Clicks To Conversions - Max Out Your Amazon Prime Day Sales

The tension is mounting as we approach Amazon’s 10th Prime Day Event. And while we haven’t been given a date yet, we do know Prime Day 2024 will be happening in July. BTW, did you know 7 out of the last 10 Prime Day’s have happened in July? Last year CBS News reported that this time of year is typically slower in sales numbers, and preceeds back-to-school shopping. Making it the perfect month for those Prime Day Sales.

Amazon holds Prime Day in July every year to juice sales numbers during what are typically slow summer months. It also helps Amazon promote an early start to the back-to-school and college shopping period, according to JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth.

And according to CNET, they predict is that Prime Day (being the 10th Anniversary) will be July 9th and 10th. We wait and see!

Regardless of the date, now is certainly the time to get your listings optimized, using pre-Prime Day sales as a testing ground for what will and won’t increase your conversion rate on the big day. If CNET are correct, then you have 5 weeks to split test, improve, and do all the things you need to do for a great event. And given that any change you make to your listing will reflect a result within 3 days, you’ve got plenty of time to test all of the things!

Let’s go!

Review.

Assess Last Year's Prime Day Sales and Inventory.

And, assess your sales and inventory for other periods, too! Why? Because if your Prime Day was a disaster last year, but your Q4 sales were epic, then you might want to look at your Q4 as the benchmark. Between then and now you’ve probably learned a lot about your sales history and what works. It may be more prudent to use other month metrics as an indicator of what’s possible for Prime Day this year. As you know, if you run out of stock, that doesn’t bode well for your account. So look at where you were strongest, and start there. I remember a $10m client telling me about their Prime Day last year, and how it didn’t generate the sales they were looking for. Now, this is a company with a 200+ ASIN brand, and my advice to them would be to consider looking at which products are the most pliable. In other words, which products are more likely to be searched for during event days and which products are not.

I also have client right now who has sold out 2x this year already! Seriously underestimating the success of his new brand. This brand was launched in November last year during Q4. He doesn’t have 2023 Prime Day sales to benchmark against. My advice to him may be to overstock - minimizing the risk of selling out on Prime Day, but also knowing that this product is already a proven winner and will continue to sell like hotcakes no matter what time of year.

Assess Last Year’s Keyword and Ad Performance.

Look at your PPC data and keyword performance from the previous Prime Day and see what worked and what didn’t. But there’s a small change this year. This year we’ve seen the introduction of Generative AI in the form of Rufus on mobile search, plus AI generated review summaries and Q&A answers. And while I personally don’t believe keyword search will differ much this year, it’s worth keeping at the back of your mind that the market is in fact, changing. We’ll consider this when we talk about optimizing your listing later in this article.

In the meantime, grab a list of your hottest performing keywords and start running traffic now. Nick and Aaron from Sellers Arena suggest:

"You need to create momentum and position yourself ASAP. Consider running a big promo 2-3 weeks ahead to lift yourself in the ranks organically and be ready for prime time on primeday"

I would add to that, optimize your listing first (we’ll talk about that soon)

Assess Your Competition

You can use tools like Helium 10’s Diamond plan to see competitor keywords and keyword sales. You can use the Helium 10 Chrome Extension to aggregate reviews, view pricing changes and sales for the period. And this is handy for those Sellers who don’t have their own 2023 Prime Day Data to look at. Study their creative (title, bullets, main image, carousel, A+ content, videos) and study their reviews to get a benchmark of where you need to be.

Strategize Your Product Offering

There are many different strategies you could deploy during this years’ Prime Day event. Perhaps you have a loss leader or dead duck product that you need to runout. Maybe you have an epic product selling like hotcakes, that you can see will be even hotter during promotion. Or perhaps you’re in a testing phase and trying to figure out which color, or which style is most price sensitive? And maybe, you have too much inventory of one thing that just needs to go quickly. Choose your strategy, then choose the products and their price to promote during the 2024 Prime Day Event.

Decide Your Inventory Levels

The team at Helium 10 suggests 4-5 days of inventory is ample for Prime Day. But if you’re anything like my client who has already sold out 2x this year, you may want to consider 8 days of inventory, in case. The last thing you want is “unavailable” appearing on your listing with 10 hours of sales time left to go. Whatever you decide to do, Helium 10 suggests to send your inventory at least 2-3 weeks early (by June 20th).

Optimize

Now that you know what you’re selling, how much to have in inventory and what your pricing might be. And now that you know what keywords you’ll target and which competitors you’re benchmarking from - it’s time to optimize your listing so that you, are best in show on the day.

Optimizing Titles

Ensure all titles contain your main keywords. But not just any main keywords! Each title should contain the keywords you are most likely to make a sale from. Because title clicks without conversions increases your ACOS, and signals to Amazon that you’re not a good match for shoppers. So go ahead and check your PPC reports, do you have any keywords in your title that don’t generate sales? Remove them. Are there sales generating keywords on your PPC report that you don’t have in your title? Add them. You have a few weeks before Prime Day 2024, so now’s the time to do some A/B testing to see which title gets the most clicks.

Optimizing Main Image

While we’re on the topic of clicks. How’s your main image looking? Does it demonstrate your USP? (within image TOS). Does it look the same as everyone else? Or, if it looks different, is there anything about its difference that shoppers may run a mile from? Many Sellers use Pickfu to find out which image has the most appeal. But for real time data that is based on real Amazon shoppers, an A/B test on Amazon is also a good idea.

Ensure your main image is high resolution and optimized for zoom. This from Jungle Scout

The optimal zoom experience for detail pages requires files to be 1600px or larger on the longest side. Zoom has been shown to help enhance sales. If you are unable to meet this requirement, the smallest your file can be for zoom is 1000px, and the smallest your file can be for the site is 500px.

In other words. Make your images 1600 x 1600px or larger. But no larger than 10,000px. Always start with at least 10MB photo where possible. And make sure your final “ready-to-load” image is 10MB or less. I always try to make sure my main image designs are 10MB, but if starting photos are low resolution - so too will the final main image. Your main image will be as good or as bad as your photographer. Ensure your product takes up 85% of the main image.

Make sure your product offering is displayed clearly and in its entirety. I have a client selling a gift set right now, but only features the main product in the image and not the gift set. Interestingly, A/B testing is showing no difference in performance between the gift set vs single item image. But its early days. And this again highlights the need to split test. No need to reshoot your product, or remake images if it doesn’t even need it!

Optimize Features (AKA Bullets) and Plain Text Description

There is a ton of information in previous blogs that talk about what to say in your Amazon Product Description. And for a more indepth look, you can check out my Product Description Masterclass which walks you through the main things you need to say in your listing and why.

But in a nutshell, an optimized set of bullets should:

• Answer any and all customer questions. So check your Q&A and see if anything is missing from your listing.

• Discuss all major features and the benefit to the customer. But a warning - too many people are doing this in a generic way. Learn through my Product Description Masterclass how to make your listing sound less generic and more compelling.

• I like to keep my bullets at 300chars. Not to short, not too long. But a basic rule of thumb is to say what needs to be said in as fewer words as possible. I have customers that desire 500 char bullets and some that want 100. You do you! Just don’t bore or confuse your customer with your words.

• Make sure your SEO is on point. Include as many phrase form keywords as possible. Include mostly keywords you’re most likely to make sales from. In other words, if you are selling a Pink Sweater, don’t include the word Green Sweater as a way of trying to get more traffic. We want sales, not bounces.

• Check that your copywriting doesn’t sound weird because of the SEO. It still needs to be readable.

• HOT TIP: Ensure your bullets read at a Grade 6 level. This is easier for people to digest.

• Don’t mislead. Misleading copy can boost sales for sure - but you’ll increase negative reviews also, making your Prime Day results pointless.

And if you’re a Seller without A+ Content, apply these same principles to your Plain Description, plus:

• Create a well-crafted “mini sales letter” style of copy. Something that brings the reader along on the journey

• Include bullet lists (without using HTML) to break up content

• Use <br> code to break up the copy into paragraphs

• Use all available real estate. Write your copy to 1999 chars including code. As a guide, I simply write to 1850-1900 chars without code.

If you’re an A+ PREMIUM SELLER

• Keep your plain text section short. 500 chars or less. Your plain description will show up near your A+ content, and it is unlikely a shopper will read all your content, and then read 2000 chars of plain text.

• Even though you’re using 500 chars, still consider <br> code to increase readability

Optimize A+ Content

• Follow the same advice for main image quality. 10MB photos to start with, 10MB file to load to Amazon. Increase pixels to increase the quality on Amazon (eg if your image is 970x600px you can 3x it to 2910x1800px) But don’t go over 5000px as Amazon won’t accept this.

• Ensure all the information in your bullets/plain description is ALSO in A+ content. Yes, repeat yourself! You will never know which part of your listing a customer has seen, so it’s a good idea to duplicate in case they didn’t see your bullets. On some mobile product descriptions the bullets are actually hidden behind a drop down link! They’re very difficult to spot. Read more A+ Content Need-To-Knows Here.

• A+ Old Skool vs A+ New Skool vs A+ Premium. Which is best? Do some A/B testing now! Old style A+ content is what we all used to do when A+ content was first introduced as EBC. It was pictures with text underneath. As EBC evolved, people started creating infographic style content. And nowadays, if you have more than 5 A+ pages published + a brand story you can use the newer A+ Premium Modules. One of my clients split test between old style + new style and discovered that the old style (images with text boxes) converted better! Now, he’s split testing that vs A+ Premium. The takeaway here - don’t be blinded by shiny objects, sometimes old works better. A/B test to see which style is best for you.

• Don’t include too many details per module. Best practice is one image one idea. And if you’re doing an infographic with a number of dot points, keep it to around 5. You want your shopper to comprehend everything, easily.

• When including infographics, keep the writing clear. Amazon will tell you to change infographics that won’t show up well on mobile.

• And just like any piece of copy make sure you include features, benefits and other important things. You can learn more about those things here.

• Include video and ensure that you cover all features and benefits. Show the product actually being used as this is the one thing that copy and images can’t convey.

• Add alt-tags to each image with your main keywords in phrase form

• A+ text content isn’t indexed for Amazon, but it is for Google - so definitely include some text based modules. Don’t make the entire thing inforgraphic.

Optimize Your Carousel Images

Did you know that on mobile devices some listings show the carousel images first. And I don’t mean as a horizontal scroll. On some listings the shopper will have to vertical scroll through 7 carousel images before they even reach the first bullet point! That’s a huge amount of sales real estate going to waste if your carousel images aren’t optimized. This often over-looked section needs work on approximately 40% of the listings that I see during research.

• Optimize your main image as discussed above

• Include a selling message on each image. A headline and subhead or headline and short body copy.

• As described earlier, repeat yourself on each section of the listing. Everything that is in your bullets needs to be in your carousel

• Keep infographics easy to read

• Imagine, if the carousel was the only thing the shopper ever saw on your listing what would you need to say on those images?

• Make sure all images are high resolution (read main image info again)

• Add alt-tags to each image with your main keywords in phrase form

Optimized PPC & Off-Site Campaigns

While I have some knowledge in PPC and off-site traffic there are other people who know way more! But before I leave you with them, for your Prime Day Checklist, did you know that 19% of all Amazon traffic starts with Google? That’s 1/5 of your potential buyers! As Kevin King mentions in his latest BDSN Newsletter:

More and more sellers are starting to shift their advertising efforts to Google Ads lately to help boost Amazon sales

He also discusses how Amazon Sellers can get Google Ads for free by taking advantage of a little-known program Google has been running for over 20 year. It’s not my place to talk about this, so you can Sign up to the BDSN newsletter to find out more.

And as for PPC. If you haven’t already, download the Prime Day Checklist by Helium 10

But a little tip from me. Amazon loves the customer x listing x PPC triad. When your shoppers search the same keywords that are in your listing and in your PPC … AND they purchase from that interaction Amazon gives you a big thumbs up for “Customer Experience”. So make sure you’re not all over the place with keywords in your listing that don’t match your PPC. And make sure you are focusing on keywords that you are most likely to win the sale from.

And my 2c worth on advertising. I’ve heard whispers that Amazon may be looking into demographic targeting. A welcome tool that has been used since the dawn of time in advertising (and I do mean, the dawn of time!). But in the meantime, if your product is very niched, consider advertising on instagram, snapchat and tiktok. And in some niches, Pinterest! By targeting your exact buyer instead of tire kickers, you can lower your ACOS and boost profit.

In Summary

Prime Day is a highly anticipated day for all Amazon Sellers, with people like Tim Sanders of Private Label Masters bringing in $400k in one day! I’m proud to have been the writer for 32 of his Product Descriptions and love sharing intel with Sellers like you about how to optimize your listings so you can succeed at Prime Day, too. And while you may not be bringing in those kinds of numbers, any bump in sales on Prime Day 2024 is a huge boost! So go ahead and optimize those product offerings and listings now, do a little A/B testing and start some PPC to maximise results on the day. You don’t have long, so get started now.