What are you doing to build brand loyalty and get repeat buyers? A big focus of marketing is customer engagement. Read on to see how you can or can’t interact with your customers on Amazon and how Amazon is changing that with their new beta tool, Manage Your Customer Engagement. 

Building a brand is about cultivating the personality, actions, and reputation that support the value of your products. By sending consistent visual and written messages and evoking similar and related feelings, your brand becomes synonymous with an identity. This brand identity is then leveraged to create relevance in the market, connect to consumers, and build a loyal following.

Brands on Amazon

All brands inevitably run into a snag on Amazon: Amazon owns all the brands and customers, meaning many aspects of the buying process are beyond anyone’s control. Amazon curates the customer journey and oversees the entire buying experience. They keep all the customer-specific data for themselves and buyer-seller communication is limited to certain transactional activities.

So, why should a brand be on Amazon?

Benefits of being on Amazon

Reach. Amazon gives you access to millions of shoppers searching for products. 

Despite the vast potential, it’s challenging to reach customers organically because of the steep competition. With new brands and 3P sellers joining the marketplace every day, figuring out how to show up organically in search results is always a brand’s first priority. 

Keyword search optimized product listings and paid advertising will help you show up in any search results, but Amazon also offers other tactics to help you get noticed by customers. 

Leverage these 3 free Amazon tools to get customers attention:

1. Brand Stores: Similar to a landing page, this Amazon-hosted web page allows you to showcase products and themes. It can help you enhance your brand image and build an emotional connection with your customers.
2. Amazon Posts: This is a shoppable feed that viewers can browse to discover new products. You can post product details and updates with lifestyle imagery, similar to popular social media channels. 
3. Amazon Live: This is Amazon’s combination of shopping and entertainment. You can livestream and let new audiences discover products and buy them. These videos are recorded and can be viewed after the event as well.

Even with the reach these tools provide, the lack of personal communication between brands and shoppers creates an inherent disconnect. Brands cannot learn directly from customers, and this makes it harder to win ongoing loyalty. 

New! How Amazon is showing brand support

Amazon is finally acknowledging that successful brands need loyal followers. And, that a brand needs to market to and engage their followers and customers, to gain loyal and repeat customers. Because, even on Amazon where the potential is huge, one-time buyers limit a brand’s profitability. 

Manage Your Customer Engagement (MYCE)

In April of 2022 Amazon launched a new tool in beta called Manage Your Customer Engagement (MYCE). This tool available to registered brands allows you to send marketing emails to followers with messaging announcing new products, 7-day deal details, and gift event guides. You can find the new feature under the “Brands” tab by clicking on Customer Engagement. 

The tool is a positive trend for brands, however creativity is limited by Amazon’s fixed and unchangeable templates— you cannot customize titles, text, or targeting. For more information on how to use this important tool click on Set Up Manage Your Customer Engagement.