Driving Loyalty and New Product Visibility on Amazon

How to Manage Your Customer Engagement (MYCE)

Building brand loyalty should be a priority for any business. Those that rely on an Amazon presence to connect with their customers are no exception. However, the limited interactions between Amazon shoppers and the brands that sell on the platform can make it challenging to create that vital bond. 

So, what can you do to drive loyalty on Amazon and get your brand buyers to purchase new products from you? It starts with delivering an exceptional customer experience and realizing the value of your current customers. You also need to know about the tools, like Manage Your Customer Engagement (MYCE), that are available to you as an Amazon seller and recognize opportunities to grow your brand and capitalize on your strengths. 

Make the most of your brand

If you’re already selling your products successfully on Amazon, you may be missing out on an important strategy that can significantly bolster your brand. You likely have a product, or products, that people appreciate. However, that may not be enough to create a comprehensive brand that people will return to for their future needs and track for new offerings. 

The good news is that these previous sales can provide an important foundation for your next steps. The Amazon customer engagement tool is designed for brands who want to connect with existing customers. Taking advantage of it can require a substantial amount of effort. And the results will depend on both how well you understand its capabilities and the extent to which you integrate it into your broader customer loyalty strategy. Before we get into those details, though, let’s be clear about the value that building your brand can bring to your company. 

Target current customers

Your current customers can be your most valuable customers. Harvard Business Review found that in some cases, a 5% increase in customer retention resulted in as much as a 95% increase in profits. 

While it’s not unusual to target brand buyers across advertising audiences, there historically haven’t been many options via Amazon to have a more direct connection with your customers or to let them know of your new products. MYCE now enables you to reach them. You can use it to directly market to Amazon customers who follow your brand via email marketing campaigns that build brand loyalty and increase the visibility of your new products. 

A cost-effective strategy

One way to maximize ROI is to utilize marketing tactics that don’t cost anything. In the case of Amazon’s Customer Engagement Tool, it’s free to use, other than the time you invest learning how to do so. Fortunately, it’s also relatively easy to navigate. 

However, even though it is easy, there is not much flexibility in how you show up. Your communications with customers are extremely templated and don’t leave a lot of room for creativity or modifications. 

Start with your Storefront

An Amazon Brand Store is only available to brands who complete the Brand Registry process. Sellers who create a storefront can display all of their products in a single location using their custom branding and logos. In addition, a well-designed Amazon Store allows brands to showcase their content in a more engaging way, using banners, photos and graphics. 

In addition to the visual enhancements, Amazon Stores can provide sellers with more insight into customer behaviors and the steps that lead to conversion. Brands can use these comprehensive analytics to refine their sales strategies and develop more effective digital advertising campaigns that can use the store as a landing page and gather more data. Without question, a stellar Amazon Store is one of the best brand-building tools that Amazon offers and an invaluable mechanism for optimizing your Amazon product listings.  

Manage Your Customer Engagement

In the past, customers would receive product updates, launches, or notifications about special sales for brands they followed, but Amazon, not the brand, was sending these updates. But now, Amazon’s customer engagement tool, MYCE, creates new opportunities for sellers to increase engagement, retention, and loyalty. These email campaigns allow you to highlight your new products and display your logo right in customers’ inboxes.

However, it’s also essential to understand the limitations of Manage Your Customer Engagement. Eligiligibity hinges on meeting specific Amazon prerequisites, and the campaign you create can only reach your brand’s followers rather than every customer who has ever purchased from you. You will also want to have a plan to assess a campaign’s success so that you can improve your store, strengthen future campaigns and grow your brand. 

MYCE Eligibility

To be eligible to access Amazon’s Manage Your Customer Engagement, there are four main requirements. 

• You need to have completed the Brand Registry process. 
• You have to have an active Amazon Store set up.
• You must sell in the US.
• And the promotion needs to be for a new product that has been in the market for six months or less. 

Create a Campaign

Once your eligibility is secure, you’re ready to begin building an MYCE email campaign. 

• While your customization options are limited, you do have a chance to choose from several shopping themes that Amazon offers to make your campaign email more engaging.
• Choose the listing you plan to highlight in the email. Remember, it should be a new item to your marketplace. 
• Select a high-quality supporting image that displays the product’s benefits. For maximum impact, be sure it is informative and reflects your brand appropriately.
• You can also add supporting products from your store to the promotional email. It is optional but an excellent way to ensure your customers are aware of the complementary products you may offer. 
• Schedule the day you want your email campaign to begin. Your campaign will take place during a five-day window from that date forward. Amazon requires a six-day advance scheduling period and you may only contact customers once every seven days. 
• Write a compelling subject line and section header for your email. Again this should be relevant to your product and reflective of your branding strategy. 
• Finally, upload your brand logo in a 3:1 horizontal format to be used within the email header. 

With the campaign setup complete, you can name it and submit it to Amazon for approval. The review takes a minimum of 72 hours, so any issues could delay your planned launch date. 

Evaluate Effectiveness

As your engagement campaign runs, be sure to monitor its progress. The data can provide excellent insight into your customers’ preferences and can guide your goal of increasing brand loyalty. Focusing on metrics like open rate and click-through rates, combined with an effective A/B testing strategy, can quickly elevate your campaign effectiveness. 

The Amazon customer engagement tool includes valuable data on how your customers interacted with your emailed promotion. You will be able to view:

• Emails delivered: the number of unique customers receiving your campaign email. 
• Open rate: the proportion of targeted customers that actually opened the email you sent. 
• Click through rate (CTR): the number of unique customers who clicked on a campaign link divided by the total number sent. 
• Opt-out: the number of customers who opted out of future campaign emails from you. 
• Sales: the total sales of all brand products, not just the featured one, that occur in a 24-hour period after the initial email click by your customers who clicked on your campaign.
• Conversion rate: the proportion of customers who clicked your emailed link and went on to buy a product within 24 hours, compared to total emails sent. 

Go Further

To truly maximize the impact of any MYCE campaign, it shouldn’t be an isolated effort. Instead, it should complement other branding and marketing tactics. Your campaign results will depend on scale as much as effectiveness. So building your brand’s following should be a priority for your business. You’ll also want to make any Amazon customer engagement outreach part of a larger, coordinated strategy that drives customers to your Amazon Storefront.  

Success needs scale 

As mentioned, these engagement campaigns can only be sent to your brand’s followers. Those are the customers who have expressed an interest in staying informed about your brand by clicking the “Follow” button on your Store. Therefore, if you only have a small number of followers, the impact of these will be minimal.  

As with anything on Amazon, it’s important to have scale to get more impressions and generate a viable impact on sales. While using the metrics to increase your open rate and conversion capabilities is vital, you must also focus some of your efforts on building a following for your brand beyond their sales transactions. 

Build a Following

It benefits Amazon when brands establish a solid relationship with their customers. That is why there are tools to help you do just that. In addition to creating a stellar Amazon Store, you’ll want to optimize your listings and live up to your customers’ expectations. Building trust is the first step to customer loyalty that can result in new Amazon followers. 

You need to be responsive to customer concerns and take advantage of all opportunities to engage with them. Integrating Amazon’s social feed and new technologies like Amazon Live into your strategy will go a long way toward creating the connection you want with your customers. 

Coordinate your efforts 

Successfully adding followers and strengthening your brand loyalty also requires an approach that extends outside of Amazon’s customer engagement tool. Because you need scale, you should consider ways to drive traffic to your Amazon store using other brand assets. Encouraging your social media followers off Amazon to follow you on Amazon as well and crafting digital advertising campaigns designed to accomplish this goal are just a few of the ways to get started. 

The key is to remember that just because Amazon is where your sales are happening, it’s not the only place to engage those customers. Many companies make the mistake of isolating their marketing efforts rather than taking the time to look at them from a broader perspective. All aspects of your branding and advertising should support your Amazon Store, and your Amazon presence should contribute to your overall brand in return. 

Let Amify navigate your path to customer loyalty

Before planning your next new product launch, consider the impact that heightened customer loyalty, and an experienced partner could have on your success. The team at Amify knows how to grow companies on Amazon, and they have the track record to prove it. 

Contact us today for a free listing assessment or to find out precisely what a full-service Amazon partner can provide. For many companies, it’s the most cost-effective way to compete on the platform and leads to faster results that exceed expectations. 

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