When Amazon Prime first came to market in 2005 (2013 in Canada) it was much different than it is now. Customers loved the ability to sign up for free two-day shipping, I have been and continue to be a Prime member since day 1 however I noticed that friends and family that signed up would often cancel their membership after their items were delivered. At that time your membership was to receive free shipping and not much else. 
In January 2016 Amazon Prime reached 54 million members, and it wasn’t by fluke. In April of that year they announced the same day shipping in many US cities, and then in September a restaurant delivery service. Not far after that came Amazon Prime Music and throughout the process they successfully launched Amazon Prime Video. Then came Alexa which directly integrates with Amazon Prime and provides households across the world with integrated voice-activated services to make life easier.
What can a digital marketing company learn from Amazon?
Amazon has many, many, verticals and strategies in place. From their affiliate program, where literally anyone can sell products on Amazon just by using a link and earning commission, to their Prime program; they’ve always focused on over-delivering to their customers. They quickly realized that by providing and integrating more value into their services it meant that the customer life cycle would far exceed the numbers they were seeing, and they would maintain an increasing amount of residual income.
What does video have to do with free shipping? Well not much, but it’s just one more thing that Amazon does to keep customers paying their monthly prime membership
How can we apply this mentality to the digital marketing company model? I’ve been the president of Apex Wireless for some time, and we have spent a lot of time increasing our Managed Services offering to bring our customers value that far exceeds the price they pay us every month. We effectively learned that by providing customers with over-the-top value, like our billing app, real-time data updates, easy to read monthly reports and a local helpdesk, they were more likely to not just sign up but stay with us for an extended period of time.
These types of innovative values are the core of business success. Many agencies operate on a model of trading time for money. How we should be operating is by providing as much value to our clients as possible so that their businesses become more successful due to our efforts and input. This will create long lasting relationships, better outcomes, and more successful partnerships