yeah, if you've got an extensive catalog and someone bought, let's use the skincare example. Someone bought the skin cream but not the mascara. Well let's run a sponsored display ad or an Amazon D S P ad. If you got an agency, have you got access to that of let's sell the skin cream purchasers, let's let them know about our mascara. You love the skin cream, you should try the mascara. Or they'll probably be running out of the skin cream in 30 days, 60 days. Let's get that set up where we can just remarket to them and get them to repurchase and reorder when that 30 or 60 days is up. And so, yeah, just thinking about how do we leverage what's going on there and then how do we not give all our money back to Amazon through ads, which is also wise too. So love that. Jonathan. Rachael, what about on the overall, the E B M side? How are we maximizing post prime day?

Rachael:

Yeah, this kind of goes hand in hand with what you guys were just talking about with that remarketing. That retargeting is that we found that a very small, the minimum you can vul you can go is 5% off, but a very small 5% off, $1 off coupon in around you can go up to two weeks post prime day. We found that really helps. It captures some of that residual traffic, the people who missed out on the event wish they bought, but also just really helps that D S P retargeting, it performs at a higher rate. You'll have that coupon badge and it just really compliments all of that super nicely.

Brett:

So maybe someone missed the prime deal now they're sad, they got regret the opposite of buyer's remorse. I didn't buy a remorse. So now you've got that coupon to try to get 'em back and to extend to that. And it is interesting that kind of once you start purchasing, that can extend. And so what you guys are saying is we really see a nice lift through the end of prime week, so to speak. And then sometimes even into that following week.

Rachael:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We've seen it on, done it on several accounts and like I said, it really compliments the other efforts you're doing.

Brett:

Cool. And what about on the customer service side? Cause I know there could be some new customer service issues or things that we got to consider. What should we be thinking about there, Rachael?

Rachael:

Yeah, so I would just say have your customer service team prepped. I mean, it's not uncommon to have an influx of messages during prime week, the prime days, and then after too with customers. Perhaps they bought too much and now they're trying to return. So just make sure you're checking your account. You're watching to be replying within the 24 hours that Amazon requires. You don't want to have any type of alert on your account because you haven't been replying to customer messages. So watch that. And then also in the weeks after prime day, even month or two after, watch your account health page, watch the product health, you'll have those, Amazon calls them the n CX scores. Basically it's just a trend to track how often are customers returning your product and are there known complaints about it. I've noticed in years past with some of my clients, some of them that sell food goods, they'll see a spike in complaints of quality wasn't a adequate, even some more extreme, I bought this and it was expired. Not totally uncommon to see this because people are looking for any way that they can return a product and they think that's kind of the workaround that they can do it. So if you're monitoring that and you're being proactive and replying, you shouldn't see any negative ramifications on your counts. Any alerts that are then trickier to remove if you're being proactive and just watching all of these things.

Brett:

Yeah, love it, love it. So let's talk about going the extra mile. I know there's some little extras we can kind of throw in here, some other things we need to consider. What would you say, Rachael? What are some of the extra mile things we should do?

Rachael:

So I'm big advocate for Amazon posts. They are so low effort. It's really easy to use some of your preexisting social media content. You can utilize those images and those captions make 'em best fit Amazon. But these posts, you can have a brand profile that customers can follow. And we have clients that have over 3000, 4,000 followers, people who are engaging with this brand on Amazon's crazy. So it shows on your storefront, it can show on your product detail page and just the videos we were talking about earlier. It can show on other competitors' product detail pages too. And it's just really clean, nice to showcase some of those lifestyle images and the brand story really elevate your brand, show that you are reputable, you are someone people can trust in buying and trust in your quality. So those are great. They also give you access to customer engagement emails within Amazon where you can send emails to different buckets of customers. And so by utilizing posts, you have access to some of those recent customers, repeat customers, high spend customers, some really cool buckets there.

Brett:

And so the engagement emails, are those only available if you're doing Amazon posts or are they available if you're not? Okay,

Rachael:

So you can send customer engagement emails to all of your brand followers, but if you send a certain number of campaigns, 10 campaigns to across those 10 campaigns, if it's sent to a certain number of unique customers, then you can access some of those other buckets, which are the high spend, your most recent customers, repeat customers. So you can customize them. I mean it's in Amazon, so it's you don't have much customization you can do in the actual campaign itself, but you can be more

Brett:

Strategic about you're still, your customers mean. This is another mean email marketing. It's a service we offer at omg emailing through Klaviyo or whatever. And it's tried and true. It's proven it's going to work day in and day out. And now you can do that on Amazon if you structure this properly and if you're engaged in posts and you got followers and things like that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Makes sense. Cool. So

Rachael:

If you have access, send those emails, start scheduling them now whenever you watch this to maybe get one hitting during prime day to have those eyes on your listings.

Brett:

Love it. Love it. What about Amazon Live? Are either of you recommending Amazon Live? Should we be considering it for Prime day or after prime day? How should we think about Amazon Live?

Rachael:

I think people should give it a go. I mean it's kind of scary to get on camera for sure. As a brand owner though again,

Brett:

Oh, look at you guys first time podcasters and you're just crushing it here. And so it'll be the same for a brand. Just get on camera, get somebody to be on camera it it's probably worth it.

Rachael:

Yeah, you're interacting with your customers in real time, which that's is, that's pretty unique on Amazon. So it's a great way to build your brand presence also. I mean during prime day, if you can do that or right before great, great click through rates during prime day, great conversion there. So if you can do it, do post prime day. Again, kind of ride that wave. But if you don't want to be on the camera, you can work with influencers. Amazon has an influencer program. You can go into that hub and find people to find people to represent your brand to work with and really build out those connections there because you can also utilize them on different platforms. Make use of unique promo codes. There's a lot you can do and not enough people are doing it. So it could be a really cool way to diversify your brand.

Brett:

Super interesting. And do either of you have a perspective? Do we have very many clients that are utilizing Amazon influencers and Amazon lives there? I know it's so relatively new and not every brand is given to work with influencers, but any anecdotal experience there?

Rachael:

I have had clients experiences who have used it.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. I also have one client who used it, but considering that was I think about eight months ago and he never told me anything about the results, I don't think he can stuck with it.

Brett:

Guessing. Guessing it was not too impressive. He never spoke about it again. Didn't do it again. It was probably underwhelming. God. What about you Rachael, though? A few clients utilizing it?

Rachael:

Yeah, so I had one client, they sell jewelry and we used that, an influencer around Valentine's Day to really, it was slower moving products. We used an influencer to kind of boost sales and we did see a nice little bump around Valentine's Day hoping to maybe we can brand this in a way or market this in a way to create that seasonality for that. We'll see. But overall, I'd say for how much work and effort it was to set it up, I think it was worth it. And it's being underutilized by brand owners too, I think is if you're a brand owner, you have a cool story, cool personality, people want to see that. So put yourself out there and do it.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. I think it's definitely worth testing. What are the costs associated with that? Are you giving a percentage to an influencer, you paying them a flat fee, you have to pay Amazon to do the live or influencer? What does the cost of that look like?

Rachael:

A lot of it depends. We influencers will set their own rates and so you can communicate with influencers that you find within the hub. I believe there, as the brand owner, I don't believe there's this, there's a cost that you have to do and you can have attribution links, which are nice, but definitely something that you'd want to do your research on and check just to see. They have a nice little page about it. But most of the costs are going to be communicated from the influencer, I believe.

Brett:

Awesome, awesome. One little thing that I'll mention, one little bonus, extra mile type thing you can do. We're seeing good results with running Google traffic to Amazon listings or Amazon's storefront. It's not always a game changer. And for some brands it's just like a nice little bump. Other brands, we've got brands that are spending six figures a month on running Google ads to Amazon. But one thing to remember is that even if someone wants to buy on Amazon, and even if they want to buy a drink prime day, they may start on Google. So they may start their search on, I want backpack, deal, backpack, backpack, prime day deals. But they're starting on Google because for a lot of people the internet begins on Google. And so what happens if Amazon's running an ad for that keyword or that search term, that click is going to send someone to a page with all your competitors on it.

But if you're able to win that bid and you're able to run a Google ad to your own Amazon listing or to your storefront, now you bypass the competition and now people are shopping with you. So not a great fit for everybody, but it is something to consider and that could be a nice little nice little bonus. So awesome. As we wrap up and we went a little bit over, this was so good, I didn't want to stop it. So if you're still listening, kudos to you and now you're going to be ready, more ready than ever for prime day, which is awesome. But final words of wisdom, final words of wisdom, final insights, final thoughts on prime day 2023

Rachael:

In the spirit of Zen, because we were kind of all talking about being chill, I think of there's that proverb that's like the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. Second best time is now. So no matter when you're listening to this pre-crime day, or maybe you're just prepping for next year, you can still do some stuff. But if you're listening to this the day before prime day, there's got to be one or two things you can do to feel a little more prepped. It's not too late. You got this, you can do something, don't stress.

Brett:

Love that. Be yeah, prepare ahead of time. Ideally, you started your prep months ago and you got all your deals in and everything is set, but maybe you forgot. I remember I was at event, I think it was a year ago speaking at this event in West Palm Beach, Florida, and the event happened over prime day, which was not good planning. I don't run the day-to-day of ads so I can be there. But I was talking to a guy like a seller, I was like, Hey, how are your prime day sales going? He's like, oh, when is it? I'm like, oh, it's like right now. That was a real rude awakening I think for that guy. But I know people listening to this are not like that. You've been preparing, but even if you've missed some things, totally agree with you Rachael. Capitalize on what you can get that prime day follow up stuff, really going ride that wave for next couple weeks and be ready then for holiday. Cause a lot of these same principles apply for holiday shopping. So get ready for that as well. Jonathan, what about you? Closing thoughts, closing remarks, closing insights. Let's say you,

Speaker 3:

Yeah, for sure we're past pretty much all the deadlines in terms of deals and that kind of stuff that you can be doing. But there's, until the day of, and even during the day of, there's time to be really fine tuning your ads to make sure that they're hitting the goals that you want and you're being aggressive enough to match again where you are in your brand journey. So yeah, I definitely highly recommend the budget rules and kind of auditing your placement adjustment positioning. But just stay fresh, stay cool. You got this.

Brett:

Stay fresh, stay cool. You got this, man, I feel it guys. I feel it right now. I feel fresh and cool and chill right now, but also excited and also ready to make a lot of money over prime day. So hey, you may be listening to this and thinking, dang, I want some people like that running my Amazon account. I want people like that maximizing my holiday sales and my post prime day sales. We are good luck because we do take clients, not a ton of, we don't have a ton of availability and we do sometimes sell out from month to month. But I would love to chat with you. So if you want to talk to the OMG experts, reach out to us@omgcommerce.com, fill out that, let's talk form for, to request a strategy session. And so would love to do that. Guys, it's been a blast. I've got to say 10 out of 10 for both of you for your first podcast. Holy cow, you crushed it. But I do got to know, so I know you're, you're all business. I know you're all thinking about how to maximize client sales, but is there anything you've got your eye on, Hey, if this goes on sale on Prime day, I might just buy it. Anything you're shopping for?

Rachael:

That's a good question because I feel like now that I've been working on Amazon, I've like totally changed my perspective of it. So I'm like, I need to check helium 10, see if they've, they're doing anything shady with their prices and I'm not going to buy from them if they did. So I have a different mentality now. I'm not

Brett:

Falling for your games marketer. I play this game, right? So I'm not going to fall for that yet. Exactly.

Speaker 3:

Just protein powder,

Brett:

Protein powders. I'm all about the protein. I'm all about the bulk, yo. So he is going for it. Yeah, I may be in the market for a new year where all this talk about caffeine. I don't like my current coffee maker, so I may need to upgrade. So I may be looking for a deal for that. So anyway, guys, thank you so much. This was fantastic. You'll definitely be invited again and can't wait to watch how you guys perform on prime day. Thanks, Brad. Awesome. Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in and let us know what you think about the show. We'd love your feedback. So if you found this podcast helpful, please share it. Share with other sellers, other e-comm people, other marketing nerds like us. I think they will. Thank you for it and if you haven't done it, leave us. That review on iTunes makes our day and helps other people discover the show as well. So with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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