As with any online sales platform, effective branding is essential on Amazon. It determines how your product is recognized by the customer and how they react to it. Amazon is continually developing programs and releasing new features to support brand growth, which all started with Amazon Brand Registry to help protect brand owners selling on their platform. They later introduced Brand Analytics, which helps guide brand owners to make smarter decisions regarding their product portfolios and marketing campaigns.
Next came Amazon Launchpad, with the goal of increasing exposure for a brand through storefront placements, banner ads, and category-focused email campaigns. Now, with the newest release of Manage Your Customer Engagements, Amazon has provided brand owners with even more ways to increase brand visibility and exposure.
The Basics of Amazon Branding
Before you start selling on Amazon, you first need to have a clear idea of what exactly your brand is. Make a list of which categories your products fall under, and consider the demographics you want to reach with your advertising. It’s also crucial that you set goals to achieve with your brand so you keep yourself motivated and on track.
Patience is the key to growing a brand. You should begin with a solid foundation by creating a respectable brand, protecting your intellectual property, and nurturing your business so it grows. You can learn from and be inspired by bigger brands, adapting their techniques and customizing them to fit your needs.
You want your brand name to be unique, but at the same time, be marketable and sellable across different niches. It’s also important that your A+ content is done well. This will help you showcase your products better and increase sales through cross-platform promotion.
Amazon’s Manage Your Customer Engagements
According to Amazon, this feature helps build loyal relationships to increase visibility for your new products. This recent update can be found under the “Brands” tab on Seller Central and allows you to send an email to Amazon users who follow your brand. As of right now, with the Manage Your Customer Engagement (MYCE) program, you can send emails and create email campaigns to announce new products, with more templates to be added in the future.
Brand owners can customize these email campaigns in a number of ways, including making changes to the email subject line, adding images and brand logo, and adding an ASIN for any product that has been launched in the previous six months and is available for sale on Amazon. As this program rolls out and sellers get the hang of it, you can supplement customer engagement with Amazon seller software, like the SellerMobile Request for Reviews Chrome Extension to streamline the process of requesting product reviews and boost your brand’s authenticity.
Getting More Amazon Followers
It should be noted that the “Follow” button on Amazon has been around for quite some time, however, it was mainly used by authors selling their work on the platform. This button helps users stay up-to-date with the people, brands, and interests they don’t want to miss out on in Amazon. With the release of Manage Your Customer Engagement, brand owners will soon increase their following on the platform.
There are two principal ways to grow your following on Amazon, the first is Amazon Posts and the other is Amazon Live Stream.
Amazon Posts differ from social media posts as they contain an image with a description that should be linked to a specific product currently available at your store. You can find these on detail pages under “Related Posts” and in the “Posts” section of brand storefronts. When you click on these posts, you can either go to the product listing directly or view more similar posts. This is commonly seen in the mobile app.
On the other hand, Amazon Live Stream is available on the desktop and mobile platforms. To go live on Amazon, you first have to download the Amazon Live Creator App, then connect both your Seller Central account and your brand that is registered with Amazon’s Brand Registry. You can go live directly from the app and your followers will get notifications when you do.
Boost Amazon Customer Engagement and Grow Your Brand
While the new Manage Your Customer Engagement is still in its initial stages, you should already be focusing on how to grow your brand following on Amazon. Create Amazon Posts to promote your newer products, and go live to entice more buyers to your storefront. Also, consider cross-platform promotion like doing retargeting ads on Facebook. Remember to always make sure you’re following Amazon’s Terms of Service.
There are so many tools at your fingertips to drive customer engagement on Amazon, don’t wait any longer and start taking advantage of all the features on offer now to build your brand.
