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Movable Ink

The Magic Behind the Marketing at Amazon Music

Customer obsession at Amazon is one of the founding principles of the organization. From the eCommerce platform to Amazon Music, marketers across the entire business at Amazon are focused on continuing to create better experiences for their customers through innovation, personalization, and sophisticated marketing campaigns.

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  • 682%Increase in click through rate
  • 69%Increase in active playback rate

One such example came early in 2021. Amazon Music knew that improving customer streaming playback led to happier listeners and a higher subscriber lifetime value. To do so, Amazon Music marketers decided to use an email newsletter to recommend new artists based on their customers’ music tastes. With Movable Ink’s help, the Amazon Music team built a new, hyper-personalized experience into an email campaign read by millions of subscribers.

Building New Personalization Models

At the time, Amazon Music had five million newsletter subscribers along with preference on listening habits from their Music customers. The team needed a way to quickly access the preferences information that Amazon Music could transform into stunning, visual email content. That’s where Movable Ink stepped in.

The collaboration between Movable Ink and Amazon Music started by building a new Artist Follow API that the Amazon Music team could use to supercharge personalization into their newsletters. The data was based on the preferences that Amazon Music users provide for a more tailored experience as well as user listening habits. The goal in building the API was to display personalized song and album recommendations as part of a round up of new music releases.

In turn, marketers could create automated, evergreen campaigns that were easily scalable. More importantly, these recommendations within the listener’s emails would customize their experience through engaging, personalized content discovery. With more than 90 million songs to choose from in the catalog from Amazon Music, personalized recommendations improve the overall customer experience by whittling down a listener’s near-limitless options into ones that are just right for their preferences. 

The goal for marketers was to increase clickthrough rate and downstream KPIs such as playback active rate—any listener that streams two or more times a week—while saving hours of time through automated creative.

The Finished Product

Once the API integration was complete, marketers quickly built an email experience where recommendations were personalized at the moment of send, reflecting the latest new releases. The results were stunning. 

The new creative dynamically updates depending on the number of recommendations available to each user, which means millions of content variations that are all automatically generated. Marketers no longer update a generic new release module email each week with popular artists; instead, every email is personalized with between one to four new releases that align with each listener’s interests. That provides more incentive to stream, and reinforces the value of Amazon Music to customers.

The Results

With Movable Ink’s help, Amazon Music marketers significantly increased their speed to market with sophisticated, data-driven content. The brand now has custom creative treatments that save time even as millions of 1:1 creative variations are automatically built based on an email recipient’s tastes and listening behavior.

The personalized content can also easily be repurposed, allowing marketers to expand its use case beyond customer loyalty. Amazon Music can now efficiently change the creative content’s look and feel to reach potential customers.

According to one Amazon Music director, “We can talk about personalization all we want, but if we are taking a bunch of marketers’ time or still requiring technical resources to do it, then it kind of defeats the ultimate benefit of it....Movable Ink has helped (our team) essentially automate much more of these newsletters and reduce the amount of time that we’re spending each week.”

The new personalized email campaign increased the click through rate of Amazon Music by 682% against the previous new music release format and playback active rate increased by 69%. On top of the campaign’s success, Amazon marketers also saved an estimated 469 hours of manual work a year in the United States alone.

Amazon Music marketers have freed up time to create even more rewarding, personalized experiences for their customers in the future. We can’t wait to see what they come up with next!

An image of Amazon Music's email which contains a list of new album releases

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