Preparing for Prime Day
Sanofi Consumer Healthcare is a French multinational pharmaceutical company based in Paris, France. Its Spanish offshoot researches and develops health care products, which focuses on vitamins, cough and cold remedies, and pain relievers. In 2019, Sanofi Consumer Healthcare Spain began selling one of its multivitamin brands, Pharmaton on Amazon.es.
In April 2020, Sanofi partnered with Channel Bakers, a full-service global marketing agency that specializes in Amazon Ads, to support its first-ever Prime Day engagement on Amazon. Sanofi looked to Channel Bakers to analyze potential deals, support retail engagement for supply and sales forecasting, and help drive on-site and off-site engagement before, during, and after the event.
Facing new challenges
Though historically held in July, Prime Day shifted to October in 2020. While this gave Channel Bakers more time to plan Pharmaton’s strategy, the agency faced two challenges: it didn’t have historical data points or growth to reference; and given the brand would be participating in Prime Day for the first time, there was uncertainty about whether the high-traffic event would drive value.
There were also many other brands in the multivitamin category, so the team at Channel Bakers knew it had to devise a strategy that would help drive adoption.
Devising a plan
To create a successful Prime Day strategy, the Channel Bakers team knew Pharmaton needed: 1) the right promotion to engage with shoppers; 2) enough product supply to ensure it could meet shopper demand; 3) paid search campaigns to help drive qualified traffic to that deal before and during the event; and 4) Amazon DSP to help drive conversions and increase new-to-brand shoppers.
To do so, Channel Bakers started by asking Sanofi to map out a potential sell-out using forecasting to ensure it had the right amount of inventory to support the Prime Day campaigns. Sanofi then ran point to secure supply, while Channel Bakers assessed which products would help increase sales for the multivitamins before, during, and after Prime Day, with unit sell-throughs, product detail page visits, and conversions as the key performance indicators (KPIs).
Channel Bakers leveraged the majority of its investment in Sponsored Products, seeing it as a potential sales driver for middle-of-the-funnel tactics. Focusing on Sanofi’s core products (the 60- and 90-count Pharmaton vitamins) for the Prime Day activation, the agency prioritized building campaigns with single ASINs to help with sales tracking.
Channel Bakers then used Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display to showcase a variety of Pharmaton products in shopping results, helping drive brand awareness and visibility, and in turn increasing conversions. Specifically, Sanofi leveraged Sponsored Display for category targeting, to help audiences engage with Pharmaton’s smaller pack sizes within the portfolio.
Next, Channel Bakers leveraged its integration with the Amazon Ads API to monitor the progress of how Sanofi’s ads were performing through its customized reporting service, Visibly. This also allowed the agency to access additional metrics, like product-level reporting in the Amazon Ads API, giving Channel Bakers more insights into how the campaigns performed to help drive sales for Pharmaton.
To optimize, Channel Bakers leveraged the search terms report to understand how the Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Products campaigns were performing. Channel Bakers also downloaded a bulksheet to view its bids and budget changes pre- and post-Prime Day and make adjustments accordingly.
"Prime Day can be a valuable time to establish your brand on Amazon, so it’s helpful not to think of it as a one- or two-day event. By not limiting the execution to just a single day, we were able to see great engagement for the brand. Sanofi did the right thing by ensuring it had a retail-ready product and solid inventory to ensure it didn’t limit themselves with supply."
— Tyler Speer, EMEA Director of Sales and Operations and Business Development, Channel Bakers
Measuring success
Channel Bakers helped Sanofi sell three times the projected amount of Pharmaton1 and return on investment (ROI) increased by 15:1 versus the previous four weeks2. Plus, during Prime Day, Pharmaton was the No. 1 multivitamin in Spain on Amazon, with glance views increasing by 230% versus the previous two days.2
When it comes to advice for advertisers who work with agencies, Gentiane Barret, the Digital Lead for Marketing Strategy at Sanofi, recommends:
- Finding a partner who knows Amazon Ads products and features well
- Being clear on the KPIs you want to reach
- Working in advance to have enough time to set the strategy, especially when it comes to high-traffic events like Prime Day
- Aligning with stakeholder teams on retail, supply, and media strategies
"We believe it is invaluable to work with agencies that are experts in digital strategy and campaign execution to not only get the best results, but also understand the learnings to enrich future campaigns."
— Gentiane Barret, Digital Lead, Marketing Strategy, Sanofi
1 Amazon Internal data, 2020
2 Advertiser-provided data, Spain, 2020
