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Amazon Prime Day Sneak Preview

Article by John Landsman CATEGORIES: News & Updates TAGS:
Perhaps there are folks who haven’t heard that July 12th is Amazon’s much-anticipated, second annual Prime Day, but that wouldn’t be for want of Amazon’s trying to tell them.  Once the event is completely finished, we’ll do a deeper dive on Prime Day email activity and performance, but we wanted to share what we’ve seen so far of Prime Day related emails in the run-up to the event itself.
  • Amazon opened the game on Thursday, June 30th, with several more days’ notice than they’d provided last year.  Amazon sent nineteen Prime Day related email campaigns on June 30th, comprising a total of 34.3 million actual emails. Read rates averaged 24% for those messages.  Fully half of that first day’s volume went in a single email to non-Prime customers, with a subject line that read, Prime Day is July 12: Try Prime and enjoy Prime-exclusive deals.”   Read rate? 16.1%
  • The next four days — our July 4th weekend — were relatively quiet.  Only three Prime Day campaigns mailed on each of July 1st and 2nd, two campaigns on July 3rd, and none on July 4th.  Email volume for those several days totaled less than 3.5M, but daily read rates remained strong:  24-49%.
  • Activity ramped up again following the Holiday weekend.  The daily number of mailed campaigns has ranged from 12-17, deployed email totals ranging from 6-22 million, and average read rates of 18-28%.
  • Amazon is following its usual practice of alternating subject lines between very general and surgically precise.  On a day where a heavily mailed message’s subject line was “Prime Day is July 12: Exclusive deals for Prime members,” another email (to a much smaller audience) read, “Prime exclusive: home products with FREE Same-Day Delivery.”  On various days, other such subject lines — each directed at specifically targeted audiences — tout Video, Electronics, Gadgets, Travel, “Delicious Deals” (for foodies), Handmade goods, Back to School, and Streaming.  The result of this kind of targeting is that Prime customers each appear to be receiving only one email per day relating to the event.  This relative restraint may be part of why Amazon’s overall inbox performance has been very strong for all this event’s emails.
  • Best performing email example:  Prime Members: Your Prime Day Streaming Guide,” mailed to 1.1 million customers on July 8th, with a read rate of 41.7%.
  • As for other retailers, it’s tough to compete against your huge competitor’s massive proprietary branded event without promoting it yourself, especially when you learn about its timing only two weeks in advance.  More on this in our upcoming event deep-dive.