collI've used Amazon as a case study in my books for over 10 years now since I think all types of businesses can learn from their digital business strategy. From startups and small businesses to large international businesses, their focus on the customer, testing market opportunities made available by digital technology and their focus on testing and analysis to improve results.
I aim to keep this case study up-to-date for readers of the books and Smart Insights readers who may be interested. In it we look at Amazon's background, revenue model and sources for the latest business results.
We can also learn from their approach to digital marketing since they use digital marketing efficiently across all customer communications touchpoints in our RACE marketing planning framework:
Reach: Amazon's initial business growth based on detailed approach to SEO and AdWords targeting millions of keywords.
Act: Creating a clear simple experiences through testing and learning.
Convert: Using personalisation to make relevant recommendations and a clear checkout process that many now imitate.
Engage:
Their focus on customer experience, "Customer Obsession" as they call it is shown by the way they consistently outperform other retailers in their ACSI customer satisfaction rating too. We have our own internal experimentation platform called “Weblab” that we use to evaluate improvements
Experiments and more experiments!
Amazon have created their own internal experimentation platform called “Weblab” that they use to evaluate improvements to our websites and products. In 2013, they ran 1,976 Weblabs worldwide, up from 1,092 in 2012, and 546 in 2011. One recent example of how these are applied is a new feature called “Ask an owner”. From a product page, customers can ask any question related to the product, Amazon then route these questions to owners of the product who answer.