Lessons From Amazon’s Prime Day (Jim Karrh On Marketing)

Jim Karrh

Were you “primed” on July 15?

In case you missed it, Amazon showcased its Amazon Prime subscription service ($99 per year) with a daylong series of flash deals and special sales for Prime members.

These days you can buy nearly anything through Amazon, and the top “Prime Day” sellers from around the world (excluding Amazon devices) reflected the breadth of product offerings. According to Amazon, the top seller in the U.S. was “Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy.” Canadians, responding to a half-price deal, bought Huggies diapers more than any other single item. The top seller in Japan was a green smoothie mix. For both the Germans and Austrians, Croc sandals were tops. Perhaps surprisingly, in France the top seller was the Monopoly board game.

Naturally, Amazon’s big event creation was also a juicy opportunity for some consumers to voice disappointment, skepticism or plain ol’ snark on Twitter; the hashtag #PrimeDayFail was at one point trending more strongly than was the official #PrimeDay. According to a report in Adweek, negative tweets spiked 241 percent from July 14 to July 15, while positive tweets rose 108 percent. Still, the number of positive tweets was nearly twice that of negative ones.

But if the goal was to win business rather than win Twitter, then the Amazon brass appears satisfied. In its own press release from July 17, Amazon announced that it sold more units on Prime Day than on Black Friday 2014 (which had been its “biggest Black Friday ever”). The company sold more than 34 million items worldwide, which equated to 398 items ordered per second. The company also had more new members try Prime worldwide on July 15 than on any other day in its history. In that press release, Amazon’s country manager for Canada was quoted as saying, “We can’t wait to do it again next year.”

If you missed Prime Day 2015, there’s always next year. The team in Canada might want to get a head start on restocking Huggies.

What can the rest of us businesspeople learn from the success Amazon had selling so much stuff in one day? I believe Amazon’s leadership made at least three good decisions when creating and planning its first Prime Day:

• It didn’t forget loyal customers while chasing new ones. Sometimes retailers and publishers get so excited about campaigns for net-new business that they wind up penalizing loyalty. (Magazine publishers are notorious for making “new subscriber only” offers at much lower rates than those given to existing subscribers who renew.) In this case, existing Prime members got access to special deals and shipping rates.

• Amazon chose a date with organizational meaning. Prime Day was staged in honor of Amazon’s 20th anniversary. So rather than creating an event that was only about moving merchandise (think “Christmas in July”), Amazon could weave in stories from its history, invoke some nostalgia and even have some fun during the buildup to Prime Day through avenues such as Throwback Thursdays.

• It avoided cannibalizing events that already generate massive revenue. Although Amazon compared Prime Day’s results to those from Black Friday, Amazon wasn’t trying to compete with Black Friday. Recognizing that Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day will generate purchases anyway, leadership separated Prime Day from those other big retail times on the calendar.

These are solid guidelines as you create events and buying opportunities — even if you don’t, as Amazon claimed, sell in Canada “enough Instant Pot Pressure Cookers to make more than 55,000 servings of poutine gravy at the same time.”

Jim Karrh of Little Rock is a consultant, trainer and speaker. Visit JimKarrh.com, email him at Jim@JimKarrh.com and follow him on Twitter @JimKarrh.