Advertising across devices and bridging the gap between online and offline campaigns should be key components of every marketer’s strategy, according to Lisa Utzschneider, Amazon.com’s global VP of sales, who outlined the ecommerce giant’s marketing tactics yesterday at the Dmexco conference.
Amazon’s customer strategy is based on three rules: “Start with the customer and work backwards, innovate on behalf of our customers and think for the long term,” Utzschneider said. “We see huge opportunities for helping consumers discover new products and new items. We make this happen through our personalization engine and we apply everything we learn to our advertising program.”
Amazon has 215 million active customer accounts and the company is aware that many of its customers do their shopping across multiple devices, according to Utzschneider. “We know that people today use numerous devices when they shop. I might start by researching products on my mobile phone and then complete the purchase on another device, like a tablet,” she said.
It is important to make the shopping experience as seamless as possible, Utzschneider added. Customers can read product reviews and rating scores on ads, in addition to purchasing the product from the ad. She also pointed to wish lists and shopping carts that are linked through the cloud as another example of simplifying the shopping experience.
Amazon also will be adding more video features to its site, according to Utzschneider. “Our customers love video,” she said. “What we’ve done is embed video in our ads and customers can purchase products straight from the ads.”
Susanna Grundmann, marketing and communications manager at Nikon, joined Utzschneider on the stage to talk about Nikon’s campaigns on Amazon. To promote its D3200 camera, Nikon ran two PC-based campaigns and one multiscreen campaign on the Web and mobile devices like the Kindle Fire.
The multiscreen campaign produced a consideration rate (Amazon’s term for customers who click on a product’s details page after viewing the ad) that was three times higher than the PC-based campaigns, according to Grundmann.
“We know consumers who look for higher-priced items spend more time online and that they’re using their mobile phones,” Grundmann said. “We see an urgent need to get even better [at multiscreen advertising].”
It’s also a mistake to manage offline and online campaigns separately, Grundmann noted.
“When we run offline campaigns, they can be a trigger for people to go online and start searching information to compare products and prices before they buy the product online,” she said. “Or the reverse could happen, where they look online and then make the purchase at the store.”
