Sales, awareness of Amazon Echo skyrocket in Q4, analysts say

Amazon has sold about 8.2 million devices from its Echo family since their launch in 2014, and awareness among all Amazon customers continues to grow. That’s according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP), who issued their Q4 2016 analysis covering sales and adoption of the popular home speaker.

The 8.2 million sales estimate is a huge jump — about 60 percent — from CIRP’s pre-holiday estimate of 5.1 million devices. Those figures take the whole Echo family into account, including the smaller Dot and Tap devices.

Amazon has made the Echo family the centerpiece of its marketing in recent months, often placing it front and center on the Amazon.com home page and promoting it visibly during sales events like Black Friday/Cyber Monday and its own Prime Day last summer.

The company also launched a new TV ad campaign for Echo in October that continues to run today. Then there was the aggressive pricing on the Echo Dot, which saw its price drop by almost 50 percent at the same time Amazon launched a buy-five-get-one-free deal for bulk orders.

That all seems to be paying off, as CIRP also estimates that 82 percent of Amazon shoppers are aware of the Echo family as of December 2016, up from 47 percent a year earlier.

Amazon doesn’t share official sales figures, but days after Christmas it did report a 9x sales surge in Echo devices compared to a year ago.