Disclosure: you bet your bottom dollar that every Amazon link in this post is an affiliate link, for which Trust Insights earns a commission on anything you purchase.
Amazon’s next Prime Day is almost upon us, and we wanted to make sure marketers like you have everything you need to make the most of it, especially for those who participate as Amazon Associates (affiliates) or influencers.
Prime Day is massive, with businesses selling over a billion dollars on Amazon for the self-created shopping holiday. This year, thanks to Amazon attracting thousands of new Prime customers with a free-to-Prime-members Taylor Swift concert the week before, Prime Day stands a chance to be the largest ever.
Not an Amazon Associate? You can join the program for free here.
The Prime Day Strategy
For anyone who isn’t a participant in the Amazon Associates program, the basic premise is simple: use an affiliate link from Amazon, and you get credit for purchases made by people who visit your link and then shop on Amazon. Here’s the most valuable part: that extends to any purchases made in that shopping session, not just the item you linked. It’s an opportunity to monetize the other interests of your audience.
Thus, the principal strategy for any Amazon marketer on Prime Day is to get your audience to Amazon through any of your affiliate links. Logically, we’d want to know when to do this, what to promote to maximize the likelihood that someone will click through, and where/how to do our promotions.
Predict
We’ll begin with timing. Amazon announced in its pressroom the exact dates and times of Prime Day on June 25, 2019. They timed it perfectly with search interest in Prime Day, which we see below:
Here’s the interesting and awkward part: an awful lot of marketers started heading out of the office that week, based on our forecast of when people were searching for their out of office settings:
Thus, marketers might not have been fully prepared to leverage the power of the Amazon announcement. So, how do you catch up?
Understand
With thousands of new Prime members thanks to the very clever marketing of a Taylor Swift live concert, which was announced June 27 (a week after they announced Prime Day), you have no shortage of audience to work with. The next question is, what should you be marketing, especially as an Amazon Associate, to maximize your profitability for Prime Day? You should share the items most likely for someone to click on.
What are those items?
Using the AHREFS SEO tool, combined with our own custom software, we analyzed the best performing pages on Amazon’s website. From the top 24,981 pages, we discovered these top 10 specific products were most likely to be clicked on, based on existing clickthrough history:
- Apple’s AirPods with Charging Case
- Amazon Music Unlimited (regular)
- From House to Home, Karina’s Journey
- Amazon Echo Dot 3rd Generation
- Bose QuietComfort 35 II Noise Cancelling Headphones
- Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
- The free Amazon Storytime Alexa skill
- Acer 24″ HD Gaming Monitor
- Amazon Elements Baby Wipes for Sensitive Skin
- Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning
Of course, as is the case every year, Amazon’s own devices like the Echo, Kindle, etc. are discounted enough to be appealing, so be certain to include those standbys as well. You’ll want to add in the all-new Kindle and the Echo Show 5.
What do you do with these items? Put them in all your promotional content – email, social media posts, paid ads, featured products on your storefront – whatever you’re eligible for in your Amazon Associates account.
Act
Now that we know what products to focus on which will likely convince our audiences to engage with something – anything – that will bring them to Amazon, we next need to look at what methods and channels are likely to help us accomplish this.
For this, we’ll take our SEO, social, and click data and have IBM Watson analyze it with its all new AutoAI capability to determine what predicts clickthroughs from our data:
Based on Watson’s assessment, Facebook shares is an excellent, strong predictor of the likelihood of a clickthrough; thus, we should make our first marketing priority Facebook as a channel. After Facebook comes a feature engineered from the data itself, the type of Amazon marketing.
In this case, it’s people who have set up Amazon Stores pages, meaning pages on Amazon selling items under their brand. Stores pages are an important part of Amazon marketing – they provide not only a landing page for external visitors but also a page that can be used with Amazon’s native advertising system.
Other indicators showed a weak relationship/predictive capability for clickthroughs, so for now, focus on building out your Amazon Storefront (quickly!) and using Facebook to market your Prime Day offering.
Prime Opportunity
So, to summarize:
- You and your competitors may have missed the marketing opportunity around Prime Day initially – make up the time now.
- Promote products that are most likely to get clicks, based on existing data from top pages on Amazon.
- Use Facebook and Amazon Stores to reach the audience most likely to click through.
Use this data to ensure your Prime Day offerings are as successful as possible. Good luck, marketers!
Want to get ahead of the trends for upcoming major retail events like Singles Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc.? Contact us today for your custom report.
Shameless plug: need some marketing resources to share in your Prime Day marketing? Trust Insights books can help round out your recommendation lists:
- B2B Marketing Confessions
- The Marketing Over Coffee Playbook
- AI for Marketers, 2nd Edition
- Leading Innovation
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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.
Hey, nice article about “Amazon affiliate marketers”. I will definitely follow these for my company to give the best possible services to my customers. Keep on adding this type of valuable content again and again. Hope to read more from you. Thank you!