How to win at Prime
Amazon takeaways on prepping your brand for Prime Days
Enjoying my European holiday, I realize Prime Day comes early in 2025, and is extended to 4 days (Prime Week next year?). Momentum Commerce expects 14% growth over last year’s Prime.
How about a reminder of what we know on how to maximize your odds of winning big during Amazon’s signature deal event? Let’s leverage the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s terms to show how to increase the mental and physical availability of your products and brands.
First, you should start raising mental availability BEFORE PRIME DAY. Get out of your maintenance budget! This is your time to shine because many competitors keep their budget boost for the Prime Days themselves. While I was Principal Research Scientist, I reviewed research showing the superiority of increasing Amazon ads about a week earlier for low involvement products (such as most food and beverages), and up to 4 weeks earlier for high involvement products (such as devices). Especially for the latter, my own research at Amazon demonstrates a higher return for spending before peak events, such as Prime and Thanksgiving Day.
Any category differences? Yes, DSP Display (Video) and Sponsored Brands Video (SBV) have the highest efficacy on Detail Page Views for Electronics, whereas Sponsored Display (SD) has the highest efficacy for Tools and Home Improvement.
However, for revenue, both SBV and SD have the highest efficacy in Electronics, while DSP Display performs the best for Home and Kitchen.
We speculate that video is especially effective for helping consumers choose among such experience products, where they can access dynamic demonstration of the focal products. This offers a much more engaging experience than search ads with only textual information. As search ads (e.g., Sponsored Products) appear on search results and close to conversion, it is not surprising the disparity in efficacies are smaller in revenue than DPV. Thus, the effectiveness of ad products depends on both the advertising goal and the nature of the product category.
Besides Amazon ads, social media Influencers can promote your product, and (digital) out-of-home can make and keep prospective customers familiar with your brand and its offering.
Beyond the customer’s mental availability, increasing your ad budget NOW also benefits from better treatment by the Amazon algorithm, which prefers to show ads and deals it believes are more likely to lead to conversion. On their own website, they highlight that:
Likewise, the deals are offered “across more than 35 categories including apparel, beauty, and home from top brands like Away, Breville, Bissell, Kiehl’s, and Milk Makeup”
Wouldn’t you like to move towards that kind of brand mental availability? As Momentum Commerce puts it:
Consider using tools like AMC and channels like Amazon DSP, Sponsored Display, or Connected TV in the weeks leading up to Prime Day to get in front of these shoppers early and ‘prime the pump’ for Prime Day itself
During Prime Days, the competition for attention is brutal: Amazon states that ‘New Deals will appear as frequently as every 5 minutes during select periods’. This Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) will drive a lot of extra site traffic, which you can now convert. Many customers will have a high intent to buy, especially if the deal is great, but also realize that many will just be browsing (low intent) and thus won’t go out of their way to get the details on your product. Physical availability (in stock, clear product details) is key, with Prime real estate to get recommended by the algorithm, in particular winning the Buy Box. Industry experts estimate that the buy box seller receives close to 90% of product sales.
Amazon’s algorithm awards the buy box to a product based on its competitive pricing, fast and free shipping, high quality customer service, and a high in-stock percentage. Profs Jürgensmeier and Skiera have further investigated how fair the buy box process is to your brand.
Which tactics work well on Prime Day? Within Amazon ads, we demonstrated that awareness, consideration, and sales revenues improve with % discount, negative keyword and geo reach ad campaigns, and the number of new reviews. In other words, TARGET: use negative keywords to avoid irrelevance (eg adult diaper customers when you are only selling baby diapers), which would also hurt you in future campaigns because the algorithm observed your lower conversion. Likewise, geolocation allows advertisers to reach audiences at the right place and at the right time. Because they are seeing ads relevant to their real-time location, consumers are more likely to pay attention to, consider, and ultimately purchase the advertised product.
As to advertiser goals, we found a large impact of Sponsored Brand Videos (SB) on all three outcome metrics, and a large impact of connected TV, Sponsored Brands and Owned & Operated Display:
Beyond Amazon Ads, Listrak recommends to
· Email: Tailor messaging to lapsed buyers, cart abandoners, and high order value audiences during teaser campaigns and midnight launches
· SMS: Send VIP customers early access codes or real-time stock alerts, with real-time nudges like "Just dropped: your X% off code."
Moreover, “Industry data shows that Prime Day traffic spikes between 8 PM and midnight and remains strong the following morning”.
Still, it is key to effectively monitor purchase and conversion trends as they happen, and adjust your tactics accordingly (Momentum Commerce can help)
After Prime Days, you can leverage your enlarged customer base. How about reminding them to leave reviews for your extraordinary product? Our peer-reviewed Amazon research shows reviews are a key milestone for enduring success on the platform, and that Amazon ads substantially speed up the time to achieve such reviews:
How about encouraging happy customers to share the vibe on social media, or to make a Tiktok video showcasing them unboxing and using the product? Such user-generated content is more trusted than firm-generated content, and can be amplified through your paid marketing.
Finally, can you get permission from these happy first-time buyers and would-be buyers (remarket to those who just missed out on the deal!) to add them to your email list, through which you can answer their questions and nurture them towards the all-important holiday season (Q4)?
Forwards and Onwards!