Amazon | Internet Marketing Blog

Seven ways to get prospects to do what you want

What would it take to get you to do what I want? If I looked you in the eye when asking? If it was a Tuesday? If your name sounded like mine?

According to scientists, it’s the last. We feel more warmly towards people or things we associate with ourselves, like if my name was Mary Anne and yours was Marilyn. They’re close enough in sound and visual likeness that I’d be more apt to do you a favor than one for, say, Richard or Jennifer.

These kinds of findings, argued Nancy Harhut at Integrated Marketing Week, have implications for marketers because we’re trying to get people to do things all the time: click on a link, choose our product over another, like our company on Facebook.

Knowing the instinctive, reflexive behaviors that people rely on when making decisions helps our marketing strategies and how we go about designing the prompts or triggers to get others to do what we want.

Harhut identified seven that will help you on your way to world domination.

by Cielo Lutino 17 June 2013 16:17pm 5 comments

10 interesting digital marketing stats we've seen this week

Here are some of the most interesting digital marketing stats we've seen this week.

Stats include connected TVs, online customer satisfaction, mobile news publishers, Amazon's ad revenues and the boom in tablet use.

For more digital marketing stats, check out our Internet Statistics Compendium.

by David Moth 07 June 2013 13:18pm 6 comments

Mobile checkouts: which of the top 20 retailers have upgraded in the past year?

This time last year I looked at the mobile sites for the UK’s top 20 retailers to see which offered the best checkout process.

I found that there were a number of common flaws, such as forced registration, but in general the standard was quite high.

However I was also surprised to see that eight of the retailers were still relying on desktop sites.

As 12 months has now passed I thought it would be interesting to see whether the situation had changed at all and find out which retailers have made an effort to upgrade their sites.

by David Moth 05 June 2013 10:42am 4 comments

10 excellent ecommerce product pages

In the varied world of ecommerce no two product pages are exactly the same, though there are a number of features that many sites have in common.

We previously looked in detail at the kind of tools retailers should consider including to help boost their conversion rates, including product videos, large images and user reviews.

And in this post I’ve tracked down 10 retailers that have excellent product pages for one reason or another. None of them is perfect, however each has several features that make them examples you can learn from.

by David Moth 23 May 2013 14:07pm 5 comments

Are the top 20 UK online retailers bothered about Google+?

According to a recent report three quarters of the worlds top brands have Google+ pages, with a combined following of more than 20 million fans.

This is a massive 9,400% increase since December 2011 when only 222,000 people followed them collectively.

But while writing a recent series of posts looking at how some of the world’s top brands use social I noticed that the amount of effort put into their G+ pages massively varies, while user interaction with content and posts is almost non-existent.

So to find out whether this is a common theme, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how the UK’s top 20 online retailers use G+ and the levels of engagement that they achieve.

Just to clarify, this post isn’t about the SEO benefits of G+ or the potential for +1s to become more important in future, it’s an evaluation of how brands use G+ and how their fans respond...

by David Moth 26 March 2013 10:42am 12 comments

The trillion dollar ecommerce pie: are you getting your slice?

First the $1 trillion part: According to a recent report from eMarketer, ecommerce topped the trillion-dollar mark for the first time in 2012.

This was not a one-time fluke, or even something unexpected, on the contrary, this number is expected to rise: The National Retail Federation and Shop.org both reported that eRetail spending grew by 15% over 2012.

ComScore recently reported that ecommerce represented 10% of all discretionary dollars spent in 2012 and that web sales for 2013 are expected to increase from 9 to 12%

How can you get your slice? Truly, a trillion dollar question. We have prepared some tips that can help you on your way to having your pie and eating it as well.

by Arie Shpanya 21 March 2013 18:02pm 2 comments

Five dynamic pricing issues retailers should consider

From social media sentiment analysis to digital ad buying, faster is increasingly seen as better, or at least necessary.

So it's no surprise that the ability to generate lots of data and analyze it rapidly is changing the way products and services are sold.

by Patricio Robles 25 January 2013 14:01pm 2 comments

Which of the top 20 UK online retailers use responsive design?

Responsive design is a hot topic in web design at the moment, as it allows site owners to tailor content to any sized screen from a single set of code - which is obviously very useful as the mobile web continues to grow in popularity.

Yet it’s still quite difficult to find examples of retailers that have embraced the technology.

This is particularly true among the top retailers that tend cling to their existing mobile sites and apps rather than going responsive.

Though responsive design is an all-encompassing way of building your site rather than a mobile strategy per se, for the purposes of this post I thought it would be interesting to look at which of the top 20 UK retailers use responsive design compared to those who have a separate mobile site.

Here’s what I found out...

by David Moth 24 January 2013 12:36pm 13 comments

Six different approaches to online product recommendations

You need only take a look at Amazon’s homepage to understand the importance of product recommendations to ecommerce.

One report suggests that 70% of Amazon.com is devoted to recommendations, so it’s obvious that they play a vital role in exposing customers to new products and increasing sales.

In fact, according to an infographic from Monetate recommendations can increase revenue by up to 300%, improve conversions by 150% and help boost the average order value by 50%.

Obviously these figures will vary wildly depending on initial benchmarks and how extensively recommendations are used across the site, but the evidence is still too compelling to be ignored.

by David Moth 22 January 2013 11:33am 0 comments

Brick-and-mortar retailers making big gains in the SERPs: report

Brick-and-mortar retailers may face challenges in competing online, but pure-play online retailers that think they've won the ecommerce game shouldn't count out their old-school competitors.