Take Advantage of Prime Day
Yes, I’m talking about Amazon’s Prime Day and how it completely impacts your business. There is a small amount of time between Memorial Day and Labor Day that businesses will see an increase in sales, but it must be strategically planned for otherwise you’ll lose customers to Amazon.
If you have been on the internet, browsing around, you may have heard about Amazon’s Prime day for a few weeks now.
It’s the celebration of Prime Membership, giving exclusive sales and discounts to Prime Members. In the early years, it’d been a ‘party’ for 24 hours of crazy deals. Starting in 2019, it was extended to 48hrs.
As a small business, you don’t have to directly use Amazon for income but you can use their promotions to generate income from your own offerings.
Why?
Creating an annual event for your customers to exclusively be part of is the premise behind Prime Day. You can run this event at any point during the year, and you can open it up to first time customers, but the ANNUAL aspect of it has several benefits.
1. Have fewer sales during the year shows your pricing reflects the value you offer, less sales increases perception that you value what you're worth.
2. Your marketing is planned, you can reuse what you did last year that worked and adjust what didn't work. Rinse and repeat of a plan allows you to focus on the details, incentives you offer, and growing your potential customer base.
3. Your work/life balance can be planned. Knowing this is going to happen allows you to plan to be available leading up to and a few days after the event and take time off when it's less high-traffic for your business.
How does this effect your business?
If you have any promotions planned, your ideal customer needs to be reminded of the value of your product or service more frequently to distract them from Prime Day.
If you don’t have any promotions planned, your ideal customer will likely be spending their money on Amazon during this time, so you may see a decline in sales. This is a great time to plan how you’ll handle business around Prime Day in the future years, as well as create a promotion for the 2-day event if you’re able to quickly pull something together.
Things you can do now.
Create an offer of an exclusive product or service that’s only provided with a purchase during this time, and blow up your marketing efforts on all channels. I don’t suggest discounted products or services, because I want you to make money instead of lose money.
That’s the basic point of Prime Day, exclusivity to Prime Members, so choosing to market in that same way does benefit you.
Write out your 9 day promotional plan, which starts today. Allow your email subscribers an exclusive early shopping window to get first dibs.
Ideas you can use.
Create an email opt-in for exclusive deals during those two days in July each year, and give a hint to what your special product or service will be. If you’re using the email-only offerings, make sure you are pushing that message HARD in all of your promotions.
Create a series of Live video messages for all of your high traffic social media channels, allowing a sneak peek at the product or service you’ll be offering for those 48 hours.
Create a message that your entire team talks about whenever a potential customer asks a question about this promotion. This ensures that the messaging is clear no matter who is doing the talking, and everyone is pointing to the same opt-in to get the deals.
Offer a repeat customer deal, exclusive to your repeat customers who are still on your email marketing list. It may take a little time to go through all of the emails on your list to find out who is a repeat customer if your email database doesn’t (yet) segment but it will be worth it. A simple gesture of this nature goes a long way, and the statistics show that 70% of sales come from repeat customers or their friends.
Selling on Amazon
You don’t have to have actual products to sell on Amazon, you can create a store front and curate your fvorite products you buy from amazon and earn income through their affiliate marketing.
Quite a few website platforms offer the ability to directly link Amazon products, so you can link your Amazon affiliate store front from your website just like you do with other products you personally sell.
Another good idea
Did you know you can get a Business Account for Amazon, keeping your business purchases separate from your personal? This is another way to keep your weekly bookkeeping tasks more efficient, sorting through those Amazon purchases business versus personal on your personal Amazon account is time consuming! Get a business account for your Amazon purchases. Learn more: HERE [affiliate link]
