Shoppers and businesses alike excitedly countdown to the Amazon Prime Day. Shoppers can snag great deals and businesses see a noticeable bump in traffic and sales.
Worldwide sales for this 2-day sale grew by 6.7% between 2022 and 2023 to reach $12.9 billion. For this to translate to profits for your business, you need to be well-prepared for the event. Here’s what you need to know.
What is Amazon Prime Day?
Prime Day is Amazon’s annual shopping event for all Prime members. The first Amazon Prime Day was held in 2015. During the 2-day event, Amazon offers all Prime members heavy discounts on a wide range of products.
To be eligible for these discounts, customers must sign up to be Prime members. New sellers who participate in Prime Day sales have seen sales grow by 3X. Even well-established brands have seen profits spike during the sale.
6 ways to prepare for the Amazon Prime Day
All sellers registered on Amazon can participate in Prime Day sales. To stay ahead of the competition, businesses start planning months in advance. Here are a few tips:
- Validate customer data
Despite the higher traffic, brands must still be able to deliver personalized service for each customer. To be able to do this, they must have access to reliable customer data. Studying customer information and their shopping patterns can tell you a lot about how to approach the customer. For example, street addresses can indicate the family income and thereby the customer’s budget.
Collecting data is the easy part. To create a well-rounded customer persona, you must unify data collected through different sources and break down departmental silos to create a centralized customer database.
In addition, all customer data must be validated to be accurate, complete, relevant, formatted correctly and unique. Identity and address verification tools can make this process quicker and simpler. These tools automatically compare data shared by customers with third-party databases to ensure that every customer is who he/she claims to be.
- Finetune your deals
Customers expect great shopping deals and discounts during Prime Day. Hence, coming up with the right promotions is critical to holding your customer’s attention. You can give your customers discounts, free shipping or include a free gift with every purchase. While these deals must look attractive to customers, they shouldn’t eat into your profit margins.
A few years ago, Hoover’s poorly thought-out offer of free international flight tickets for every £100 purchase led to the company’s downfall. To keep yourself from making similar mistakes, finetune the terms and conditions of your Prime Day deals.
- Build a trusted mailing list
Emails are a great way to reach out to customers before the Prime Day sales. In addition to planning the perfect campaign, brands must also create a validated emailing list. Using a validated mailing list reduces the bounce rate for your campaigns and makes sure your message is delivered to the right audience. It also improves your sender reputation and keeps you from being blacklisted by servers.
Email validation tools can be very helpful in creating reliable mailing lists. It helps weed out email addresses with typographic errors and syntax issues as well as ensure that the email is being used by the person who created the account.
Validating emails also helps identify and remove temporary email addresses and spam traps from the database. If you have duplicate email IDs in your database, email verification tools can deduplicate files to ensure customers don’t receive multiple copies of the same email.
- Segment the audience
Different customers have different interests. To maximize sales, brands must be able to reach out to customers with relevant offers. While a teenage customer may be interested in crop tops, working professionals are probably looking for formal office wear.
Segmenting your audience helps tailor your messages to different customer demographic groups and pique their curiosity.
Insights gained from the customer data can be used to divide the audience into different demographic groups. Audiences can be grouped according to age groups, gender, cities, average order size, shopping behaviour, etc.
- Optimize product listing
Given the thousands of products listed on Amazon, you must optimize your listing to make it stand out. For this, the listing must contain all the details of the product and be listed in an easy-to-read format. Start with the title. It must be compelling and include details such as product colour, size and brand name.
Identify high-volume keywords and make sure these are included in your product description. Each listing must also include product photos that let prospective customers see how it looks from different angles. Including a demonstrative video further raises the chances of conversion.
In addition to what you have to say about the product, customers want to know what other users have to say about it. A report found that 99.9% of all online shoppers read reviews before buying a product. If you don’t have enough product reviews, send automatic product review requests. The more reviews a product has, the more credible it looks.
- Confirm inventory
Running out of stock during a sale is every retailer’s worst nightmare. So, when you’re putting together a product range and offers for Prime Day, make sure you take a close look at inventory levels. Analyse past sales and market trends to assess top-selling products and the estimated inventory required. Prime Day customers expect quick delivery within 1-2 days of placing an order and hence you must have enough product stock in your warehouse.
Summing it up
Businesses across the world look forward to Amazon Prime Days as an opportunity to attract new customers and make profits. The better prepared you are, the higher your chances to make a profit. At its core, it comes down to optimizing product listings and ensuring that you’re working with good-quality data.
Access to verified customer data makes it easier for brands to understand what customers want and deliver personalized customer experiences. It’s just the opportunity your brand needs to grow.