Flood Of Marketing Emails Coming From Amazon

Amazon is going to allow third-party sellers and brands to run personalized email marketing campaigns targeting existing customers.

Buying from an Amazon third-party seller or brand may soon see you automatically signed up to a personalized email marketing campaign.

Amazon is launching a free new feature for sellers and brands it calls "Tailored Audiences," which was announced during the Amazon Accelerate conference this week. It will allow sellers to run personalized email marketing campaigns, with the goal being to "build lasting and profitable relationships with your existing customers."

Until now, Amazon only allowed sellers to target individuals who opted to "follow" their store or brand through its website, but Tailored Audiences removes that restriction and replaces it with three customer groups that can be targeted with personalized marketing. Those groups are Repeat Customers (ordered in the past 12 months), High-Spend Customers (top 25% of spenders), and Recent Customers (most recent 20%).

Amazon will offer a free tool and easy-to-use campaign templates to help create the marketing emails, which can be sent every seven or 14 days. Sellers will also be able to "monitor the impact" of a marketing campaign including details such as open rate, click-through rates, emails delivered, opt-out rate, sales, and conversion.

A beta test for Tailored Audiences is already underway, and Amazon expects a full release within six months. After that, buying anything on Amazon from a third-party seller or brand could also result in you receiving marketing emails from them. It looks as though the only way to stop them is by finding the opt-out link when the first marketing email arrives in your inbox.

Hopefully Amazon realizes before the beta test is over that not all customers want unsolicited marketing emails appearing in their inbox. The best way to avoid that is either by displaying an opt-out option as part of the checkout process, or offering the ability to opt-out of Targeted Audiences campaigns completely from your Amazon account settings.

Credit: pcmag.com

Amazon Is Filled With Hard To Spot Fake Reviews

Since Amazon's early days, reviews are the one big metric customers have relied on to determine the quality and authenticity of a product. Amazon's listings often have hundreds or thousands of reviews, instead of the handful found on competing marketplaces. But many of those reviews can't be trusted. Thousands of fake reviews have flooded Amazon, Walmart, eBay and others, as sales have skyrocketed.

From Facebook groups where bad actors solicit paid positive reviews to bots and click farms that upvote negative reviews to take out the competition, fake reviews are getting harder to spot. In July, UCLA and USC released a study that found more than 20 fake review related Facebook groups with an average of 16,000 members. In more than 560 postings each day, sellers offered a refund or payment for a positive review, usually around $6.

The repercussions are getting more serious, too, as shoppers stay home and increasingly turn online for things they'd normally want to shop for in person. In recent months, fake reviews have boosted sales of unsafe products and hurt business for legitimate sellers, causing huge brands to sever ties with Amazon.

Amazon told CNBC it uses "powerful machine learning tools and skilled investigators to analyze over 10 million review submissions weekly, aiming to stop abusive reviews before they are ever published." Still, the company recently removed 20,000 reviews after an investigation found that the top Amazon reviewers in the UK were engaging in fraud.

Watch the video to find out why fake reviews have infiltrated Amazon, how customers can spot an unreliable review, and what the trillion-dollar company and others are doing to stop them.

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DIRECT LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq_Ksga9uHY

Credit: CNBC

Amazon Could Be Your Healthcare Provider

The tech giant is looking to change the $3.7 trillion healthcare industry as we know it. Amazon Care has real potential to disrupt the system. Amazon.com has become a trillion-dollar company for one reason above all others: its strength as a disruptor.

Starting out with traditional retail, Amazon has waged war on established industries including book publishing, supermarkets, enterprise computing, cable TV, and logistics. Now, healthcare seems to be securely in its sights.

For a while, Amazon's intention to disrupt healthcare has been coming into focus. The company acquired online pharmacy PillPack last June and launched a joint venture last year with JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway that is focused on health insurance. But Amazon just made its biggest move yet to break into the $3.7 trillion healthcare industry.

It just introduced Amazon Care, a virtual and in-person clinic currently only available to Amazon employees in Seattle and their families. The service provides help with issues like colds and infections, preventive-care visits, and tests for things like sexually transmitted infections. Amazon is partnering with Oasis Medical, a family practice clinic in Seattle, to provide the service.

Though this is just a pilot program for now, it's clear from the company's history where it's going with Amazon Care. It's also evident why Amazon has a better chance of disrupting the industry than anyone else does.