On average Amazon sells more than 4000 products per minute only in the US.
This is how successful Amazon is.
I have recently made extensive research on the content marketing strategies of Amazon.
The goal of the study?
To help you understand the Content strategy breakdown of Amazon.
Four things that I’ve analyzed are:
- How Amazon takes contextual marketing to the next level using AI and machine learning?
- The secret behind the success of Amazon’s user-generated content
- Email marketing secrets of the amazon
- When to monetize the content
[Important Note: To make it more actionable content, I’ve included key takeaway for each of the findings.]
Highlights and Key Content Marketing strategies of Amazon in 2020:
1. “Content with context” is the backbone of amazon. From the Home page of the site to the email content, Amazon uses AI and machine learning to take the personalized content to the next level.
2. Amazon keeps the engagement of its customers by using user-generated content on a large scale. Amazon encourages its customers to leave feedback through customized Home page, Email content.
3. The role of building an audience first is what made it possible and successful.
4. The email marketing strategy of Amazon doesn’t only increase the revenue for the company but also helps to get qualified reviews for their products.
Let’s deep dive into these findings.
Learn more about How to build content strategy for your business from scratch
1. Content personalization
Ever wondered how the Home page of Amazon store always shows you the product that you were looking for.
It’s not a coincidence.
In fact, the homepage of the Amazon store displays different products and recommendations to different people.
By tracking your every movement on the site, it builds a personalized experience for you.
It is all about personalized content.
Let’s understand how does it work.
The personalization of content is a result of two-way communication.
First, Amazon allows you to consume content (in the form of products related information).
Second, they track your consumption of content, which type of content or the product info keeps you engaged on the site.
For example, when a visitor is using Amazon’s store for the first time, it won’t show personalized content to that new visitor.
It’s because Amazon doesn’t have that much information like what the person is looking for, etc.
As a result, either the person will search for a product, or the person will just browse the home page to see product ideas.
That is where tracking of the consumption of content starts.
It tracks every movement on the site of that user: even the movement of mouse courser
For instance, that person shows interest in dairy product categories. As because the AI-system now knows what the product that the person is looking for is, it will customize the Home page based on the person’s interest or recent searches.
Next time, you visit the home page of the Amazon store, please take a close look at the product recommendation.
You’re most likely to see that the product recommendations are just a result of your interest.
“As a result, this personalized content experience results in 35% of their total sales“
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 on the performance of other e-commerce sites.”
That means out of 100 personalized recommendations, 60 turned into a successful order.
That’s huge.
But this doesn’t end here.
Amazon’s personalized content experience isn’t just about your recent behaviour on the site.
It gathers information about recent interest, history of buying, and many more, from multiple sources.
- Amazon Alexa
- Amazon store
- Amazon Go (Only available in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle)
These three platforms work for amazon to get more and more information about every customer, and as a result, it takes personalized experience to the next level.
One important thing to notice is that the data from one source (out of Alexa, Amazon Go, Amazon store) also fuels the other sources.
Let me explain.
You asked Alexa about “Can you tell me the best smartphone to buy”.Now, Alexa will give you some answers about your search query.
But in the backend, your search query will also be shared with the Amazon store.
So there’s a high chance that if you visit the Amazon store site, you’ll see a bunch of smartphones as a product recommendation.
That’s how strong it is.
Key takeaways
Personalized content is key
Personalization is essential in 2020. The more personalized content you create, the more engagement your content will get.
So what’s the best way to start with creating a personalized a customized experience?
The first step is to understand the buyer’s persona for your product or service.
The buyer persona will help you understand what type of content to show each of the buyer personas for your product or services.
That will make your website, landing pages even more personalized for each of these visitors.
That also implies that visitors will likely to see content that he/she is most interested in.
Here’s a complete guide on how to get started with personalized content for the entire website.
As a result, you’ll see more engagement on your site, and the chances of converting visitors into leads will increase.
In 2020, Content with context is the key to achieve high engagement and conversion.
Cross-data promotion
Let’s say, You have a sales team, and a content creation team. In this case, always promote your data and information from one department to another. Ask your sales team about the most asked questions of customers.
Then look for the scope so that your content creation team can create helpful content on those topics.
That was just an example of you can use the information from the department to another one.
2. A purposeful email strategy
The most significant source of Amazon’s content is its customers.
For almost every product, you’ll see at least one review on the Amazon store.
Let’s look at some statistics of how Reviews helps in sales.
This is how powerful are reviews from customers. Now, you may know how Amazon is able to grow its customer base significantly.
Let’s understand what helps Amazon to get reviews from its customers so that you too can implement the same for your own business, service, or eCommerce.
The user-generated content (mainly reviews) heavily relies on the personalized email marketing strategy.
The email strategy of Amazon mainly focuses on three sections:
- Getting more product reviews
- Product recommendation and Increasing sales
In marketing, we often use cross-sales which means encouraging customers to buy related or complementary products.
This same theory Amazon applies through email marketing.
Typically for every purchase, Amazon asks for a review or rating for the recent purchase after a few days.
And, this is what keeps the customer engaged with the site. Timing is important when it comes to getting reviews from the customers.
You need to understand the peak time when the customers are ready to share their thought, on the products; otherwise, you’re most likely to miss a bunch of reviews and feedback from your customers.
I have noticed that after 2 to 3 days of getting the product delivered to my place, I get a mail to leave a review on their site.
One valid question you might ask is “Why don’t they ask me after one week or two weeks?”
It’s because of our interest and hype about any new purchase decrease over time.
The best time to ask for a review is when the person is engaged with the product. And, it’s no coincidence that we, as human nature, tend to get excited about any new purchase only when it is new.
That way, Amazon gets tons of reviews for almost every product. As a result, Amazon doesn’t need to convince people about the authenticity and originality of the product, thanks to the customer’s honest review.
Here’s a statistic to show how effective the email strategy of Amazon is.
Yes, the personalized emails with cross-sales are seemed to be more effective than a customized home page.
But, for amazon making reviews real and authentic is more complicated than getting reviews for products.
Every individual wants to have many positive reviews. As a result, many of the reviews are fake or paid.
To deal with this kind of scenario, Amazon implemented three features:
- ‘Verified purchase’ (To let the people know whether the review is coming from a genuine buyer or not)
- Review comments/ (To check whether a review is trustworthy or not)
- Helpful votes (To verify the authenticity of reviews )
Key takeaways
A. Ask for reviews at the right time
Always remember that your job doesn’t end when someone purchases your product or service. It is the starting point to get new customers or referral customers.
It’s Because the reviews from your existing customers are going to influence new potential customers.
Thus, ask for reviews just after the successful order. This will help you to increase the conversion of getting feedback from your clients.
B. Make it real
Just like Amazon, try to eliminate the spam in the form of fake reviews from your competitors or even paid reviews.
C. Make it easy
Make it easy for people to share or leave feedback for your product or service.
The more steps you include to get a review, the more frictional it would be.
One of the best ways to reduce the friction in getting reviews from your customers is by implementing the One-Click Google Review for your business.
By doing that, your clients will directly reach the review page without any barrier.
Learn more about implementing one-click Google-review
D. Cross sales and up-sell strategically
If you’re selling products to your customers, then it would be easy for you to Cross sale and up-sells.
But what I see that people from service-based business, get stuck at upselling and cross-selling their services.
Many of them don’t know what to charge for when they have already provided the service.
All I would like to add is always have a goal of making repeated customers not just one time.
Even if you’re providing service, organize it in such a way that you have any monthly or quarterly program for your clients.
Here’s an example.
A website developer may provide a service to its clients at a one-time fee. But along with this, having monthly maintenance of their website works like an add-on service.
This will help your brand to get a longer customer relationship.
3. Monetizing the audience
Did you know In 2014, Amazon launched the Amazon Fire Tv (Set-top-box system)?
On the same year, Amazon also launched Echo, a voice-enable speaker.
One of the great lessons, I learned from Joe Pulizzi is that companies should always go for monetizing the content and audience at the right time.
The same principle I noticed in the Amazon brand.
In this case, the monetization option for Amazon is pretty broad.
From Amazon game studio to Echo dot, many products are launched along with the Amazon store.
Once the brand has built a base audience, it started extending its product and service line.
That way, the revenue sources increased.
Again, Amazing marketing service (AMS) is one of the great examples of monetizing the content.
Within the AMS, you get three option to promote your product.
- Sponsored Products
- Headline Search Ads
- Product Display Ads
The idea behind this is to have multiple sources of revenue.
Key Takeaways
Look for monetizing the content or audience with own product or service. But before that never forget to build a minimum viable audience. Many believe that future businesses will focus on building the audience first, and then it will start launching their product or service.
Unbounce is one of the great examples of this. Unbounce started its blog even before the launch of its first product.
By the time, they launched their first ever product, their blog was already getting 20k unique visitors/month.
Final words
Handpicked article for you: Choosing the right content format for your business
Content marketing is a pretty broad topic; we just cannot define content as blog, video or even audio. A product or software can also work as content for the brand.
Never restrict the definition of your content, just like amazon.
The review system (user-generated content) discussed above is one of the examples of how you can also leverage review into your content marketing project.
Content marketing has evolved significantly over the past decades, but if we have to understand the trend of content, it’s all about context.
Content with context is the future.
Invest in creating customized content to enhance user experience and conversion as well.
Last but not least, monetizing your platform is also crucial for increasing the sources of revenue.
But remember first focus on building a minimum-viable-audience, then move forward to monetizing it.
That’s all.
Leave your thoughts on this.
Tell me what would you like to add in this list.
Sk Rafiqul Islam is a content marketing practitioner with 3+ years of practical experience. He spends most of his time helping businesses to build a loyal audience with content marketing. He is also running a tech career blog called 10Pie and content marketing VIP, a bi-weekly marketing newsletter. In his free time, he loves reading books and playing football.