Black Friday & Cyber Monday Success, Amazon 2021
Discounts and Sponsored Brand Ads bring Black Friday & Cyber Monday Success to Many Brands Selling on Amazon
Amazon’s prioritizes 2 promotional periods above all others: Prime Day(s) and Thanksgiving – Black Friday – Cyber Monday (5-day period).
During these periods, Amazon guides sellers on what types of promotions and discounts to offer customers. By following Amazon’s guidelines, sellers benefit from the free marketing from Amazon that shows discounted offers to Amazon shoppers on a much wider scale than normal.
We have even had clients featured, for free, on Amazon’s Instagram account during these periods. This is free marketing to a huge customer base.
Prime Day 2021 and BF/CM 2021 was our first post-pandemic look into customer behavior during these huge promotional events. What did we learn?
1. Amazon customers expect a certain level of discount
During these big promotional periods, Amazon requires a 20% discount to be considered for additional promotion. Amazon knows, from historical data, what kinds of offers Amazon customers expect during these periods.
Offering too small of a discount, or no discount at all, will result in very little additional sales during this period.
2. Targeting Prime shoppers directly is almost always a good idea
Amazon prioritizes the Prime shopper experience over all others. During Prime Day in 2021, we noticed that Prime Exclusive Discounts outperformed regular Sale Price and Coupon promotions, even when they didn’t outperform during normal non-promotional periods. This is because Prime customers are much more valuable to Amazon than a normal customer, due to their frequent repeat purchases on Amazon.
It is important to specifically target Prime Customers during any Amazon promotional periods.
3. Sponsored Brand Ads are underpriced and very effective.
While every seller on Amazon seems to be aggressively bidding on keyword search terms using typical Sponsored Products ads, we have found a surprising lack of competition in Sponsored Brand ads. This may be because only a minority of sellers have access to these tools, while larger brands may not (yet) see the importance.
There are two types of Sponsored Brand Ads that are crushing it in Q4 2021:
Video Ads
We’ve seen compelling research that shows that almost no customer scrolls past the video ad on a search results page on Amazon. It grabs all the attention once a customer scrolls to it. We are seeing bids for video ads costing about the same, per click, as typical Sponsored Product ads, while seeing CTRs (click-thru rate) that are 10 times better, with comparable conversion rates.
Sellers should be creating a ton of video content to use on Amazon search advertising. Each SKU or product line should have individual videos highlighting the features of the products. We even recommend multiple videos per SKU/Product line for each distinct customer segment we are targeting.
Create video content specifically to use as Video ads, for each SKU/Product Line and each targeted customer segment.
Headline Brand Ads (Banner Ads)
Lately, it seems that these banner ads are working better than almost anything else we’ve been running over the past several months. The cost-per-click is very reasonable, and these ads work to show off a larger segment of your catalog and brand to potential customers.
The best part: the ad is at the top of search and is the first thing a customer sees when searching. This is very valuable real estate that you want to grab for every valuable keyword on your keyword list. And they work even better during the large Amazon promotional periods.
With Amazon’s continued focus on brands and brand stores, Headline Brand Ads will only become more effective.
During Prime Day 2021, we tested a lot of different advertising and promotions options, to see what would work and what was not worth it. We took our learning from Prime Day and applied those lessons to Black Friday-Cyber Monday, showing huge year over year growth for many of our clients. We plan to play the same playbook going forward until we see evidence to change.
As always, Amazon is constantly changing and all of the above may be obsolete at any time in the future. But for now, we’ll continue to do what’s working and keep an eye on what will work next.
Petros Neofotistos
Petros lives on the cutting edge of e-commerce marketing and data analytics. He helps clients build strategies to target and retarget customer segments that lead to sales. He can take the overwhelming amount of business data available to brands, find the important information, and apply that information to business and marketing decisions with a tight feedback loop.