Amazon Prime’s SMART Goals for the Prime Time of your Life
Fast and free shipping, discounts, and award-winning movies and series are the main features that drive Amazon Prime, Amazon’s membership service which plays a vital part in their mission “to be Earth’s most customer-centric company” (Amazon, n.d.). Amazon is constantly working on polishing their Prime service in order to stay ahead of the e-commerce and streaming competition like Netflix, Hulu, and HBO. This includes adding more third-party sellers to their Prime eligible marketplace, expanding their diverse library of movies and series and offering more incentives to sign up for their yearly Prime membership. Once all of that is said and done, Amazon needs to come up with a solid strategy for advertising the improved Amazon Prime through social media, as well as with a clear goal so as to measure the success of the company’s new efforts.
OBJECTIVES
Amazon Prime is an extremely successful service for the company, and they don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. Amazon sees a growth of Prime members on a constant basis: the company surpassed 150 million paid Prime subscribers globally after the December 2020 quarter (Bishop, 2020). The company had last reported the number of members in 2018: a milestone of 100 million subscribers (Keyes, 2020).
According to Todd Bishop (2020), former CEO Jeff Bezos once stated that the company’s goal is to make it “irresponsible” for someone to choose not to join the Prime membership program. Amazon’s objective is to increase the number of subscribers for its Amazon Prime’s service. This is not very specific and raises several questions, such as how big of an increase, how they hope to attain this increase, and within what time frame, among others. For this, they need to establish a SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-focused) goal and focus their social media marketing strategies on reaching this goal through measuring and analyzing key performance indicators, or KPIs.
SMART GOAL
SMART goals are established using specific criteria in order to ensure that an objective is attainable within a certain time frame (Boogaard, 2020). To meet Amazon’s objective, the company can pursue to increase the number of Amazon Prime members. The following is a break down of the acronym’s components while establishing the clear goal for the objective at hand:
Specific — Increase global Amazon Prime subscribers. This may be accomplished by adding more features to the service, expanding its library of movies and series for streaming, and creating a social media marketing campaign to advertise all of this and the annual Prime Day event on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Here we go more into detail on what the goal’s work will comprise of and how the company hopes to meet the goal.
Measurable — Increase global Amazon Prime subscribers by 30,000,000. This may be accomplished by adding more features to the service, expanding its media streaming library, and creating a social media marketing campaign to advertise all of this and the annual Prime Day event on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
This quantifies the goal and makes it measurable in order to track progress for the goal.
Attainable — Increase global Amazon Prime subscribers by 30,000,000. This may be accomplished by adding more features to the service, expanding its media streaming library, and creating a social media marketing campaign to advertise all of this and the annual Prime Day event on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
By looking at the previous feats for the company’s Prime service, Amazon can come up with a realistic and achievable goal that is within reach in line with the service’s recent growth in years. The numbers showcase a growth of at least 25,000,000 subscribers per year, and given this, an additional 5 million subscribers for a year is realistic for the company.
Relevant — Increase global Amazon Prime subscribers by 30,000,000. This may be accomplished by adding more features to the service, expanding its media streaming library, and creating a social media marketing campaign to advertise all of this and the annual Prime Day event on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Our Prime subscribers purchase more products in the long run while also paying for their yearly membership, so the aim of increasing the number of subscribers is to ultimately increase revenues from higher sales and more subscriptions.
This part outlines the essential benefit behind the goal.
Time-focused — Increase global Amazon Prime subscribers by 30,000,000 by Q4 of 2021. This may be accomplished by adding more features to the service, expanding its media streaming library, and creating a social media marketing campaign to advertise all of this and the annual Prime Day event on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Our Prime subscribers purchase more products in the long run while also paying for their yearly membership, so the aim of increasing the number of subscribers is to ultimately increase revenues from higher sales and more subscriptions.
Here, the company sets a specific deadline for the goal.
KPIs
Now that the SMART goal is established, the company can proceed to focus social media efforts on the major platforms: Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, to push the advertising for the newly improved Prime service as well as 2021’s Prime Day sales event. According to Todd Clarke (2019), social media key performance indicators, or KPIs, measure performance deemed valuable to a business, tracked over time to measure progress or lack thereof. Once the campaign has kicked off, they can begin to measure:
- The rate of growth for their audience.
- Conversion rate from call-to-action links on posts to the Amazon Prime landing page and the Prime Day landing page; how many of these are subscribing or browsing the Prime catalogue.
- The bounce rate on posts. The company needs to observe how many users are clicking on call-to-action links to the Prime landing pages only to leave without completing any call-to-action.
- Cost-per-click to know how efficient the investment on sponsored social media posts is.
A strong focus on advertising the service’s streaming media library would be extremely useful in attracting potential subscribers, especially when offering media not available on other streaming giants. Developing content in order to highlight its unique library and publishing it through sponsored posts would do well in increasing visibility of the service and therefore increasing reach and potential audience growth. Of course, all of this would be measured by KPIs as well.
ROI
These indicators serve to help Amazon reach their goal by measuring the return on investment, or ROI, on the new social media campaign and determining how much more they need to spend on sponsored posts and which platforms they need to target more out of Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. The KPIs also allow the company to measure the success of their social media strategies as new subscribers are constantly being tracked through these indicators and also distinguish if new members subscribed due to a post or if they came from elsewhere.
Ultimately, the social media efforts combined with the increase in features for the service aim to amplify visibility for the service and therefore garner more members to reach the 30,000,000 additional subscribers by the end of Q4 2021 (December, 2021) as defined by the SMART goal. This means keeping a constant eye on KPIs for the campaign, seeing which posts work well and on which platforms is the campaign performing better.
Amazon’s standard yearly rate of $119 translates into at least more than $17.8 billion in revenue (Bishop, 2020). Some subscribers pay the monthly rate of $12.99 as opposed to the yearly $119, which implies even higher numbers. The ROI that would come about meeting the company’s SMART goal would be at least an additional $3.5 billion in revenues from the 30,000,000 new subscribers alone before accounting for the increase in sales that this would generate. This would total a reported 180 million subscribers by Q4 of 2021 for Amazon. At the standard rate of $119, this would translate into at least more than $21.3 billion in total revenue.
Prime subscribers are drawn in for three major reasons: faster shipping (2 days or less), discounts online and in physical grocery stores, and access to a growing library of videos, movies, series, music, and ebooks (Albane, 2019). Considering the exponential growth in subscribers that Amazon Prime has achieved in the last couple of years, a larger focus and investment on social media marketing and new features for the service previously unseen could reap a much more successful ROI.
References
Amazon. (n.d.). Who we are. https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us
Albane. (2019, April 16). Amazon’s marketing strategy: 5 ways to win on social. Talkwalker. https://www.talkwalker.com/blog/amazon-marketing-strategy
Bishop, T. (2020, January 3). Amazon tops 150M paid Prime subscribers globally after record quarter for membership program. GeekWire. https://www.geekwire.com/2020/breaking-amazon-tops-150m-paid-prime-members-globally-record-quarter/
Boogaard, K. (2020, November 15). An explanation of SMART goals and how to write them. Atlassian. https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/how-to-write-smart-goals
Clarke, T. (2019, March 11). 18 social media KPIs you need to track to measure success. Hootsuite. https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-kpis-key-performance-indicators/
Keyes, D. (2020, February 3). Amazon surpasses 150 million Prime subscribers. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-surpasses-150-million-prime-subscribers-2020-2
