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Amazon Prime Day 2023 is scheduled for July 11th and 12th and planning should be well underway for the biggest shopping event of the year.
We’ve covered how to prepare for Prime Day by examining the roles of inventory, social media, and cross-channel marketing, but below we’ll focus on an often overlooked piece of the puzzle: activating your Amazon brand store.
Put Your Amazon Brand Store to Work
The Amazon brand store is a seller’s personalized storefront, existing as an island amongst a sea of competitors. Brand stores are a curated experience with absolutely zero competition. It's the perfect place on the Amazon marketplace to differentiate your brand, educate, accessorize, and launch new products.
Whether we are talking Prime Day or any regular day, Amazon brand stores engage shoppers. Have a look at the diagram we created below. It shows you how shoppers engage with your brand store vs your product detail page. Shoppers spend two times longer looking at your brand store than they do your product detail page. This results in 55% more PDP views and ultimately 15% more sales. Think of just how game-changing brand stores can be for your Amazon content strategy.
Why focus on the Brand Store on Amazon Prime Day?
We tend to focus on how much to discount and inventory levels and lose sight of the bigger picture…the shopper’s experience. Your Amazon brand store should is a big part of your shopper's experience and should play a major role in your Prime Day Strategy.
Visitors to your Amazon brand store want to enjoy an easily navigable, visually clean, and logically hierarchical page. For an example of a great-looking Amazon brand store, take a look at Channel Bakers' work on the Martha Stewart Amazon brand store.
Craft your brand store properly, and the shopper (especially an in-aisle shopper) has no reason to leave and no potential distractions to pull them away. This is why the Amazon brand store + Prime Day are a match made in heaven! Drive your Prime Day traffic to your Amazon brand store and watch your sales, cart size, and conversion rates increase.
How to Capitalize on Prime Day Momentum
Now let’s get into activating your Amazon brand store for optimum Prime Day sales. A winning Prime Day brand store strategy should have:
- Three unique Prime Day themed versions for Before, During, and After Prime Day
- Several pushes to direct traffic to your Amazon brand store and increase brand store following. You can do this by directing social traffic or DSP traffic.
1. Create Different Brand Store Versions
It's time to make your Amazon brand store ‘Prime Day ready’. Channel Bakers encourages all Amazon sellers to create three brand store versions specific to each part of your promotional strategy and ensure that each version is mobile optimized. Recall that it's helpful to break down a winning Prime Day strategy into Before, During, and After components.
A Prime Day brand store must have a distinct look and feel, delineating it from a non-tentpole occasion. It's the same idea as adding holiday flare/deals to your brand store around Christmas time.
Here’s a breakdown of how Before, During, and After brand store versions should look:
- The Before Prime Day brand store should generate excitement. Tease products that will be discounted on Prime Day and tie that in with social and email promotions.
- The During Prime Day brand store must highlight your top deals and hero ASINs. It's critical these elements are in clear view and easy to see for any site visitor. Curate your assortment so as you run out of inventory, you have other options for shoppers.
- The After Prime Day brand store is the most important of the three. This version should remain up for at least a week, utilize less aggressive deals to sell off excess inventory, and leverage cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Brand store creative can also be adjusted based on earlier Prime Day learnings.
2. Increase your Brand Store Following
The next thing sellers need to do is ramp up traffic to their brand store. Most visitors to the Amazon marketplace are browsing the product aisles—your goal is to steer their interest straight to your curated and competitor-free brand store.
To ramp up awareness and get the Amazon flywheel spinning, sellers can lean into a combination of any of these useful tactics:
Amazon Posts: Capitalize on Amazon Posts’ FREE reach which can be shown organically on your Product Detail Pages and across relevant categories.
Over-The-Top/STV & Social: Engage your loyal customers by encouraging them to check out your upcoming deals and steering them straight to your shopper-safe brand store. Gather direct traffic using over-the-top or email campaigns and invite your social media followers to follow your brand store. Have your influencers ready to send traffic to your Amazon brand store.
Sponsored Brand Video: Lead in-aisle shoppers directly to your brand store to continue their shopping experience. Sponsored Brand Video ads take up the largest above-the-fold ad real estate within search results—making it the perfect attention grabber during the hottest online sales event of the year.
DSP Campaigns: Reach contextually relevant shoppers and re-engage existing shoppers with DSP campaigns. The hands-off nature of a demand-side platform will allow you to spend critical time monitoring ad spend and inventory levels while banner, audio, and sponsored ads engage shoppers and drive traffic toward your brand store.
Upper-Funnel Tactics: Win new-to-brand customers with such upper-funnel tactics as Streaming TV ads, online video ads, and audio ads. Creative ad placements like these will enable you to excite and educate audiences all across the web from Amazon subsidiary platforms like Prime Video and Spotify to third-party sites.
Additional Brand Store Tactics for Prime Day
Even when you’ve started to generate page traffic and have three unique brand store versions, don’t think your Prime Day strategy is ready just yet! To maximize Prime Day sales 2023, also consider these additional tactics:
- Ensure the scheduled Before, During, and After Prime Day pages have COHESIVE messaging and creative.
- Have a CTA “hit the follow button” on the homepage of your Amazon brand store—this will help grow your following and re-engage customers through engagement emails.
- After Prime Day, make sure to analyze brand store insights and determine which subpages/products within the brand store drove the most sales. Also, look at tag sources and see which placements/DSP creatives drove the most traffic/sales and double down during lead out.
Are You Ready for Prime Day?
The best way to win Prime Day 2023 is to formulate an Amazon brand store strategy. As important as it is to fine-tune your omnichannel marketing and get inventory levels in order, don’t miss out on this easy way to boost sales and win loyal customers.
Want more information to prepare for Prime Day? Get in touch with Channel Bakers’ performance marketing experts. Also check out our Prime Day Case Study and this Prime Day Infographic to check your Prime Day preparedness.
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