People love to be rewarded, it’s human nature. Research, conducted by Dr. Robert Cialdini and described in his book Influence: The Psychology of Behavior, shows that the pleasure reward circuit in the brain is an area that can be highly stimulated by food, sales or special offers. This is exactly what makes rewards so addictive and what makes them a killer marketing technique.
Amazon knows this. The company is debuting a new service, Amazon Moments, that will allow marketers to easily offer unique perks to customers who complete high-value actions, such as subscription renewal.
TikTok, Bravo, Sony Crackle, Sesame Street, Washington Post, Disney Heroes and other brands have already tested Amazon Moments. And according to Amir Kabbara, Amazon’s head of digital marketing and consumer innovation, these brands saw impressive results.
Also, an unnamed “video streaming service” created an Amazon Moments targeted campaign toward “lapsed” customers (previous customers that terminated their subscription), and with the new Amazon tool, these customers were two times more likely to subscribe again, Kabbara said. Subscriber numbers also doubled during the company’s Moments campaign.
He continued, “If you look back in history, marketers used to either discount their products, extend free trials if it’s a subscription app, or give away items to drive engagement. And some marketers, especially on the loyalty side, ended up spending a ton of time trying to source rewards and figuring out how to deliver the products to their customers.”
According to Kabbara, Amazon faced this problem too—the company struggled to engage more customers and now aims to put this hassle to an end with the new tool.
The process is quite simple: Amazon Moments automatically creates a customer-reward landing page for every single campaign and shares the rewards links—containing the rewards API—with marketers.
“The reward link works like magic,” Kabbara said, “Customers click on it, go through to collect their rewards on Amazon, and, by the way, with all the benefits that they expect from Amazon. If it’s a Prime customer, [he or she] will get same day shipping; and any customer can, of course, track their items.”
Marketers, in their turn, are presented with the choice of choosing one Amazon product, several products, or a monetary reward that then can be spent on Amazon, but this, again, gives more options to a customer.
Kabbara said that it is up to the marketer to determine the experience that they want for their customers. However, what the company typically recommends is to give the customer an option to redeem their reward right away, inside the app, which provides more gratification—instead of making them wait for a confirmation email.
“Through this program, we really want to give marketers a new way to guide engagement, create promotions, but delight the customer with fun moments that last, while we are at it,” Kabbara said.
