How Amazon Do Marketing

How Amazon Do Marketing

How Amazon Do Marketing

 

Do you shop online on Amazon?

I bet you do!

Let’s see this first.

 

You might be thinking what is this?

This is a newsletter from Amazon which I have received on my e-mail, a few days back.

From this ad, we can better understand that Amazon is offering huge discounts to its clients, this independence.

I am sure you might be getting these kinds of newsletters from Amazon, most often.

But, have you ever wondered about the marketing tactics of Amazon.

Yes! Guys we are going to discuss how Amazon do marketing and what are the keys to success.

Well, internet marketing is basically the process of creating and handling customer relationships through online activities in order to share ideas, products, as well as services that satisfy the goals of both sellers and buyers.

This is obvious that consumers change every year. There might be slight variations or may be huge sweeping trends that may alter the way business markets conceive their products as well as their services.

Whatever it is, “Change is gonna come and you better be ready”-as Sam Cooke said.

Approx. 30% of all online activity is spent on social networking sites.

In a recent study, it was found

“the respondent base, which is numbered around 1,70,000 people, spent 30% of their online time on social networking sites” According to Global WebIndex.

But before I discuss how Amazon do marketing I would like to tell you about insights of Amazon.

 

Amazon- A Company

 

Amazon.com, Inc., is doing business like Amazon.

Amazon is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company based in Seatle, Washington.

Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos on July 5, 1994. It is the largest internet retailer tech giant in the world as measured by the market capitalization and revenue.

After Alibaba group, it is the second largest in terms of total sales.

You will be surprised to know that, Amazon.com, as a website is started as an online bookstore and then later on it, is diversified, in order to sell (videos, MP3, audiobook) streaming/downloading, software, video games, electronics, apparel, food, toys, furniture, as well jewelry.

You can go to buy cheap and best SEO books 2018, for taking an authentic ride to Amazon.

It produced Kindle e-readers, Fire TV, Fire tablets and latest one is Echo.

You may be shocked to know that it is the world’s largest provider of cloud infrastructure services.

Well, I think that all types of businesses can learn from their digital business strategy. As from start-ups to small businesses to large international organizations, can learn from their focus on

Their customers

Their focus on analysis and testing to improve their results as well as testing market opportunities that are made available by digital technology.

You can also learn from their approach to digital marketing. They use digital marketing easily across all customer communications.

You can see the touch points in the RACE marketing planning framework:

Reach:

Act:

Convert:

Engage:

 

Amazon says that

“We are not competitor obsessed, we are customer obsessed. We start what the customer needs and we work backward”.

Just watch out this:

 

 

Well, their focus on customer experience, which they call it “Customer Obsession” is shown in a way they regularly outperform other retailers. They outperform other retailers in the ACSI customer satisfaction rating also.

Before we move further to how Amazon do marketing, let’s have a look at the revenue and business model of Amazon.

 

Revenue And Business Model Of Amazon

 

If anybody is interested in studying Amazon, I recommend you to please check their latest Amazon revenue and business strategies.

In fact, you can see the summary on latest business model initiatives, which is also available on Amazon annual report summary.

Amazon says that:

“We will continue to measure our programs and the effectiveness of our investments analytically, to jettison those that do not provide an acceptable return and to step up our investment in those that work best. We will continue to learn from both our success and our failures”.

Let’s take a look at the latest example of innovation in the business model of Amazon. This innovation is named as Amazon Go.

 

 

Maybe you got an idea that, Amazon Go is a store where no checkout is required.

Just ‘boasting off’ a “Just Walk Out Shopping Experience”, the app users easily enter the store and they take the products they wanted to take and gout with no lines and no checkouts.

Apart from this, they have a wide range of business model of their innovations as well focussed on new services and hardware. Very popular ones are:

Kindle E-readers

Fire Tablet

Smartphone and TV

Echo, which is using the Alexa Artificial Intelligence Voice Assistant)

Grocery Delivery

Amazon Fashion, and last but not the least

Expansion to the business-oriented Amazon Web-Services (AWS).

And also, Amazon Prime.

Oh! How can I forget this?

This innovation of Amazon is an annual membership programme that gives you the benefit of free shipping and then also involved diversification to a media service which gives an access to instant streaming of thousands of TV shows and movies.

One thing forgot to tell you that this all comes under “unlimited package”.

Now I think we should move further towards our actual agenda of discussing how Amazon do Marketing.

So guys, let’s get started!

 

How Amazon do Marketing

 

Well, Amazon has performed exceptionally well, it has efficiently measured against revenue per visitor.

This basically is one of the key measures for any website which is commercially driven. It may be a media site, social network or transactional retailer, search engines and/or offers travel or financial services.

Yes of course! the profit per user is different due to the lower costs of other websites or .coms, just like Facebook and Google.

Let’s have a look here.

Well, Amazon does not reveal about its marketing approach in its annual reports, but obviously, they seemed to be focused on online marketing channels.

In their statements, they usually highlight the importance of customer loyalty tools.

In the SEC filings of Amazon, they state that the “aims of their communications strategy are to:

 

Create awareness of the products and services

Develop incremental product and service revenue opportunities

Promote repeat purchases

Increase customer traffic to our websites

Strengthen and broaden the Amazon.com brand name.

 

Here, we will see some marketing strategies or hacks that Amazon is using to sell their products and maintain customer loyalty in how Amazon do marketing.

So, here we go!

 

Email-Marketing

 

Not only for Amazon, but also for other websites, the most important marketing channel is e-mail.

But, at a time when most of the companies are still sending e-mail blasts (as we like the term), Amazon is using an amazingly refined e-mail strategy.

Amazon has pioneered in highly personalized product recommendation e-mails, which are based on, almost everything. That is:

Purchase History

Past Order Value

Age

Location

Gender and

On-site browsing etc

It has been noted that the advantage of every opportunity to market within a transactional e-mail has been taken care off – as noted by Jimmy Daily at Vero.

In comparison to Amazon, other companies are not doing good, on this part. When I get dozens of promotional e-mails from the start-ups that are well-funded to established and successful companies, I actually rarely see those sort of messages.

“While a blast can move the needle, it also dulls the reaction for the customers who wouldn’t find that offer relevant”pointed out by iMedia Connection.

But what does that mean?

Let me tell you.

Though Amazon takes care of personalized product recommendation e-mails, yet I have to say that their recommendations are not very much ……inspired.

I will make you understand this with the help of an example.

I had purchased two Yoga Mat Towels from Amazon. So, I had received messages recommending me to purchase two more yoga mat towels.

This is so weird that, if I would have to purchase four Yoga Mat Towel sets, then I would have done that earlier. The recommendation was of no use to me.

 

Customer Loyalty

 

Image result for amazon ratings and reviews

Well, Amazon’s marketing is fuelled by its Prime customer loyalty program, in terms of its value proposition.

Let’s go by statistics.

The membership base has increased by around 50% last year, as Amazon’s success with the Prime is basically the stuff of legends.

It has been estimated by Macquarie Capital that almost about 25% of the households of the US have prime accounts.

51% of US e-commerce growth has been due to Amazon, in the year 2015.

With the Prime Loyalty program, members spend 5-20% more than the non-members.

This aspect basically creates a sense of prestige and extra worth.  But, regardless of this, many of the customers think that the convenience they are getting is worth.

The reasons that they get many perks:

 

Firstly, free and fast shipping for millions of products.

Various free streaming television shows and movies

Cloud storage

A Kindle owners lending library

Streaming music etc

 

All these features, especially in the combination, some see this as excellent customer service, and also foster loyalty beyond the Prime program.

With the Prime program, I want to emphasize on the point that Amazon has created a holistic experience for its own customers.

You know everything that user wishes, even the food delivery, can be easily found on Amazon’s website.

You don’t believe that then it’s time to have a look at this.

 

 

Ratings and Reviews

 

Image result for amazon ratings and reviews

 

Yeah!

Ratings and reviews!

We have many times in our articles have discussed upon ratings and reviews.

See, now, reviews and ratings have become quite common on almost every e-commerce sites all over the world, and it is good and done with a good reason.

It has been found that “the customized Ratings and Review system raises the revenue by approx. 18%”Annex Cloud.

I personally, whenever order anything online; always go through ratings and reviews of the product first. Even at the time of ordering food from food delivery apps, such as Foodpanda or Zomato, I always check the ratings and reviews of the concerned restaurant.

Well, I must tell you that Amazon is a pioneer in this field also.

Way back in the year 1995, Amazon was one of the first companies of its kind to even put a review system on their site.

The reviews of Amazon are so universally known that they have succeeded in making great for Reddit and Tumblr fodder.

So, when one more feature is added to the review system of Amazon, the company begins to earn at least $2.7 billion every year.

Let’s talk about another important point about the Amazon’s review tactic.

They solicit reviews for each product individually. Amazon, send out different e-mails for different products, while, on the other side many companies send one e-mail asking for reviews, and they all together bundle their requests.

This benefits Amazon and customers to know the like and disliking of the product particularly by going through the e-mail of the product individually. Rather than going through the general and vague solicitation e-mail.

Here I am giving you an example, which will differentiate between the Amazon review technique and Myntra.

 

For more information on Amazon’s marketing success story, I suggest you take a note of these resources as well.

Last but not the least in knowing the best marketing hacks used by Amazon, for answering the question how Amazon do marketing is:

 

Video Marketing Strategy

 

Right now Video marketing is a fantastic opportunity for a business owner.

The video is the single most effective tool which the marketers have to

Increase sales

Raise brand awareness

Deliver ROI on marketing budgets and

Drive website traffic.

 

Our world is becoming “video first”, with the backing of the largest social media platforms and driven by customer demand.

Video marketing strategy usually allows the marketers to create effective video campaigns and to harness the power of video.

Amazon is continuously streaming its videos and has seen tons of success with its original programming, like Transparent.

Sometime back in the year 2016, Amazon streamlined Style Code Live, which debuted on March 8, discussed all the things about fashion.

The question is what’s new about it? The novel about this is that every segment had a direct link under the viewing screen so that the viewers were allowed to buy the featured products.

That means it combined entertainment, immediate gratification and shopping all in one.

If this found out to be entertaining and compelling enough to the viewers, it could open up the whole new world for Amazon’s marketing programs.

Now, guys, it’s time to give you information about the Amazon Great Indian Festive Sale of 2018.

Please have a look!

 

Conclusion

 

In this discussion on how Amazon do marketing, we have emphasized on the four most important marketing hacks adopted by Amazon, to be successful in its field.

Online marketing techniques usually include these:

Interactive Ads on Portals

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Paid Search Marketing and

E-mail Campaigns etc.

 

Affiliate programme of Amazon has also played an important role in driving visitors to Amazon and Amazon also offers a wide range of methods. These methods are linked to the Amazon’s site in order to help improve its conversion rate.

How Amazon do marketing is not just a four-step guide on the marketing strategies on Amazon, rather it is a case study on how Amazon do marketing and earned tons of success in its account.

We are hopeful that you may have found this article worth reading. For more and more queries we welcome you to please fill the FORM here.

 

Thank You!

 

In Your Service

Dhairya Singh Chauhan

 

 

 

 

 

Digital Dhairya

About the author

Dhairya Singh Chauhan is a Google certified professional who has achieved hundreds of number one rankings over the past 5-years. Dhairya has consulted countless clients on SEO and how to make money online, from small family-owned businesses to international brands.

Leave a Comment