How to choose the right products for your Prime Day audience strategy

Prime Day can drive a surge of traffic and sales, but the most important decision happens before the event starts: which products you choose to put on deal.

Prime Day deal strategies should focus on product selection, not just discounts

When you're planning Prime Day, it's easy to fall back on the obvious choices: best sellers, hero SKUs, products with enough margin to support a discount, and items Amazon is already recommending for event participation. Those are all important inputs, and they can absolutely help drive event volume. But if you want to maximize Prime Day's impact beyond a few-day sales spike, you need to ask a different question:

Am I choosing deal products that I can build audience strategies around that will bring in high-value shoppers who keep buying after the event is over?

To do that, you need to move beyond focusing on top-line sales velocity. You can use Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to identify your point of market entry (POME) ASINs (products are typically thought of as the products that attract new shoppers), and then go one level deeper. With Perpetua's Consumer Long-Term Value (CLTV) dashboard, you can see which ASINs drive new-to-brand purchasers AND which ones actually keep those customers coming back to your brand. Those insights fuel both smarter product selection and stronger audience strategies before, during and long after the event.

Why this matters now

Prime Day calls for large media investments, and competition for visibility is intense. If you're spending heavily on media, you need to make sure those dollars are going behind products that actually drive long-term purchase behavior, not just a quick sales spike. The sellers who win are the ones deciding early which products deserve deals so they can plan their media investment around smarter audience strategies and more effective budget allocation.

Access to behavioral data changes how you select products

You've long had visibility into new-to-brand product sales. What you haven't always had is a clear view of what happens after that first purchase. AMC's five-year retail purchase lookback window changes that. Instead of just knowing which ASIN drove a new-to-brand purchase, you can now understand what those shoppers did next and what similar cohorts have done over time. Through Perpetua's POME report within the CLTV dashboard, you can see which products:

• Bring in new-to-brand shoppers consistently

• Lead to stronger repeat purchase behavior

• Open the door to a broader portfolio journey

• Can convert during a high-traffic event without depending on the deepest discount

Prime Day naturally attracts deal-seeking behavior. Some shoppers will be one-and-done buyers. Others will repurchase, subscribe, trade up, cross-shop into adjacent categories, or build larger baskets over time.

By analyzing historical shopper behavior through the lens of long-term value, you can identify which products attracted lower-value deal seekers during past Prime Day events and which ones brought in shoppers who actually came back to buy again. The question evolves from “What products do we put on deal?” to “What products will we make our highest investments in that will bring in shoppers worth acquiring?"

Tip: With Perpetua's CLTV dashboard, isolate shoppers acquired during last year's Prime Day dates and track what they did afterward. You'll see which products drove only event-day conversion and which ones brought in shoppers with real long-term potential. That's the foundation for both product selection and audience strategy heading into this year's event.

Your best Prime Day deal products might not be your best sellers

One of the biggest mistakes operators make is assuming the product with the highest ROAS, strongest sales, or broadest event appeal is automatically the right Prime Day deal product. Sometimes it is. Often it is not.

For example: imagine you're deciding between a large refill bundle and a lower-priced starter kit. On the surface, the refill bundle looks better: higher average order value, stronger event-day return. But your POME analysis shows that new shoppers overwhelmingly enter through the starter kit, and those shoppers later come back to buy refills, additional scents, or adjacent products. In that case, the starter kit is the better product to put on deal. This product is bringing in shoppers who will build value over time.

Once you choose the right products, make sure they're ready to win

Product selection is step one. Then you need to pressure-test the basics:

• Is the PDP strong enough to convert new-to-brand shoppers when Prime Day traffic hits?

• Is imagery clean and compliant?

• Are titles, bullets, and A+ content communicating the product's value quickly?

• Is content structured clearly for both shoppers and AI-driven discovery?

• Can inventory timelines support the deal?

• Does the product meet discount and eligibility thresholds for the deal type you're pursuing?

That last point matters operationally. Amazon's deal programs carry different discount requirements, so even if an ASIN is strategically right from a long-term value perspective, it still has to work financially within the deal structure.

You can also use AMC insights beyond just media planning. Shopper behavioral insights can inform how you merchandise the event across PDPs, A+ content, and your Brand Store so you're not treating every deal ASIN as a standalone conversion moment. Used well, these insights help position products within the broader shopping experience to support stronger long-term value.

Make sure your media investments are efficient before and during the event

Now that you know the right products, the next step is making your media investments work as efficiently as possible before and during Prime Day. This is where AMC Audience strategies and intraday bidding become your efficiency levers.

Tip: Using Perpetua's CLTV insights, build precise audiences around shoppers whose behaviors match your highest-value buyers. Create lookalike audiences based on frequent shoppers, high-value cohorts, or promising new-to-brand segments, then layer those audiences into your Sponsored Ads and Amazon DSP campaigns supporting your deal products.

The smartest Prime Day strategies improve with every event

It's easy to repeat the same product selection logic across tentpole events without learning from what actually happened. When you use POME and CLTV insights to decide which products go on deal, then measure what those shoppers do afterward, you create a learning loop:

• See which ASINs brought in high-value shoppers

• Identify which ones drove weaker downstream performance

• Refine your product selection and audience strategy from these insights

Over time, this moves you from a rinse-and-repeat tentpole strategy to a proactive one. Your product selection gets better. Your audience strategy gets better. Your outcomes get better.

Prime Day starts before the event page goes live

The most important Prime Day decisions are made now while there's still time to choose the right products, build the right offer strategy, and support those products with the inventory, content, and audiences they need.

Before you submit deals, take a step back and ask whether your shortlist is based on habit or on shopper value. If it's just high-volume products, you may be missing the bigger opportunity.

By using Perpetua’s POME report and CLTV dashboard, you build a strategy that drives effective new-to-brand growth while maximizing long-term customer value. And that's how you win Prime Day.