Prime Day’s Done-Now What?
If you’re like many brands and businesses right now, you’re probably taking a moment to relax and catch your breath after months of strategizing and preparation for Prime Day, the largest online retail day of the year so far. But before you either put up your feet or switch gears to Q3/Q4 programs and plans, make sure you’re not missing a critical learning opportunity from all of that work. Many businesses do.
Regardless of a runaway Prime Day success or missed sales targets, Monday morning (or whenever morning) quarterbacking everything that happened, is an absolute must. The next 2-4 weeks should be about analyzing the data (whether your team manages that or you work with a specialist). What worked? What didn’t? Here’s a quick overview of to-do’s and questions to ask of your performance from a best practices point of view.
Look for Short and Long Term Learnings
The data doesn’t lie. If you planned well before Prime Day, if you set up benchmarks and levers to test, now is the time to start reviewing. But review for short term and long-term learnings. Starting 2-3 days after Prime Day is ideal. In this window, you should be looking at initial results: sales figures, volume sold, and Marketing costs. Ask the big picture questions – what worked? Did couponing engage consumers better than a Lightning Deal? Which items, which listings created the best click-thru and why?
Your overall brand may also experience a halo effect from Prime Day. Organic sales of your brands products, not even subject to Prime Day discounts or promotions, could cause an increased lift due to the attention your Prime Day activities being focused on your brand. It’s also critically important to understand if your Prime Day promotions affected organic search results for those products versus your non-promoted products.
Once you’ve looked at these short-term findings: brand halo, organic search placement, and overall sales lift, it’s time to do longer-range data analysis. Looking at the individual levers that caused the best consumer engagement, and ultimately drove clicks to checkout. Measure every lever used for every product and determine the cost per result. You’re going to want to understand where you saw the most effective & efficient results, when and why. Those learnings will help shape your strategy for 2020 but also could become key factors in your Black Friday and Cyber Monday planning.
Combine Man and Machine for Leading Edge Understanding
Until recently this kind of data analysis was entirely manual. But over the last few years AI programs and analysis have grown quickly. Machine learning can aggregate far more data points than ever before and are really beginning to shape the way we can tackle the planning process and the challenge of understanding the outcomes. AI is helping us understand not just the old and obvious data points but also find new patterns and determine previously unseen KPI’s that can drive real success. For the best possible results, combine AI data mining for next level learnings and a specialist analysis team for comprehensive strategic plan development.
Embrace the Failures
In analyzing what worked and what didn’t, we can learn just as much from failure as success. The digital retail landscape is unique in this way. Seeing and understanding why a lever didn’t engage a customer, why a promotion timed out without converting into sales can redefine the strategic road ahead. But look too for perhaps the smaller decisions, the unexpected misses that can be improved – product listings copy, imagery, price point strategy and the many other variables that drive the all-important conversion.
For more insights on post-Prime Day analysis or help with project planning, talk to our Channel Key team.
