Getting Ready for Amazon Prime Day
It is official. Amazon Prime Day’s big sales event will be held on July 12 and 13 beginning at 3 am ET for 48 hours, spanning across several countries. Last year’s event was the biggest two-day sales period for third-party sellers in the company’s history. Online spending during the event surpassed $11 billion, a 6.1% increase compared to Prime Day 2020 (Link).
The internet is overflowing with tips and tricks for shoppers to make the most of the day by planning purchases ahead of time and making lists in advance so that the moment the virtual doors open, they are not wasting any time researching but rather going straight to “Add to Cart” and “Check Out” without a moment of hesitation.
What does this mean for you?
As a supplier on Amazon, you need to be “event-fit” ready and this includes being Seen by consumers as they peruse search results and fulfill orders seamlessly. Your product will be fighting for attention in the sea of products available. To succeed on Amazon, confirming your top-selling products have compliant product pages and follow best practices for managing e-commerce products is important, but can also be a real pain. (Read more in our e-book, “Digital Retail Can Be a Real Challenge: Ten E-Commerce Pain Points We Can Help You Overcome”.)
Great then, what’s next?
It’s all about the image.
When shoppers visit Amazon on Prime Day: they’re in a hurry and more than usual because of their fear of missing out. The scarcity effect of a time-limited event heightens the shopper behavior we already witness daily. Remember that on a normal day, you only had 1 second to impress. Imagine how much worse this is on Prime day when consumers already did research in advance.
A significant driver of being Seen and Selected to get into a customer’s virtual cart is in your product visual. Humans process visual content and pictorial imagery 60,000 times faster than any text and 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual. This year, with the anticipation of Prime Day expanding the bargain pool to include household goods, it is incumbent on manufacturers to make sure that their product detail pages (PDP) include compelling images that increase the potential for sales conversion. As Henry Ford said, “Nothing happens until somebody sells something.”
For all that work, energy, and love you put into the description and prose on the PDP, within seconds of getting to that page, 70% of shoppers are already scrolling, not digesting fully each word. Our research has shown that consumers see an image, maybe the headline, and that’s about it.
So, make sure you highlight the Benefits so your product gets Selected and put into that virtual check-out cart.
Yeah, but we already test images.
Then you’re in the top 1% and congratulations!
However, for most of you digital marketers and e-commerce managers, you’re juggling so much from AB testing to a massive image library that change so often, you cannot possibly apply any rigorous testing to it. We understand, it’s why (again), we wrote our e-book: “Digital Retail Can Be a Real Challenge: Ten E-Commerce Pain Points We Can Help You Overcome”.
Many CPG brands have an image bank with tens of thousands of approved images to use on e-tailer sites. And frankly, if the image meets the threshold for Amazon, Walmart, or Carrefour, these images will have to suffice as is.
Most will take the CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) as a proxy for the equity of the image. That is a shortcut. It leads to huge gaps in truly understanding if that image works and for you, millions of dollars lost.
From guessing to predicting to converting
The speed of the e-commerce world is extremely fast paced, the scale is enormous, and it is ever-changing. Therefore, measuring the effectiveness of product images on the digital shelf needs to also match in responsiveness, quickness, and effectiveness as the world it’s playing in.
Flash.PDP™ draws on past learnings and applies algorithms to predict an e-commerce image’s likelihood of success quickly, effectively, and effortlessly within its category. The tech platform loads in the product images from e-tailer sites such as Amazon and then the AI does all the data crunching. This AI powered platform automatically evaluates PDP images to determine which ones are high performing and which ones are deficient and need replacing.
Digital marketers sit back as reports are provided automatically and directly into your inbox with clear, easy-to-understand actionable scores that highlight which images to use more often and which to change so that your images are working just as hard as the rest of your team. From there, just watch the conversion rates increase.
So, is your brand in prime condition? Not sure? Contact us today for a free demo today and Happy Prime Day!
THE AUTHOR
Adrian Sanger helps insight start-ups, scale-ups, and established agencies bring winning products to market. He is a Director at eFluence™, the technology division of Behaviorally. He has helped in the build of Flash.PDP™, from the very beginning and now works with clients to shape the program and realize the value. He is a classically trained researcher, assisting C-level Insight teams in tackling their biggest growth challenges, including finding market opportunity, elevating their product strategy, and positioning, and developing winning go-to-market. Connect with Adrian on LinkedIn.
