Prime Day and Prime for Young Adults - Get ‘em Early(er)
Prime Day approaches and it’s four days this year!
Prime Day has two overarching goals - encouraging shoppers to join or continue as Amazon Prime members, and selling merchandise. Beyond that, each year Amazon emphasizes particular products or programs to leverage their created holiday to boost desired Amazon engagement for the long-term. In earlier Prime Days, Amazon pushed trial of Echo smart speakers with bundled smart home devices, promoted streaming video viewing, encouraged app downloads, emphasized apparel sales (before they were a dominant clothing seller), and offered added incentives for Amazon credit cardholders.
This year’s Prime Days coincide with the introduction of Prime for Young Adults. This program replaces Amazon Prime Student membership, and is a far more aggressive effort to capture these early customers who have so many shopping years ahead of them.
To fully understand this move, we looked at 18–24 year-old US Amazon shoppers to see their current Prime membership status. CIRP data on Prime membership suggests 18-24 year-old Amazon shoppers have Prime memberships consistent with the overall average for all ages, around 75% (Chart 1), but that lags the other relatively young age bands.