Four Ways to Maximize Your Amazon Prime Day Profits

Here comes Amazon's annual Prime Day. It'll take place starting at 9PM EST on July 10 and go through 3AM EST on July 12. Prime Day is BIG. Last year, the company sold about a billion dollars of products in a single day — which was more than double the previous year — and the numbers are projected to grow significantly this year. With deals only Amazon subscribers can enjoy, the promotion is designed to grow Amazon's Prime subscriber base. There's plenty of advice for shoppers on how to get the best deals possible during this giant sale, but what does this day mean for you, the Amazon merchant? In this blog post, we're going to look at four suggestions on how you can take advantage of this enormous event and grow your business.

Start promoting immediately. If you're only learning today that Prime Day is next week, then you know that time is short. But the good news is that it doesn't take much time to set up and execute an online campaign. Prime Day gets a huge amount of media attention, so leverage that: create email and social campaigns that take advantage of the Prime Day recognition by inviting prospective buyers to visit your merchant site and benefit from your special promotions. Utilize Amazon's Marketing Services to create specialized pay-per-click ads and measure keyword performance, impressions, clicks, sales, and other factors impacting your return on investment.

Test now. If your business is gearing up for a big sales day, then triple-check your site right now. Make a bunch of sample purchases from various devices to test performance, content, messaging, and images. Ensure that you've got enough inventory on hand and be ready to ship. Make sure your top-selling items are Prime-eligible. Consider turning on Amazon's Bid + feature which could increase your bids across keywords on ads that are eligible for placement. Make sure the data and information about your products (and company) are completely up to date. First impressions matter, and if your Prime Day is successful, you'll get a chance to introduce your business to tens of millions of new buyers.

Staff up. For 30 hours, things will be jumping. If there's a problem, a question, a service issue, or a product delay, you've just lost sales. If you want to succeed on Prime Day, you've got to take it seriously. Make sure you're staffed for the entire period, checking comments and feedback and responding quickly.

Think today ... about 2018. Prime Day has been a stunning, annual success for Amazon, and all indications are that it will be another hit this year. Get a head start and assume Amazon will host Prime Day next summer, too. If you missed registering your products for Lightning Deals — a promotion where you can offer a limited number of discount offers on an item for a short period of time — mark your calendar to sign up for 2018. (The deadline to apply for Lightning Deals for the 2017 Prime Day was this past May.) Also, make sure you're collecting the names and contact information (particularly emails and social media addresses) for everyone buying from you this year so that you can bring the data into your customer relationship management system. A great CRM database will then enable you to continue to reach out to these customers throughout the rest of the year, build a community, and hopefully sell additional products to these customers.

Bottom line: Amazon Prime Day can serve two big purposes for your business. It can be an opportunity to move lots of product and generate profits. Or it can be a great time to move product at cost with the objective of acquiring more customer data — with the opportunity of then turning that data into future sales. Whatever your objective, it's an opportunity to grow your business, if you decide to take the right steps.