Amazon entered and swept us off our feet – both by heart and market. It is ruling the sphere successfully over the last 2 decades, globally. Amazon has evolved, and it hasn’t stopped doing so even now. Marketers have been studying Amazon’s marketing strategy and taking lessons from them. It’s time you do to! I have been doing some observation of my own and this is what I think makes Amazon a clear winner – Email Marketing.
According to Sucharita Mulpuru, a Forrester analyst, Amazon’s conversion to sales of on-site recommendations could be as high as 60% in some cases based off the performance of other e-commerce sites.
If you are a regular customer of Amazon, you wouldn’t have missed it. They send emails and a lot of them, yes. But they still manage to never come across as annoying, or pushy. Ever wondered why? Amazon has a very tailored and targeted approach.
Here’s what they do.
1. They keep it simple, crisp and pleasant
If you have received their email on any special days, like this one I received on International Book Day. Being an avid reader, I tend to browse and order a lot of books from Amazon, as they have a mammoth collection. This one was specially tailored for me because they knew, I would make a purchase.
You know how they did that? Amazon collects every scrap of the customer’s behavioural information and turns into personalized emails. Although they cater to a huge market, their targeting is still niche and sharp.
Emails are automated based on every customer group. These customer groups are aggregation of customers with a similar behaviour. Email automation has been used here to trigger emails upon specific actions taken by the customers. For instance, I am not very fond of cosmetics and make up tools, and so, I never receive emails that say, ‘Hey! We have some cosmetics recommendations for you!’
No. Never.
2. Super helpful Transactional Emails
Amazon’s transactional emails literally shadow you at every step, once you set foot on their website. Be it, account creation, order placement or returns and refunds. Everything is so organized and streamlined, just like their purchase cycle.
Like this email which I received seconds after I placed a request for this product.
3. Personalized Recommendations
I can’t stop myself from gushing over Amazon’s highly personal emails. The brand takes an entirely different approach. Every email is personalized using every bit of information they have about their users: on-site behavior, past purchases, amount spent, location, age, gender, etc. It reflects in the emails that they send out.
Amazon sends out their most recommended products every week that are tailored as per the users’ browsing patterns using segmentation strategies. Previous buyers are tracked by integrating Google Analytics with the email marketing platform to analyse subscribers’ website behaviour. It literally tracks you everywhere you go!
Now there are 2 types of recommendation emails that they send out. One is when you have viewed a particular product many times but not made a purpose and the second one is a list of products that are related to your browsing patterns.
Like this smartphone flip cover that I loved, amongst all the others. This email has the product details along with the link to directly go to the product page if I decided to buy it. This is a service extended to Prime members only, I guess. But nevertheless, it’s pretty nice and one tends to feel looked after!
The ‘response to buying suggestions’ that Amazon offers its customers is said to generate an additional 10% to 30% in revenue for the business.
Key takeaways:
1. Use tracking and targeting techniques to map users with similar interests and browsing patterns and segmenting them for targeted communications
2. Complementing SMS with emails to keep the customer updated on their order status wherever they go
3. Mapping triggers to send out automated emails upon specific actions
By using the data you already have, and inserting simple messaging at the right places in the buying cycle, you can dramatically increase sales, engagement, pageviews or whichever metric you’re after. Contact Juvlon to know more.