Prime Day Strategies To Get The Most Out Of Your Affiliates In 2024

Amazon Prime Day is one of the most anticipated shopping events of the year. It’s kind of like Black Friday but it happens in July. This annual event, which was created by Amazon exclusively for Amazon sellers, has quickly grown to become adopted by most ecommerce stores, regardless if they sell on Amazon or not.

So, while Prime Day technically refers to the 2-day sale event held by Amazon, only for Amazon stores, it has grown beyond that in the past few years. And while it’s a good idea to run a sale during this period, it’s an even better idea to incentivize your affiliates to refer their friends extra hard this weekend.

In this blog, we’re going to go over the smart strategies you can use to get the most out of your affiliates this Prime Day.

What is Amazon Prime Day?

The first time Prime Day was organized in 2015 to celebrate Amazon’s 20th anniversary, and it has grown into a massive 48-hour online shopping event. This event is packed with a wide variety of deals and discounts, drawing shoppers from all over the world. 

Last year, the first day of Prime Day, was the single largest sales day ever on Amazon. Prime members bought over 375 million items worldwide during the event.

What does this mean for ecommerce stores without an Amazon storefront?

While Prime Day started as an exclusive event for Amazon sellers, its success has inspired other ecommerce stores to capitalize on the increased interest in online shopping during this period. And why shouldn’t they? An ecommerce store should never shy away from running a sale if its customers are in the mood to go shopping!

Plus, a cheeky 2-day lightning sale could help your ecommerce store manage its summer slump. Or, get rid of extra inventory before planning Quarter 4 and the Black Friday, Cyber Monday sales period. Or even test new products.

8 Prime Day affiliate marketing strategies to get the most out of your affiliates

Prime Day 2024, Amazon’s 10th Prime Day event, starts on July 16 and ends on July 17.

There are a ton of things that you can do to maximize revenue this Prime Day, including running Prime Day campaigns in your Paid Social and Search platforms.

Today, we’re going to focus on the strategies that will help you maximize your affiliate revenue to attract new customers. Plus, the best part of it all? They’re quick and easy to implement.

Strategy #1: Boost your affiliates’ incentives

Your affiliates work hard all year, so why not thank them with increased incentives during Prime Day? Offer a higher commission, like doubling from 10% to 20%, to maximize success and show appreciation.

This boost will engage influencers and keep your brand top-of-mind, especially since you’re competing with other brands’ offers. Affiliates who feel rewarded are more likely to prioritize promoting your brand.

With Social Snowball’s affiliate program, you can easily customize these rewards for your affiliates.

Strategy #2: Email marketing tactics to increase sales

When gearing up for Prime Day it’s important to stay connected with your affiliates to maximize your campaign’s success. Here’s how you can keep them engaged:

1. Pre-event emails: Before Prime Day kicks off, send out emails reminding affiliates about their incentives and the exciting promotions lined up. This keeps your brand top-of-mind and encourages them to talk about your products.

You can also give your affiliates early access codes for special discounts to share with their followers. This will increase the likelihood of their followers buying from them, which is buying from you! 

2. During-event updates: Keep the momentum going with regular updates during Prime Day. Share real-time performance metrics, highlight top-performing products, and encourage affiliates to leverage the buzz.

Social Snowball provides ready-made email templates for affiliates, making communication easy and efficient. You can integrate Social Snowball with Klayvio or any other Email Service Provider (ESP) for more control over your emails. This allows you to fully customize your emails and include custom fields with specific program information, ensuring your messages are personalized and effective.

Key emails to send to new customers:

• Post-purchase follow-up: Initiate new customers into your affiliate program with a post-purchase email. This encourages them to start promoting your brand right away to earn commissions and increase your sales. The more affiliates you have, the merrier you’ll be!

The moment anyone buys from you, they’ll immediately be promoted to earn commissions or rewards by promoting you. This is how their order confirmation page will look like ⤵️

Key emails to send to existing affiliates:

• Program updates: Inform affiliates about any changes or incentives you’ve enhanced for Prime Day. Get them excited about the improved opportunities to earn.
• Strategic reminders: Send timely reminders during high-sales periods to prompt affiliates to share their links or codes. Keep them engaged and active throughout the event.
• Educational content: Explain the affiliate program in detail. Provide guidelines on how to promote effectively and what affiliates can expect in terms of payouts.
• Inspirational content: Showcase successful affiliate case studies and their strategies. Share examples of high-performing content and creative ideas to inspire affiliates during Prime Day.

By maintaining clear and consistent communication, you empower your affiliates to promote your brand effectively and capitalize on the Prime Day excitement. This approach not only strengthens relationships but also drives higher engagement and sales conversions.

Strategy #3: Turn influencers into affiliates 

Over 90% of consumers engage with influencers on a weekly basis on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat. Influencers are a goldmine for brands because they can boost brand awareness and change how new audiences see your products. People are more likely to buy something their favorite influencer promotes than something they just come across online. So, why not use influencers to your advantage for Prime Day promotions?

Here are some tips to help you launch new campaigns:

• Partner with influencers who align with your brand and create campaigns that connect you with relevant audiences. For example, if you sell workout equipment, partner with a fitness influencer to show off your products. Their endorsement can boost your sales during Prime Day. 
• Ask them to promote your products before Prime Day and highlight the deals during the event peak.
• Turn them into affiliates, set a budget for your campaigns, and give them generous cash commissions so that they go beyond just posting about you once, and are invested in getting you more sales. This approach aligns their income directly with sales performance, thereby being an easy way to maximize mutual benefits for influencers and your brand alike.
• You can also offer an exclusive bundle deal for their followers to make them feel valued.
• Additionally, request them to create content that answers common shopping queries so that customers can make informed decisions.

Moreover, with Social Snowball, you can establish separate programs for each type of influencer and set up robust attribution settings. 

Additionally, we cannot stress this enough, pay your influencers and affiliates on time. 

No strategy will work well if you don’t. We understand handling everything manually can get in the way and make it more overwhelming for you. For that, you can also streamline payments by bulk sending cash, gift cards, and store credit directly to affiliates with just two clicks with Social Snowball.

Strategy #4: Paid social media advertising with your affiliates’ content 

You can ask your affiliates to create content for your top products and obtain permission to use it in advertisements. Why? By collaborating closely with affiliates, you tap into their audience’s trust, enhancing your brand’s credibility. It’s a strategic approach that not only boosts the visibility of your product detail pages but will also strengthen your connection with your target audience.

It is particularly effective on social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc, where authenticity plays a crucial role in influencing consumer behavior and in their decision-making. Here’s an example of 96North Prime Day Social Promo on Prime Day 2022: 

Source

Strategy #5: Leverage bundle deals and cross-selling

Everyone loves a good deal, and your customers are no exception. A great way to stand out on Prime Day is by creating a bundle deal just for your shoppers and promoting them through your affiliates. This will encourage customers to check out your other offerings and increase your average order value.

Try pairing your best-selling product with a complementary one at a discounted price. For instance, if you sell skincare products, bundle a face wash with sunscreen. Customers will see the value in the deal and be more likely to buy.

Strategy #6: Create urgency with limited-time offers through affiliates 

The key here is to focus on creating advertising strategies with limited-time deals. Make sure your potential customers know exactly how long they have to avail of your lightning deals. Whether it’s for an entire day or for 7 days, your ad campaigns should create a sense of urgency that makes your offer irresistible. You can do this by asking your affiliates to add a countdown timer on their story after talking about your sale or post daily reminders on social media to keep the excitement high! 

It gives the impression that time is running out, prompting their followers to act quickly to avoid missing out. This method taps into the fear of missing out (FOMO) which is part of a successful advertising strategy, that can significantly increase conversion rates. 

Strategy #7: Prevent discount code clashes

To keep things running smoothly during Prime Day, it’s important to ensure your referral and affiliate discount codes don’t clash with your Prime Day offers. Here are a few friendly tips to help:

1. Use stackable discount codes: Depending on your margins, you might allow both your Prime Day discount code and your affiliate’s discount code to work simultaneously. This can be configured in Shopify and ensures customers get the best of both worlds.
2. Use automatic Prime Day discounts: Make your Prime Day discount apply automatically at checkout. This way, customers can still use their affiliate discount codes without any confusion. Just ensure the codes are stackable for this to work.
3. Use affiliate links instead of codes: If stacking discounts isn’t feasible, switch to using affiliate links for tracking purposes. These links don’t offer an additional discount but still allow you to track referrals. Just make sure to inform your affiliates about this change.

By implementing these strategies, you can prevent any discount code clashes, avoid customer confusion, and keep your conversion rates high during Prime Day.

Strategy #8: Turn your new customers into affiliates

When customers love your product, they’re likely to tell their friends about it. So, why not reward them for their referrals with cash incentives they can easily redeem? This way, you can continue to lower your customer acquisition costs, and boost sales, while keeping your customers happy.

With the surge in sales during Prime Day, take advantage of the influx of customers by turning them into a powerful customer acquisition source. Encourage them to refer friends and family, driving even more sales during Prime Day and beyond.

Show new customers their referral code or link right on the thank you page and include it in your post-purchase emails and SMS flows.

Tabs Chocolate, amplified content across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other channels. This led to a 17%+ increase in affiliate marketing effectiveness, a 9.8x return on investment, and saved over 10 hours weekly.

⛄Bonus Tip

Use Safelinks

Code leaks can pose a significant threat to your business, draining your bottom line and turning a potential revenue stream into an obstacle. To address this issue, we’ve developed Safelinks. 

Safelinks generates unique single-use codes for every shopper who clicks on an affiliate link. This way, even if an affiliate code gets leaked, it won’t work because they can only be used once. Safelinks look just like normal affiliate links or codes that your affiliates can share wherever they’re already promoting you. Here’s an example: 

How to prepare your ecommerce store for Prime Day?

Preparing your ecommerce store for the big event involves several key steps to ensure you make the most of this high-traffic shopping event. Here’s a more detailed guide to help you get ready:

Step 1: Update product listings on your site

Work on improving your product listings before any big sale event. While shoppers love discounts, your product listing should be appealing to help secure those sales.

First things first, make your titles descriptive and add relevant keywords. For example, instead of “avocado oil” use “100% Pure Avocado Oil” This helps customers understand the product better while also optimizing for better ranking on organic or paid search results.

Additionally, you can also make sure your new keywords mention the event.

Step 2: Check your bestsellers

Analyze which products are your best buys and stock up those items. It will help you meet the anticipated surge in demand without running out of stock.

Step 3: Look at past years’ sales data

If your brand ran a Prime Day sale last year, take a look at your historical Prime Day shopping activity to see what worked well. If you don’t have enough data, you can also look at what you did during BFCM and other sales periods in previous years to help you understand what your customers respond to, whether that’s a specific ad creative or a specific affiliate incentive.

Conclusion

By using these Prime Day advertising strategies, and affiliate strategies, you can supercharge your campaigns without investing your full budget and yet getting maximum returns at the end of the event.

Amazon Prime Day 2024 can be a great time for ecommerce sellers to attract new customers. To make the most of this event, think about how you present your products and offer exclusive deals. Remember, the early bird gets the worm—or in this case, the sales! Building strong relationships with your partners—whether they’re influencers or loyal customers—is crucial for successful affiliate marketing. Social Snowball simplifies nurturing these connections and unlocking your affiliate program’s full potential.

Ready to elevate your ecommerce store? Request a demo today and see how Social Snowball can enhance your Prime Day success!