Not content with shaking up the retail world, Amazon is moving into the app business with the launch of Amazon Moments.

It’s a program that enables app publishers to reward loyal customers for carrying out high value actions with a digital or physical gift from Amazon. The grunt work of actually fulfilling the reward is carried out by Amazon, which is, of course, rather good at that sort of thing.

The program has been running in beta for the past nine months with customers including Tik Tok, Bravo, the Washington Post and Disney Heroes. Amazon said that one client, a streaming video service, ran a Moments campaign offering $10 worth of physical rewards and doubled the likelihood of winning back a subscriber. An entertainment app and website increased its average daily users by 291 per cent and its daily chat messages by 79 per cent. Another developer saw a 97 per cent lift in 30-day retention and a 43 per cent lift in average daily revenue in their new user cohorts 30 days post-campaign.

Amazon said that on average, it has taken developers in the beta program less than a week to integrate Amazon Moments into their apps, and as the integration is server-side, usually no update is required on the part of the end user.

Developers create campaigns via a Moments dashboard, where they set a cost per action. They can cap the budget for the reward so that the promotional messages are stopped once it is reached. Typical use cases are a TV streaming service offering a reward for users who complete three episodes of a new series. Or a fitness app offering a $20 Amazon voucher to users who complete 30 workouts, in the knowledge that such users tend to stay with the app for six months and spend more than that in the process.

The rewards available to developers include millions of items on Amazon.com that are sold and fulfilled by Amazon, but Amazon has curated the rewards on offer to present the most-sold and most-gifted items, in an attempt to make things easier for the developer to choose rewards.
Developers can also vary the reward on offer within the same app for different categories of use. For example, a developer could offer a $5 reward to new users, a $25 reward to active payers, and a $200 reward to top spenders.

Amazon Moments is available from today in more than 100 countries. It can be used outside of apps. For example, a brand could use it as a CRM to send a customer a reward via email when they complete a high value purchase on their website, but Amazon expects most use to be in-app. Amazon would not be drawn on how much incremental revenue it expects the Moments program to drive.

For more on Amazon Moments, read the interview with Amazon’s head of digital marketing and consumer innovation, Amir Kabbara, here.