Amazon 20th Anniversary Shows How Ecommerce and Marketing Have Evolved

Once upon a time, when mom-and-pop shops ruled the land, one-on-one relationships between retailers and customers were easy to nurture. Vendors understood their customers’ tastes and knew what they wanted and needed. But the advent of the big-box retailer turned that relationship upside-down as consumers sacrificed high-touch service for rock-bottom prices.

Under this model, there was no practical way for national-scale retailers to truly understand the individual wants and needs of their customers. They relied mostly on what the quarterly financial results told them. But just when it seemed the big box retailers would rule, the world changed once again: Modern ecommerce was born.

There were many ecommerce startups in the early days, but Amazon emerged as the company with staying power.

This year marks Amazon’s 20th anniversary, and few can argue the company’s defining and revolutionary impact on commerce. Amazon has flourished in large part because of its understanding of the transformational potential of the Internet. The Internet was not simply another selling channel – it was an opportunity to engage each customer individually and create relationships with the neighborhood store feel on a massive scale.

This approach to ecommerce led to the adoption of many innovative technologies that, while seemingly ordinary today, were truly groundbreaking at the time. Some of the lasting ecommerce themes that began with Amazon and others nearly 20 years ago include:

  • Interactive online business – Amazon, and then other sites, moved beyond a static “online catalog” and instead became an interactive place to do business. To support this business model Amazon set the bar high with its prioritization of the customer experience. This included offerings such as a unified shopping cart, wish lists, recommendations and easy customer service across all channels. This approach to ecommerce became so successful so quickly that it evolved into an existential threat to retailers living in the static-catalog world. It even led to the creation of a new business term: “Getting Amazoned.”
  • Email’s importance in marketing – Email has proven to be a key marketing channel, and since the late 1990s marketers everywhere have been doing a lot of it. Email became the engine driving online commerce … and also the spam epidemic, which ultimately led to the U.K.’s Data Protection Act of 1998. This was the first time a country legislated that there be opt-out language in email marketing. The U.S. followed suit with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 – changing the way that email is used as a commerce tool today and influencing its usefulness as a method for personalization and segmentation.
  • Mobile as a ubiquitous and rich channel – Amazon was one of the few companies that saw the potential of the mobile channel early on. Mobile is more than just a handy way to research prices. It’s also a powerful channel for purchasing, for real-time chat between brands and customers, and for building loyalty. As a result, customers today seek to conduct commerce and consume services via omnichannel delivery (mobile, web, social, in-store, etc.), which presents both a massive opportunity and a huge challenge for marketers and retailers.

Ultimately, the trend Amazon led 20 years ago was the fundamental shift in influence from the retailer to the customer. Retailers once could simply focus on “getting bodies in the store.” There, retailers held all the power, because few consumers were going to visit other stores to comparison shop. Amazon, however, helped create a new world in which competitive retailers were just a mouse click away. This put unprecedented clout in the hands of consumers. We continue to see the effects of this shift today, with the adoption of mobile, demand for personalized service and omnichannel shopping behavior. This shift has forced commerce marketers to change their recipe. Now marketers use technology to reach customers where they are, and in a more personalized fashion that effectively influences shoppers to make a purchase.

So, as we reflect back on 20 years of Amazon and what lies ahead, what do commerce marketers need to consider in order to stay ahead of the competition? I humbly submit the following:

Respond to Mobile

Mobile has overtaken the desktop as the primary point of contact with consumers. Research has shown that mobile devices accounted for 55% of Internet usage in the U.S. That’s why marketers need to put responsive design or other mobile-first methods to use, and consider adopting responsive design templates which automatically render and display properly across multiple devices. Success depends on taking the time to set up the template for the first campaign – and on performing ample testing to ensure that spacing and rendering works flawlessly across devices. Smart marketers will also approach mobile-first design with a complete understanding of which parts of their emails generate the most response.

Know Your Audience, Respect Your Channel

Old-school commerce marketing tactics, such as the batch-and-blast email, are dead. Consumers expect to find specific types of content and information on dedicated channels (e.g. product photos on Pinterest, Instagram and Amazon, or company updates and promotions on Twitter and Facebook). All of this creates complexity for commerce marketers. To master the expectations of customers, marketers should start by asking loyal customers where they’d like to see different types of offers and content. It’s important that they not limit this to surveys. Marketers can use social channels such as Facebook and Twitter to support deeper engagement without tiring or alienating customers, so long as content is created with the attention span of the channel in mind.

Establish Relevancy

It’s important to think about ways to utilize available technology and data to make marketing campaigns smarter, stronger and faster. Key to this is segmentation, which helps marketers create relevant emails and brilliant campaigns that connect with customers and stand out in the inbox. For example, if information is collected through a web form that asks for an email address and some additional profile data, then a welcome email should be triggered specific to those known preferences. This simple action can help a new subscriber become a first-time purchaser, and there are a number of solutions that make the process of collecting data easier. Remember to start simple and pick data points that will have the greatest impact.

Amazon has played a pivotal role in changing the nature of commerce. By automating elements of the ecommerce process, they helped bring targeting and customization to interactions that had previously been impersonal. Although most retailers have armed consumers with tools to transition between channels and devices, many have not yet paired these advances in technologies with appropriate marketing strategies. Those strategies are needed to keep the ecommerce customer engaged and compelled to submit an order. Moreover, further changes abound as mobile technology advances are forging a tighter relationship between in-store and online shopping. You can’t help but wonder: What will the next 20 years bring and how will technology evolve to support both consumers and retailers?

Joe Colopy is CEO of Bronto Software.