Preparing for Amazon Prime Day 2024 as a Seller

Amazon Prime Day 2024 Preparation

Amazon Prime Day has continued to rise among the top in which brands are able to gain visibility and see sales success on what is, effectively, one of the biggest shopping days of the year. In 2023 on Prime Day, spend was up an entire 6% from 2022. Prime Day 2024 will hold yet another wave of opportunities for brands to meet millions of eager consumers.

When is Amazon Prime Day 2024? This years Prime Day is expected to occur sometime in mid-July 2024, and seller deals are anticipated amidst expectations of more shopper traffic and visits inspired by previous experiences of Prime Day.

What to expect in this guide? In this guide and breakdown, we'll walk you through some of the key steps for getting your brand retail ready on Amazon for the big Prime Day. We’ll look at key strategies—from early deal submissions, inventory optimization, and effective advertising tactics—taking place to ensure your brand stands out during this competitive Amazon event. You will have an opportunity to go through each of them with actionable insights and tips from Senior Advertising Specialist, Adam VanBaale, who has been working on Prime Day strategies for over seven years and is now part of the BTR Media team.

Planning Out Your Brands Prime Day Promotions

Let’s talk promotions! Don't forget to make room for your promotions in your promotional calendar and making sure your promotions coincide with the actual Prime Day event. Although, none of these dates are set and stone and could vary depending on your team’s need here is our suggested timeline on how you can gear up for Prime Day and set the stage for the success of your brand:

Early Deal Submissions: Aim to have your Prime Day-specific deals submitted by the end of April. An early submission process means you will have plenty of time to work through any potential issues with Amazon, ensuring your deals go live with no hiccups. Stay ahead in the submission process to ensure securing your participation and favorable positioning of your products as the Prime Day approaches.

The deadline for Lightning/Best Deals: All Prime Day lightning or best deals submissions should be finalized no later than May 3rd, 2024. These deals are usually the highlight of Prime Day, attracting a lot of attention from shoppers. That means all your best deals need to be sealed by this date to keep up with the competition and have things ready for the ones who are ready to shop.

Building Momentum with Early Promotions: Begin building momentum by June 9, 2024, in pushing out a small promotion, say around 5-10% off on some items.

This strategy allows you to gain momentum and maintain higher margins compared to the deep discounting often observed on Prime Day itself. These early promotions can also be teasers to build up the awareness of your brand in the days prior to the main event. Keep in mind these are the dates that will allow your brand to optimize the impact on Amazon Prime Day 2024 with a sold plan for promotions in advance and in compliance with these deadlines. Early preparation and a carefully planned push strategy can make sure your products lead the way, and hopefully leading to increased sales and brand awareness.

Inventory Management for Peak Demand

Proper inventory management is one of the key success or failure points for Amazon Prime Day, a day we all know for higher sales volumes and hot buying activity. Proper preparation will see to it that all these best sellers are in stock and ready for shipping without the risk of stockouts. Here are our recommendations on how you can strategically manage your inventory for Prime Day 2024:

Early Inventory Submission: Start submitting your inventory to Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) as soon as you can. Let's take May 13, 2024, as the target date to start submitting this. The sooner you submit your inventory, the better chance your item will sell. This shall also help us to ensure that your products are processed and ready in good time before the surge, thus precluding logistic delays of any nature in time for product availability.

Final Inventory Deadline: By the middle of June 2024, aim to have all FBA inventory you want to sell this Prime Day checked into fulfillment centers. This deadline is recommended to ensure Amazon has enough time to deal with the inbound stock, such as misplacement or not scanning the inventory.

Monitoring and Adjusting: You should keep an eye on inventory levels like a hawk in the weeks leading up to Prime Day. Yes literally like a hawk. Stay in the know at all times! Monitor, for example, sales velocity and stock levels using tools provided by Amazon through an Inventory Health report. This will help you adjust your inventory in real time, replenishing popular items when needed and reducing your stock of slow-moving products.

Post-Prime Day Review: Assess what sells and what doesn't sell well after Prime Day. This should be used to help adapt your strategy from here on out.

Review your inventory levels before and during Prime Day and ensure you are well positioned to replenish stocks quickly for any items that might have gone out of stock. This way, it is possible to keep sales and, subsequently, customer satisfaction rather unbothered post-Prime Day. Effective inventory management is not just an assurance to meet customer demand but also a push in your performance metrics on Amazon, improving visibility and chances of winning the Buy Box.

Optimizing your Product Detail Pages and Content

Another big one? Optimization! You should always be making sure your listings are fully optimized and compelling enough to actually catch that customers interest and drive the sales volume you are looking for. Preparing your Product Detail Pages (PDPs) can help do just that:

Finalizing Creative Assets: Finalize all your creative assets, including high-quality photos and videos, by May 15th, 2024. These assets will be critical for making your product listings and advertisements clear and attractive visual representations of your products for the shopper.

Check your Item Data Quality (IDQ) report to get an idea of the quality of your listings and update your listings accordingly, especially under your high-selling SKUs. Also, make sure you adjust product content details, like fine-tuning descriptions, updating specifications, or improving search visibility and appeal with the use of keywords, by all means, possible before May 16, 2024.

Content Optimization on Product Detail Pages: Focus on updating your PDPs with compelling content by May 20th, 2024. Ensure that your product titles, descriptions, and bullet points are keyword-optimized but also easy to read and informative. Use A+ Content to tell a compelling story of your product: its features and benefits and more.

Utilizing Visuals and Videos: Include rich visuals and A+ content that do not just captivate browsers but include details that will assist in conversion from browser to buyer. An effective product video can increase conversion rates by showing the customers the product's use and its benefits or even perhaps educating them on what you do or the product does.

Regular Content Reviews and A/B Testing: As Prime Day approaches, you'll want to review and refine your content every week. Test with different images, or titles, or descriptions, for what resonates most with your audience. This is an ongoing optimization, ensuring your listings are as effective as possible come the big day.

Optimizing your product detail pages is not much about beautifying them but turning them into effective tools for conversion. Detailed, clear, and appealing listings largely influence the purchase decisions of customers, most especially during the competitive Prime Day.

Maximizing Your Reach on Prime Day

How do you make the most of your product's visibility? Below is our suggested step-by-step plan to help guide you in maximizing your visibility.

Finalizing the Advertising Sales Funnel Plan: Finalize the top SKU Sales Funnel Strategy by the 10th of May 2024, which will include the products to be advertised, types of ads, and how the advertising budget will be split per channel.

Ensuring Complete Ad Coverage: Confirm comprehensive ad coverage for all your Top Selling SKUs latest by May 31st, 2024. That is, it includes advertising all aspects of your product, right from PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns to more detailed DSP (Demand Side Platform) strategies that enable wider targeting and even retargeting. New to DSP? Check out these DSP resources - "Basics of Amazon DSP" and "Getting Started with Amazon DSP: Key Differences from PPC".

Evaluation and Optimization of New Campaigns: Start evaluating the performance of the new ad campaigns that you would have launched in May, until around June 17th, 2024. Do continuous optimizations based on performance metrics of click-through rates, conversion rates, and ROI. This continues until and on Prime Day to ensure that your campaigns are polished and running their very best.

Regular Monitoring and Adjustments: With knowing these facts in advance and taking into consideration the 1st of July up to the Prime Day, you will need to have even more control of your campaigns. As Prime Day will be approaching, so will more and more traffic coming to Amazon. This requires very frequent changes in bids, budgets, and strategies to stay in the game.

Real-Time Campaign Management on Prime Day: Managing your advertising campaigns on Prime Day should be done in real time, with critical monitoring. Ideally, your campaigns should be checked and fine-tuned at least every hour of the day. Real-time management helps to derive the most value from high traffic volumes and dynamically adjusts to competitive pressure and consumer behavior.

Carefully plan and constantly improve your campaigns and strategies to make sure your products get noticed among such an intense competition on Prime Day. So, preparation plays a huge role in not only increasing visibility but more importantly increasing the probability of getting more sales for your brand.

Collaboration Across Your Team

Preparing for an Amazon Prime Day is not a walk in the park by many means in terms of promos and advertising strategy, but rather, a coordination with your internal teams. From logistics to marketing, alignment may be what differentiates a successful Prime Day from lost opportunities.

Finalize the Escalation Plan: You should be thorough with your escalation plan ideally no later than June 20th, 2024. This should include clear roles and responsibilities articulation, communication protocols, and setting of contingency plans for any unforeseen happenings.

Confirming Deal Readiness with Internal Teams: Check in with your SAS Manager, CSM, or Vendor Manager around June 24, 2024, to verify all systems and processes are a go and that Prime Day deals remain on track. This last-minute confirmation will save you from any negative impact that might be caused, for example, by your promotions not being properly set up.

Work with other teams before and during Prime Day in a seamless, collaborative manner. Ensure that information lines are open with constant and consistent information flow, allowing all concerned departments and people inside them to be able to action their part of the plan.

Your efforts to create awareness and market Prime Day will go a long way if your team is well-prepared and responsive. Remember this quote by Michael Jordan, “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.” Perhaps a bit dramatic comparing Prime Day to a championship, but you get the point. Your team is everything.

Brand Consistency and Incorporating Amazon DSP

Another thing not commonly discussed for succeeding on Prime Day is making sure your presence on Amazon is optimized and extending your reach at all times. Here are some ways you can amp up this side of things:

Brand Consistency Across Media Platforms: From Amazon to your website to social media channels, ensure all your marketing materials are carrying the same message as regards the product and visuals. This way, presenting the brand in a uniform way ensures your customers of a strengthened brand identity, which will make your promotions more effective.

Amazon DSP (Demand-Side Platform) Strategy:

New to DSP? Check out these DSP resources - "Basics of Amazon DSP" and "Getting Started with Amazon DSP: Key Differences from PPC".

Prospecting + Prime Day Awareness: Reach new customers during the 6 weeks before Prime Day. Use Amazon DSP to help both prospect and retarget your potential customers, assuring that you are top of mind with them as they move closer to the purchase phase.

Retargeting with Cross-Promotion: Engage your already existing customers with cross-promotion retargeting, wherein the user is able to see some other relevant product from your catalog. This increases the likelihood of repeat purchases and, at the same time, maximizes your ad spend's return on investment by keeping your brand visible among previous buyers.

Prime Day Specific DSP Campaigns: Have DSP campaigns dedicated to Prime Day. One of the campaigns could retarget users who have shown interest in your products but haven't converted. The other campaign could target new-to-brand shoppers ripe for converting during high traffic.

By layering these in, you'll be able to increase the effectiveness of your Prime Day promotions to drive both direct sales on Amazon and, ultimately, improve overall brand engagement across other various channels.

Post-Prime Day Strategies

Prime Day is done, but the post-Prime Day follows. A time when the Prime Day rush is over, but it continues to be very important to keep utilizing the increased traffic and insights gained to maintain sales momentum and prepare for future events. Here's how you can effectively manage the post Prime Day rush:

Analyzing Performance: Once Prime Day is behind you, that's when you should get all over the data obtained like a rash. Yes, like a rash - no joke! Use it to analyze what worked well and what didn't in order to hone in on your strategies ahead of the next big sales event, tweaking not only inventory levels but marketing tactics to match consumer response.

Continued Advertising Optimizations: Since the traffic from Amazon will still stay at around 10-20% high post-Prime Day, continue with the optimizations of your ad campaigns. This will require you to make a few changes in your bids and targeting, just to leverage the continued high traffic and make sure you're getting some more visibility and sales.

Post-Prime Day Promotions: Make use of follow-up promotions, e.g., 5-10% discounts on assembling ongoing shopper interests. These follow-up promotions can clear remaining inventory but still assist in benefiting from active traffic levels.

Having a strategic approach post Prime Day to further extend Prime Day benefits for the sake of customer retention, hence, can result in improved overall brand performance on Amazon.

Next Steps and More Resources

That just about wraps up our roadmap for you to prepare for Amazon Prime Day come July. Any step that you take—with strategic promotion planning, strong inventory management, or aggressive advertising strategies—should be a reflection of your final goal to maximize visibility and sales.

Additional Resources:

Downloadable Checklist & Timeline: Want to see this in a checklist and timeline format? No worries—we've got you covered! Get the downloadable version here.

Prime Day Webinar: Join us at our next webinar where we will dive into more advanced topics to help you prepare for Prime Day. This will also be an opportunity for you to bring your questions and receive customized feedback and support from the BTR Media team.

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