June ‘24 Monthly Roundup
This June roundup is a mix of Prime Day preparations, holiday shopping insights, and brand-building strategies, with nuggets like:
✅ Amazon's shift to personalized Prime Day deals and its benefits for both customers and advertisers.
✅ Key areas to find more profitability on Amazon through advertising, retail readiness, and operations.
✅ The impact of TV advertising on brand awareness and market performance.
✅ Insights into holiday shopping behaviors and forecasts for the 2024 holiday season.
Ready? Let's get GO-ing.
From the GO Team:
Prime Day Deal Personalization
Amazon shared that deals will be more personalized this year compared to previous Prime Days. They are transitioning from presenting deals at the aggregated Deal ID level (each containing anywhere between 1-20K products) to an individual product-based customer experience on both mobile and desktop. The goal is to provide 2 key benefits:
1) Improving the Customer Shopping Experience: Showing product-level deals will streamline the shopping experience and add greater functionality, such as:
2) Technical Benefits: This change also offers multi-year technical advantages, such as the ability to scale and support more concurrent deals in the Amazon store simultaneously and reducing the misclassification of deals.
For advertisers, this personalization will require some additional lift to ensure all aspects of their Prime Day strategy capitalize on these benefits. Greater focus on performance tracking and optimization opportunities throughout the event will be essential.
Hunting for profitability on Amazon is complex, and it can be overwhelming if brands are unsure where to start. When working with our clients, we typically review 3 main areas to unlock new opportunities:
📣 Advertising
📃 Retail Readiness
📦 Operations
GO works with a distributor client that enables 75 brands to sell their products on Amazon.CA despite those brands lacking a physical presence in Canada or the means to support Amazon in Canada. Our team designed a full-service strategy that supported each brand’s retail, content and advertising. While it was a massive undertaking with so many brands, we were thrilled to see the results:
Posts by others that stood out and sparked our curiosity:
Continuing with the Prime Day prep content, EMARKETER shared a chart of recent survey data showing how US adults are trying to make the most out of Prime Day this year.
The data highlights the high level of intent among shoppers going into Prime Day, signaling opportunities for brands to fill their retargeting pools for campaigns during and post-event.
The chart above, sourced from Skai ’s recently published Prime Day playbook, also includes an interesting category analysis across average daily spend, CPC, average daily advertiser sales, and ROAS, comparing the Prime Day averages with the 30 days prior.
While not necessarily new information, it’s always interesting to see external data across categories for comparison.
How did your brand perform last year compared to these metrics?
What are your expectations for this year?
Derek Majewski , Sr Partner Development Manager at Amazon Buy with Prime , shared the new Buy with Prime Calculator to help crunch some quick numbers and explore the possible lift. He added these tips from his experience:
"Plugging in an existing Amazon ASIN made it easy to start, as it auto inputted the selling price and weight/dimensions from Amazon. If something needed to be changed, I could easily adjust it.
I was able to toggle the UPO and see how shipping fees changed as units went up. Generally, the per unit fulfillment cost drops as UPO increases.
I could change some of my assumptions (units sold per month, revenue uplift percentage) and see my net proceeds with and without Buy with Prime. The calculator also shows how the calculations are made, in case I wanted to validate the math.
Recommended by LinkedIn
The calculator gave me an overview of the all-in Buy with Prime fees (Prime service fee, fulfillment fee) which includes pick, pack, ship, and the cost of returns."
Impacts of Higher Share-of-Voice via TV
With Amazon Prime Video’s advertising launch this year and forecasts anticipating Amazon’s ad-supported video-on-demand viewership to dominate the space through 2028, Elena Jasper ’s post about the impact of TV advertising felt timely. Her post offers some helpful context and additional reading, with key takeaways:
“We have seen repeatedly that our clients with higher SOVs than competitors on TV tend to outpace them in the market.”
“...a simple reason [TV] advertising works is because, in most cases, the more people who know about your brand, the better. That includes in-market and out-of-market customers.”
“If your competition is on TV, and you’re not, you risk losing customers to them.”
Elena was referring to broader TV advertising (and be sure to check out Elena’s original post for more caveats) but her post aligns well with the early opportunities with Prime Video.
Advertising on Prime Video may not be a fit for you now, but its accessibility to all advertisers and the affordable CPMs we’re seeing make it worth a look.
Holiday Shopping Behavior Insights
While we’re on the cusp of another Prime Day, it’s hard to imagine beyond it. But Salsify released a consumer report about holiday shopping behaviors with insights for brands already looking to the holiday season.
A key takeaway is that across generations, a strong percentage of people plan to start their shopping in October and November, before the US Thanksgiving holiday.
To pair with that, EMarketer released two additional forecasts:
1) E-commerce sales for the 2024 holiday season are projected to reach $271.58B, up 9.5% from 2023.
2) They also listed shared an anticipation of e-commerce sales among the Cyber 5 shopping days in order of most sales to least (in Billions):
Colin Lewis , Director at @Retail Media Works, shared a one-page marketing plan that is powerfully simple yet comprehensive, making it a great brand-building reminder for this roundup.
With so many opportunities and tools available to build a brand (and the number will only continue to expand), it’s easy to get distracted by the options in front of us and lose sight of the bigger picture.
If you haven’t done so in a while, step back and evaluate your holistic marketing plan with Collin’s resource to ensure each aspect of your plan is still aligned with your priorities.
Are the main things still the main things?
Do all aspects of your marketing plan ladder up to your main priorities?
And, maybe more importantly, does your broader team understand their role in the plan and how their responsibilities impact overall success?
Embrace Failure as a Path to Growth
We often see failure as a dead end, but it's a treasure trove of lessons. Each setback holds valuable insights that can fuel growth and future success.
Challenge: Turn failure into your stepping stone to success.
This month, take a recent failure and find three lessons within it. Write them down and think about how they can guide your next steps. Share your insights with a colleague or mentor and commit to applying at least one lesson.
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