Email marketing is considered one of the most successful forms of advertising out there.
You can develop a campaign strategy with a range of tools to reach customers who have subscribed to your mailing list. This is an excellent way to directly target an already interested audience and have them jump into action.
An email can be used to create awareness of new products, discounts, and other services.
Through emails, you can suggest relevant products during peak times or offer promotional codes for events like a customer’s birthday. Emails maintain customer awareness and interaction with your brand.
What is Amazon Email Marketing?
Amazon email marketing is free to use, so if you’re not already utilizing the feature as a seller you should strongly consider it.
Amazon email marketing is slightly different from marketing as someone with an independent website and business off Amazon as there are guidelines you must follow.
For example, an Amazon marketing email cannot contain, review update or removal requests, marketing or promotional language, requests with an incentive, or tracking pixels.
These guidelines are easy to follow since all email marketing through Amazon will follow one of their easy-set-up email templates depending on your category of email. As a seller, emails have developed into a prime form of marketing.
Does Amazon Email Marketing Work?
Would we suggest using email marketing without proof that it works? Certainly not! According to a survey conducted by Statista, they have predicted that email will only grow in the coming years.
Email marketing is predicted to continue to perform well, with a prediction that it will reach $17.9 billion in revenue by 2027.
Email is one of the leading forms of communication for people and professionals and is much more cost-effective than advertising on social media. The majority of people with a smartphone or access to the internet use and check their emails daily.
You are reaching your consumers wherever and whenever they are. Consistent brand awareness is enough to prove the success of email marketing, whether there is a direct conversion from a specific email or not.
The recent updates to GDPR mean that anyone receiving these emails would have needed to allow email marketing strategies.
Take a look at your emails and assess how many marketing emails you receive from brands you would have no interest in purchasing from. It has become so much easier to unsubscribe that it is likely you only keep those that already have your interest!
The way a book lover would submit to advertising from Waterstones. As a result, it works much better than blindly advertising to anyone, anywhere.
How Does Email Marketing Work?
Hopefully you can now see the benefits of email marketing and are probably wondering how to put this into practice. This list will help you to pinpoint a few key strategies to try out for yourself:
1. Drives traffic to your store
Sellers can use email marketing to drive traffic to their Amazon store by sending digests with emails. These usually contain a summary of a few recent newsletters, blog posts, helpful resources, or other activities you don’t want your customers to miss.
2. Attract attention to special offers
This is a key component of Amazon email marketing, your emails can be sent directly to your subscribers with personal discount codes for events like their birthday or prime day. This is a great way to increase brand loyalty by being memorable to your customers.
3.Supporting customers on each step of the sales funnel
This can look like confirming the success of each completed action and encouraging customers to keep going with a purchase. These are the emails you receive with the subject line being ‘you left something’ or ‘have you forgotten’ etc if you put something in your basket and have not brought it yet.
4. Attention to more expensive products
You can use Amazon emails to advertise more expensive products to already interested parties.
5. Personalized product recommendations
This would look like advertising baby products for customers who have shown interest in or brought other baby products.
This will help to build repeat purchasing by advertising relevant products since it shows consideration, but also prevents customers from independently searching for that product and finding another brand. Assuming they already consider you to be a trusted product source.
Transactional, journey indicators help customers keep track of their purchases, guide them further, and indicate success or failure.
An example is when you get email notifications that your item is dispatched and then a follow-up that it has been successfully delivered. It helps to keep the customer informed with useful information on their product journey without them needing to search for it.
Benefits of Email Marketing for Amazon
Email marketing is the most effective form of marketing and is more cost-effective than advertising on social media. The ability to reach hundreds of interested customers with very minimal effort and low cost makes the format nothing less than beneficial to your business.
Get New Customers
Usually, you would advertise your products and brand through your subscriber list, which limits the audience to already engaged customers.
However, using affiliate marketing you can take advantage of another seller’s email chain the way you would use their keywords in DSP.
According to the ReferralRock survey, 80% of B2C marketers reported that affiliate marketing works well for customer acquisition in e-commerce.
Marketing emails allow you to run an affiliate campaign for your Amazon store, which is when a company would advertise someone else’s products to gain a commission. This leads to more customers through advertising on another seller’s email list, which generates more sales opportunities and increases the reach of a campaign.
Build Your Reviews
If you have bought a product on Amazon it is safe to assume you have received a ‘request a review’ email shortly after one of your purchases.
I have recently received one for a book order that requested a rating of the product and my experience.
These emails can be automated through the Manage Orders page and are a great way to build up a favourable reputation. Gaining reviews is one of the most crucial elements of developing your business on Amazon, but it is also one of the most difficult things to acquire for new products.
A massive 94% of customers place their purchasing decisions on reviews, the statistic seems somewhat obvious in light of a product market.
The better the customer satisfaction it is no wonder the popularity of an item will also increase.
Retargeting
Email is an excellent way to engage with customers who have already shown interest in your products. Not only does it allow you to offer personalized product suggestions but you can also send promotional discounts for special events.
Sending out follow-ups after each step in the sales funnel, special offers, loyalty programs, and a stable contact, in general, will foster warm relationships with customers.
This produces the unfortunate consequence of repeat purchases and brand loyalty, there is no chance a seller would want those…
Amazon email marketing works. It increases sales, improves your store’s visibility and brand reputation, and helps with both acquiring new customers and maintaining a relationship with loyal customers.
Types of Marketing Emails
Within Amazon’s communication terms and conditions, there are a few different types of marketing emails you could send.
However, triggerable email marketing based on your customer’s behaviour has proven to have the most successful Click through rate with a CTR of 35.6%.
Examples of triggerable campaigns include
- Welcome emails
- Review requests
- Birthdays
- Thank you emails
Welcome Emails
A welcome email sends a message to new subscribers to inform them of what to expect next.
The goal of these types of emails is to boost consumer engagement and conversion rates. They are also a great way to set customer expectations regarding the type of relationship you intend to have with them.
Communication is key for your romantic relationships as well as your business ones, so it would be a smart business move to utilize all opportunities to engage customers with your brand. Use welcome emails to tell your brand’s story, share your most important links, or emphasize what makes your brand unique.
Reviews Emails
Last year Jungle Scout did a survey, which highlighted that the biggest challenge for sellers in 2022 was getting more reviews.
Reviews have proven to be a vital part of the customer experience. Without positive reviews, your product will not sell as well or get advertised by Amazon as much.
People actively admit to making product purchase choices based on a customer review, and Amazon prefers to place products that they know will sell ‘top of the funnel’.
You likely use reviews when considering a purchase yourself, when buying products online! If you are thinking about buying a white shirt you (as a consumer) likely search the reviews to clarify the quality.
You can use email marketing to trigger product review requests after the product has been successfully delivered. These emails can be automated through different companies or set up through management tools.
Birthday Emails
A survey conducted by McKinsey confirmed that 78% of consumers claim that personalized content makes them more likely to repurchase from a brand.
What does this mean for your email marketing strategies? Birthday emails improve customer experience and build loyalty. By remembering a birthday, you give the perception of caring about that customer.
Amazon allows sellers to generate coupons and promo codes, so it should be easy enough to trigger this type of email on the day with a special discount code.
Thank You Emails
Thank you emails are another type of email marketing available to sellers. Like the previous examples they are triggered in response to an action a customer takes.
They help a business foster warm relationships with customers by showing them that they’re noticed and valued.
These emails usually thank a customer for their purchase, because there is no exclusive promo code the effect is not immediately on sales.
However, they are still useful, especially if you are a small business that is looking to build up its community. Showing your appreciation increases the chances of repeat purchases or sales of other products you have.
It is manners, after all, you are always more likely to buy from the place that was polite and made your shopping experience more pleasant.
Amazon’s Marketing Tools
This year Amazon spoke about the Customer Engagement tool and the beta for Tailored Audiences. They have been introduced to give sellers more freedom regarding how they market to their customers.
The customer Engagement Tool is available to everyone but it has proven to be most successful with those with over 1000 followers.
This year they have opened three new audience types for the tool, these being:
- Repeat customers
- Recent customers
- High-spend customers
Through adding these audiences, Amazon will ‘unlock the value of remarketing’ – Hartman. The customer engagement tool is free and easy to use for all sellers and allows you to monitor the performance of your emails through performance metrics like CTR.
Tailored Audiences is still in the beta version, but Amazon intends to make it available to all U.S. sellers in 2023.
The tool has sellers select the customer audience types and Amazon sends the marketing email directly to those customers. Brands can now engage customers who have purchased from their brand in the past.
Through the tool’s campaign templates and customer segmentation capabilities, you can reach out to select customers through email marketing to inform them of new products, offer deals, and inspire repeat purchases.
Creating a Strategy
How long after receiving an email do people mostly open it? If you guess one hour then you would be correct.
After 6 hours the chances of them opening the email are extremely unlikely, it’s at the bottom of their feed, and scrolling down for that one marketing email probably won’t cross a busy person’s mind.
So, you can develop a strategy within your campaign that will send out automated emails after 6 hours as a prompting message regarding whatever information you wanted to share.
You could also send digests now and then to remind customers of what has passed.
It is important not to overload your customers with information. Be wary when you are automating your emails to keep them minimal.
You are looking for quality capturing emails rather than a bunch of unsatisfactory spam. A customer may very well open the emails but it doesn’t mean they will always buy something.
This is why the information you put in the emails is important and to have your goal be loyalty as well as sales. It would also be a good idea to keep an eye on your metrics so you can assess which types of emails etc are leading to conversions and assess your strategy accordingly.
There are plenty more strategy tips you could find for creating a strategy but these are just a couple you can be thinking about for now.
Amazon Email Marketing Strategies
Building a Subscriber List
Amazon takes its regulations very seriously so breaking them could lead to your store being permanently suspended.
With that, Amazon doesn’t let sellers build email lists directly on the platform. You will have to develop a subscriber list from elsewhere like starting a blog or growing your social media.
This may seem like a hassle at first but all good things come with time and it usually does take at least 6 months to get your first results. It will all be worth it though in the long term when you get a list of real subscribers who will boost your Amazon business.
You are consolidating your long-term goals as you continue with the short-term. Your business is a cohesive unit containing your short-term and long-term goals, loyalty and sales, and more.
For success, it is important to keep a flexible approach, especially with a constantly changing environment like Amazon.
Automated Review Requests
Review requests are an effective way to increase your click-through rate and be reviewed through emails.
These get more clicks and are less work, you can use an automation feature to save yourself time from manually sending the review requests.
Jungle Scout’s new Review Automation feature can improve the chances of increasing your review count, and in turn, boost your conversions and sales. It is a brilliant way of having action-triggered automation, you don’t have to do anything then click a couple of buttons.
The Amazon review template is quick and simple, so you can then sit back knowing you are getting your desired reviews.
Special Promotions
According to Jungle Scout’s survey financial security will be the focus for consumers in 2023.
With people being more cautious with their money it is important to adjust your marketing in response.
A good idea would be to include special promotions in your emails with discount codes on their birthday or other special events. People are more likely to splash out around their birthday etc, especially with extra incentives like a discount.
This will not only increase your sales but it will create a better brand image.
Drip Campaigns for New Subscribers
A drip campaign is a sequence of automated emails sent after customers’ actions. They are useful to use as they require little work after they have been set up.
They are also more effective than singular blasts and can cultivate more brand awareness and sales with a 3x higher than average click-through rate.
You can send a variety of drip emails like a ‘we miss you’ subject or a ‘welcome’ subject. Remember that when you are using drip campaigns it is important to segment your list to ensure the right information is getting to the right people.
A/B Tests
An A/B test is marketing research that compares the metrics of two email versions and allows you to use the one that yields the best results.
These are very useful to assess the effectiveness of an email campaign. Despite being most effective for new campaigns to identify what their customers are engaging with most, it is useful for anyone.
The tests allow you to run multiple strategies at once to give an overall assessment of your emails, you can then use your performance metrics to adjust the campaigns and form one running alone.
Email marketing is free to use so there won’t be any extra cost associated with running these tests so you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Optimizing Emails
Search engine optimization is necessary for the success of any digital marketing campaign.
I say this, knowing it is a sweeping statement but standing by it nonetheless. SEO makes your product searchable and your advertisements visible to the relevant audience.
It is used throughout a campaign to research topics and keywords for blog posts or gated content. Optimizing your SEO ensures you’re making the best investment of your time.
You should also clean your email/subscriber list regularly and include opt-ins. Doing this will see the relevant audiences receiving the emails and prevents your email from being ignored.
Pay attention to mobile design. Using mobiles to view emails has become increasingly popular with the growth in the capabilities of smartphones. As a result, make your mobile email marketing easy to skim, including clickable buttons and clear images.
The less effort and reading an email involves, the more influence it would have on a reader. Mobile emails must capture the attention within the first 30 seconds of being clicked on or there is little to no hope of conversion.
Getting Started
If it is your first time using email marketing you could sign up for a marketing management service to have someone help you with it.
It would have a cost associated but once you had gained an insight into the methods and content you could take it over for yourself.
With over a decade of digital advertising experience, Clear Ads are experts in Amazon Advertising, whether you are looking at PPC or DSP we are here to help.
We have helped hundreds of companies with their campaign strategy to reach their business targets. If you are interested in hearing what we can do for you, then book your free callback today
