5 Focus Areas to Help your Brand Grow Faster on Amazon

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In the increasingly competitive Amazon landscape, staying ahead of the curve and scaling your business requires a strategic focus on several key areas. In today’s email, we talk about 5 crucial areas to consider:

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1. Customer Acquisition and Loyalty

Amazon continues to attract new sellers, investing heavily in advertising to secure high rankings. Sponsored ad placements are also increasing in number, completely dominating the first row now for example. For sustainable growth, establishing your brand is essential; it ensures you're not constantly battling for visibility and that you have a steady flow of revenue.

Having a loyal customer base can provide that. Your brand customers are also more inclined to try new products as you launch them. Amazon is now helping brands take more advantage of this. It recently introduced features like "Brand Tailored Promotions" and "Customer Engagement", that enable you to send emails to your customers (currently available in the US and possibly expanding to other marketplaces). It’s useful to leverage this feature if you’re selling in the US market.

Additionally, there are some strategies that help in expanding your customer base:

• Non-Branded Targeting: We often come across accounts set up with no clear distinction between branded and non-branded targeting. While branded targeting is an effective defensive and cross-promotion tactic, non-branded is also a useful strategy to reach more number of new to Brand shoppers.

• Important Metrics: It’s important to measure metrics like Add to Carts, unique customers, repeat sales, lifetime value, and subscribe and save, to evaluate the impact of your PPC efforts and investment. For this Brand Metrics (Ad console) is an effective dashboard that shows brand considerations you’re driving with the Ad spend. The dashboard also shows the returns you get from these considerations in the past 12 months.

• Awareness Campaigns and Audience Targeting: Allocating some budget on upper funnel strategies helps spread awareness and increase more traffic. Awareness campaigns tend to have a lower ROI, but with limited spend and well-defined targeting, they don’t impact profitability but help to keep adding more customers and sales.

• Subscribe and Save: An invaluable feature for recurring sales if you’re selling in a consumables category. Recently, Amazon has introduced Subscribe and Save coupons to encourage more shoppers to enroll in the program. Having an SnS customer base is helpful in getting recurring revenue that doesn’t require retargeting.

• Store Page: A well-designed store page helps to strengthen your brand identity. The growing prominence of features such as the Follow button and Posts indicates that Amazon is bringing in the social shopping element. Both help to get more brand followers.

2. Creatives and Branding

Creatives are getting huge importance, with Amazon regularly introducing new options enabling more creativity. Recent releases include:

i. Up to 5 custom images on a single SB Ad creative that create a nice looping effect

ii. Carousel images on SD

iii. Videos on SB banner Ads and SD

iv. Inspiration from Brands section showing latest Posts

With contextual targeting extending beyond Amazon, creative content is vital for standing out. Engaging creatives can significantly enhance your brand's visibility, credibility, and sales.

Brands should focus on creative high-converting creatives. For this A/B testing different elements such as Headline and custom image/video helps. It’s equally important to ensure your creatives resonate better with your target audience.

Effective branding not only enhances visibility but also fosters brand loyalty.

3. Reviews

Another area getting high importance from Amazon is Reviews.

Amazon has been testing how reviews display on the UI. A while back, it started displaying more precise ratings with decimals, and now the one-star display.

For Ads, there are exclusive placements for “Highly-rated products” or “4 stars and above” categories.

The new badges that Amazon introduced including “Popular Brand Pick” and “Overall pick” also consider ranking as one of the key factors.

Managing and cultivating reviews is crucial for building trust and credibility.

4. Pricing

Pricing is important on Amazon, as it affects who wins the buy box and earns badges like 'Amazon's Choice.' But you don't always have to make your prices super low and sacrifice your profits. It's a good idea to keep your prices competitive, but you should test different prices to see what works best for your sales and profits.

Sometimes, having lower prices can lead to more sales and better profits, so it's worth trying. It's also important to set your prices in a way that lets you offer deals and promotions from time to time without losing money. Deals and special offers are attractive to customers on Amazon, and events like 'Prime Day' show how much people like them. So, plan your pricing strategy carefully to offer deals without hurting your profits.

5. Expanding to Multiple Marketplaces

Expanding your presence to multiple Amazon marketplaces is a strategic move that can significantly enhance your business's reach and revenue potential.

Selling in multiple marketplaces enables you to reach a variety of audiences. Some marketplaces may have a higher conversion rate for your brand, and expanding into multiple marketplaces allows you to discover and capitalize on these opportunities.

Other learnings:

1. The new “Frequently Returned” item badge. The new badge will identify products with the highest return rates in their product category. [Read more].

2. Sponsored Ads are getting more personalized. Recently we noticed categories such as: "recommended based on shopping trends", "based on your browsing history", and "related to items you've viewed". [Read more].

3. Optimize sales with the Marketplace Product Guidance Tool. Marketplace Product Guidance provides weekly customer insights and FBA selection recommendations. [Read more].

4. Boost engagement with shoppable images on the Store. A feature that Amazon launched long ago but often overlooked, as many stores don't have these images yet. [Read more].

Thanks,

Himanshu

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