With the rise of online shopping, and omnipresence of platforms such as Amazon, Walmart and Target, the pressure to outperform past promotional events is building. Forget Black Friday, according to Illicit Elixirs’ co-founder Jason Gaboriau, Amazon Prime Day events have “become a pop culture moment.”
Ahead of tomorrow’s start of the Fall Prime Day event, we spoke with Gaboriau about his experiences with the biannual promotional event.
“A sorta ‘Black Friday’ for us all,” Gaboriau said about the event, which drew $14.2 billion in sales during its July edition, an 11% year-over-year increase. “The discovery and discounting can have a viral effect and is a high dopamine moment.”
Leading up to and during this year’s summer Prime Day, the “dopamine-boosting” beverage brand tapped into numerous trends, while also launching its first “Talent Tastemakers” SKU, Naughty Behavior Citrus Flavor, alongside singer and actress Bella Thorne. It also discounted products by 50% with the aim of driving brand awareness while its retail distribution footprint “catches up.”
“We knew we wanted a citrus flavor but it had to be more fun and flavorful than just orange. Working with our amazing in house operations and the flavor experts at Sensient, we came up with a Blood Orange Prickly Pear combination,” said Gaboriau. “We feel it is the perfect combination of uniqueness, bold fruity flavor and unexpected fun that represents both Bella herself and the Illicit brand.”
The co-branded SKU ended up paying off: The brand claims to have more than doubled its total purchases and units sold in July compared to the month before the two-day-long sales bonanza. That momentum didn’t drop off either when the bargains began to wane.
According to Gaboriau, while the brand’s sales dipped slightly as discount pricing was eliminated, its unit sales continued to climb 10%. Those results came as the brand leveraged organic social media and email campaigns, but did not engage in any additional paid advertising beyond the bounds of Prime Day. Amazon experts recommend allocating twice your normal ad budget for the days during the event in addition to steadily increasing ad dollars days in advance as consumers begin browsing and adding items to cart
The co-branded release also outperformed Illicit’s five other SKUs in July and continues to hold its #2 spot on Amazon. While the innovation strategy won’t remain exclusive to the sales event, Gaboriau said the brand will continue to innovate with “playful pop culture icons and creative communities.”
Ahead of this week’s event, Illicit Elixirs added Buy With Prime to its Shopify site to further simplify the path to purchase for its customers; it will also include a 30% discount on products as it works to “train our consumers to invest at our normal prices and smaller overall discounting,” Gaboriau detailed.
With the second event of the year, Illicit will also re-employ many of its original tactics, including email marketing during the event (Illicit anticipates sending 3 to 4 during the two-day window), extending deals to drive trial, leaning on its Amazon rep for pricing and promotional guidance and utilizing its own team including focusing all effort on Prime Day promotions as well as assessing their own buying behavior and embracing those results as an “informal focus group.”
“Our Amazon strategy includes treating Amazon like any other brick and mortar retailer. The idea was to take advantage of that extra traffic while people are ‘shopping the aisles’ on Prime Day and incentivizing them to put Illicit Elixirs in their cart,” said Gaboriau. “We are hoping that the combination of the fun event and a motivating price point will bring folks into the brand to try us and love us.”