Amazon Brand-Tailored Promotions: A Game Changer for FBA Sellers?

A few weeks ago, sellers started seeing something new popping up in their seller central dashboards under the Advertising Section: Amazon Brand Tailored Promotions. Some call this a game changer for their Amazon Business. Others are skeptical as to how effective it’s going to be. I personally have seen some sellers using this already that have had almost no results, but others have gotten HUNDREDS of orders from this in just a few days.

Let’s discuss in this article what this new program is, and how to access it, and together let’s set up my first Brand Tailored promotions in one of my Amazon accounts!

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How Can You Access Brand Tailored Promotions?

First of all, how do you find it in Seller Central? On your main page, go to your main menu on the left, hover over Advertising, and it should be there at the bottom.

If you do not see it in your menu, check to see if you are logged in as the admin user of your Amazon account. If not, you need to ask your admin to go to the “Global User Permissions” and add your subaccount as able to view this new section.

What Amazon Brand Tailored Promotions Is Designed To Do

Amazon describes this new program as “a solution that helps brands quickly customize and send promotional codes to high-intent customers, known as Brand Tailored Audiences.”

With this program, Brands can now build brand loyalty by offering promotional discounts, ranging from 10% to 50%. With Brand Tailored Promotions, you can increase your customer base, boost repeat purchases, and improve customer retention. 

Is It Really a Game Changer?

The reason why some called it that when it was released was that historically, you could only target discounts and deals existing in Amazon membership groups such as Amazon Prime, Family, and Student members.

For regular sellers, there has not been much in regard to a tailored audiences tool or customer engagement tool that was designed to repeat customers and loyal customers with exclusive discounts.

Amazon in the past really has restricted a lot of the communication between sellers and buyers, especially when it comes to marketing. Sellers for years have used tools like Helium 10 Follow-Up, which allowed them to send post-purchase emails to promote good customer service or ask for reviews. However, more and more Follow-Up users are just using it for the automated “Request a Review” feature since so many have issues with sending custom emails due to Amazon not wanting any kind of marketing to be in these messages anymore.

There have been some advancements with Amazon Posts, and building out your Brand Store to get followers, and now we are seeing even more advancement in this regard that many thought they would never see third-party sellers able to take advantage of. What are the customer groups that you can target?

6 customer groups brands can engage with Brand Tailored Promotions

Brand Tailored Promotions allows you to tailor promotional codes of 10-50% off to smaller segments of the customers base across six audience types to help with customer engagement:

• Brand Followers: Customers who have clicked to follow your brand in Amazon’s store.
• Repeat Customers: Customers who have ordered your brand’s products more than once in the last 12 months.
• Recent Customers: The most recent 5% of customers who have purchased from your brand.
• High Spend Customers: The highest-spending 5% of customers with your brand in the last 12 months.
• Potential New Customers: Customers who have clicked on your brand and products or added to cart in the last 90 days, but have not purchased in the last 12 months.
• Cart Abandoners: Customers who have added one or more of your brand’s products in their cart in the last 3 months, but haven’t purchased yet.

Which one jumps out the most to you? High-spend customers and repeat customers, since they already are loyal customers? Personally, the Potential new customers and the Cart Abandoners were most intriguing to me. As you see from Search Query Performance, it’s flabbergasting how many people add our products to their cart without purchasing!

Look at the below screenshot from Search Query Performance which shows that of the 335 customers that found my product from these keywords, and who actually added the product to their carts, only SIX of them ended up purchasing it! Amazon customers boggle my mind sometimes… personally, If I add something to the cart as an Amazon buyer, 90% of the time I end up buying it! I guess I’m the weird one.

Before we set up my first Amazon Brand Tailored Promotion together, let’s cover some of the frequently asked questions that have come up since this program was launched.

How much does it cost to set up a Brand Tailored Promotion?

Like Amazon Vine, it costs $200 to set up… JUST KIDDING! It’s completely FREE currently to set up!

Will the Brand Tailored Promotion stack regular deal prices? 

Yes. Any promotion or coupon will stack on top of deals, so you need to be careful! All the tailored promotions will be set as “Preferential,” meaning that if there are multiple preferential claim codes, the promotion that offers the most savings is applied. Brand Tailored Promotions will combine with all promotions without claim codes and all “Unrestricted” promotions.

The last thing you want is to be running a 50% coupon on your listing, and then send out a brand-tailored promotion that offers an additional 50% off!

Which sellers are eligible to offer Amazon Brand Tailored Promotions?

Brand Tailored Promotions is available to all sellers in the US and China who operate in Amazon’s US store and are registered with Amazon’s Brand Registry. In the future, Amazon plans to roll out the tool to sellers in Japan, Europe, Canada, and Mexico.

How will customers see these Brand Tailored Promotions?

Amazon documentation says that if one of your customers falls under one of the above 6 categories that you have specified a promotion for, they will be able to see the promotion on search result pages, product pages, or promotional shopping pages with a green badge that says “Follower Promo” or “Exclusive Promo.”

However, we have started to see these in the wild, and here is how we saw one show up in the search results:

Can you pick out the one that was the brand-tailored promotion?  It’s actually the third one.  As you can see, for now, there is no green badge on it.   Note though how it looks when you get to the product page:

As you can see it shows up right under the product title and price with a green badge.

Note that if you or another seller has multiple promotions on a product, only one usually is the featured promo and will show up in the search results. Otherwise, you’d see search results that have listings with 15 green badges which wouldn’t be a great shopping experience outside of St. Patricks Day.

Don’t forget that while our free Amazon Chrome Extension can help you see the estimated sales of your competitors, it won’t tell you the history of their coupons, however, you can monitor if your competitors are using coupons on their pages with the new Helium 10 Insights Dashboard tool!

Could there be an overlap with some of these audiences?

Yes. For example, it’s possible, and likely even, that one customer might qualify under recent customers, repeat purchases, and brand followers, all at the same time.

Have more questions? Sellers will learn more about Brand Tailored Promotions at Amazon Accelerate, a conference in Seattle WA on September 13-14.

How to set up Amazon Brand Tailored Promotions

Let’s take a step-by-step approach to setting up this brand-tailored promotion in one of my Amazon accounts.

Once you navigate to the brand-tailored promotion landing page, select your brand from the drop-down menu on the left, and then click on the button “Create a Tailored Promotion.”

On the next page, choose which of the 6 audiences you want to target. Note that some might be greyed out because you do not yet have 100 customers that qualify under that audience.

I chose the cart abandoner audience. On the next page, you will need to name your promotion, set the percentage discount, your budget, and the promotion start and end date.

After you hit submit, you are good to go! Amazon will take 24-48 hours to approve it, and then your promotion will be live. You can return to this page to see if it was approved, and then after it starts, see the metrics of how it is doing.

What are Amazon Sellers Saying about Amazon Brand-Tailored Promotions?

Notice what some brand owners from our community have said about their first few days of using the new feature:

• “Great results. Well thought out audiences for the most part.”
• “I’m really happy with them, especially the cart abandoned ones. I was surprised how many sales we got from them.”
• “Very very happy. I ran a test for two of my brands & both did pretty well (one much better than the other though).”
• “0.6% redemptions based on total audience size after 2 weeks. This is for cart abandoners.”

What do you think? If you have the margins to still be profitable with a 10% off coupon, it might be worth a try to start using these Brand Tailored Promotions in order to reward your highest customers.

If you have some crazy success using this new feature, please let me know on my Instagram, and hopefully, we can bring you on to share your experience with others on the most listened-to podcast for Amazon sellers in the world the Serious Sellers Podcast!