Amazon Brand Tailored Promotions and Additional Coupon Targeting

Jordan Buckner: [00:00:00] Amazon is an always chain chained platform for the good and bad for brands. And with those new opportunities, it's really important that you stay on top of what they are so that you can implement them for your brand. So today we're going to be talking about how to engage natural product customers on Amazon, and really with a focus on tools that were not available before, but are available now and new strategies to use ahead of the holidays and into 2025.

For this conversation, I've invited on Luke Tierney, who is the founder of EcoD2C, which helps brands with paid marketing across all platforms, including Amazon. Luke, welcome. 

Luke Tierney: Thanks so much, Jordan. Good to be here. 

Jordan Buckner: I had to talk about these because Hey, I love Amazon, but know that it comes with different challenges, but I'm always excited by the new tools that they are rolling out to reach customers.

So I'd love to learn more about what you've been uncovering and using. 

Luke Tierney: Yeah, so there's a lot, Amazon's been doing a lot of new interesting things. They've been revealing a lot of what's coming up on the [00:01:00] horizon. There's a lot in terms of, you know, AI and a lot of tools that they intend on rolling out and incorporating into their platform.

But specifically at this time of year, we want to talk about two tools that were not Either they weren't available before 2024 or they've been evolving in 2024 and they can help you out on Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

They can help you in sales throughout December or if you're more of a wellness brands, then January is likely a pretty important month for you. We just wanted to put a couple of quick things that brands can Execute, execute on their own before rolling into all of these really important times of the year.

So without further ado, we've got a couple of slides here put together of just ways of engaging your Amazon customers in ways that you weren't able to in the past. So literally today, a lot of what we're talking about is developing. As we speak just today, as Jordan and I were connecting before the reporting, I added the slide that we're looking at now because Amazon has been just in the last couple of months, Amazon has been [00:02:00] releasing new features to this tool.

So for a very long time, A little bit of background for a very long time. The amount of emails that we've been able to send on Amazon have been enormously, enormously limited and promotions have not been allowed to be a part of that. If anything, our email capabilities have been largely taken away from us over the years in Amazon.

There's a lot of third party tools that we use for years. That we would connect to Amazon and message Amazon customers through according to some very strict guidelines. And then Amazon kind of killed that with having a lot of restrictions for what we could put in those emails. But it's all been, it seems a part of a long play to really bring it all internally into the platform and give you some, some options within seller central itself.

So basically what brand teller promotions is. Email marketing options that you can choose to send blasts with and offer discounts to different buckets of customers. So I'm going to flip back and forth between these two slides here. So who can you send these emails to? So there's a lot of different buckets, more than what you see in just the slide.

But for example, you know, repeat customers you [00:03:00] can target at risk customers, brand customers that seem to be dropping off and not purchasing your brand as much. Promising customers and then potential new customers. You know we don't really get a whole lot of insight into how Amazon is defying these buckets, but the return on these is always good because, you know, you need to do a 10%, a minimum 10 percent discount.

We've only done 10 percent discounts. None of our partners have wanted to go like super overboard with this, but. You know, this is, this is a screenshot from, from one of our partners. You know, promising new customers they spent 385 on this promotion. They brought in 4, 200 in sales. So the return in terms of a ratio is always there, but different buckets are going to have different opportunities along with them.

And then what's relatively new is that up until recently, we've only just seen like a list of these different buckets and, you know, whether or not the size of that audience is enough for Amazon to let a brand message those people. Amazon has been releasing more audiences that you can message and they've broken them out into four categories.

New customer acquisition, customer retention, re engagement. So you can actually promote [00:04:00] one of your products that maybe is a little not selling as well to customers who are buying maybe your flagship product. Depending on how your repeat, what your balance is between new customer revenue and repeat customer revenue more than that in a second.

You can lean into some of these other audiences here, but We at EQD to see use brand tailored promotions pretty frequently in responses to how a brand is pacing and whether we feel like that new customer or repeat customer whether those audiences specifically are going up and down for whatever variety of reasons, do we need to bolster one or we're trying to really push one of them?

And CPG repeat customer rate is so important and. Amazon doesn't give you a lot of opportunities for loyalty programs specifically with your customers. And so this has become a real go to for us in support of our other marketing activities. 

Jordan Buckner: Luke, what did these emails look like? Are they like full of Amazon branding?

Can you really just like put text in, like how branded or how detailed are they versus kind of more Amazon promotion? 

Luke Tierney: They're totally templated. We cannot edit them at [00:05:00] all. They come from Amazon. They come offering a discount. Or we can't even I mean, it has to even say this.

Cause by the time someone listens to this, it might be different, but at least in the past, like we ha we've only been able to select the entire catalog. So, you know, you get 10% this audience will get a one time opportunity to have 10 percent off of, and anything in your catalog, we haven't been able to narrow down of like 10 percent only for like X products, but they're just now starting to roll that functionality out.

So If I could go in right now and check it and could eat my own words so , I would play with the tool and see what it offers you there. 

Jordan Buckner: And are these, available now for a free cost? Do they require you to say, like, if you do a 10 percent off discount, is that just the cost of sending the emails?

Or is there like a price, a cost percent? That's only per redemption. You only pay the 10 percent if there are redemptions. So if you look at just the normal coupon redemption and just adds on the email on top of it. 

Luke Tierney: Yeah. So yeah, there's no additional cost outside of what you're giving to the customer.

So if you look here you know, this potential new customers Campaign that was run reached 1300 people had four [00:06:00] redemptions. This one wasn't very, this one wasn't high performing, but the easy math will illustrate a point 20 was spent on getting 200 in sales. So like you just multiply that, like.

That 10 percent discount out. And you can see that four people came and claimed just that 10 percent discount. However, if you look at this promising bucket, you know, 385 to spend for over 4, 200 in sales. Well, how did that happen? People are not only buying the item that they get for 10%.

They might start adding other things to their cart and your AO fee will be higher. And so that's something, especially when we start dealing with larger numbers, that is something that we tend to see. 

Jordan Buckner: Okay. That's really exciting then. I know a lot of times Amazon finds ways of like charging additional fees for different services, but it's not included yet.

And that might change in the future, but at least right now we can take advantage of this. 

Luke Tierney: And then one other note I wanted to throw out, you know, we're doing these on the regular for our brands. We're not usually running these more often than quarterly. our experiments and what, you know just playing around with this tool.

What we've seen is that there's pretty steadily diminishing returns. if you start running these like weekly or even [00:07:00] monthly, but quarterly to us it's been a good rhythm to let these audiences, you know refill so that then you can target more people. 

Jordan Buckner: Love that. 

Luke Tierney: And then moving on from.

There's also a lot of additional cue potting targeting these audiences as well. And so what this BrandTailor promotions are our first go to, but this is also interesting to discuss. You can now have coupons on your detail pages strictly for brand card abandoners. Now, the caveat is, how are you getting them to come and look at your detail page again?

That's a little bit out of your control if you're just throwing the coupon up, hoping they come back. The thing we like about BrandTailor, the, the emails is that they're, it is, you know, and it is So to speak that audience, whereas this couponing is going to be more of sort of luck of the draw.

But if this is combined with, you know, if you're running Amazon ads, especially if you have any Amazon ad units that are retargeting people who visited your detail pages, then this can become more interesting. And it's a way to layer on even [00:08:00] more like retargeting. And sending out offers to get customers across that finish line.

It's not limited to brand card abandoners. You can do at risk customers. you can do quite a few things. 

Jordan Buckner: I like that. That's really exciting. And so are these coupons and showing up on the product listing page or where are the, these coupons? 

Luke Tierney: That's exactly it. When people visit your Amazon product page they'll see this coupon the same way that they might see any other coupons that you might've run.

Jordan Buckner: Okay. But it's only showing to a certain segment. It's not showing to the larger audience. That's correct. Okay. So then the goal then, so you can become a hyper targeted and say, just offer a coupon to a certain group of customers to encourage them without having to blink it on. Cause right now you have to send like a blanket coupon to everyone.

So even if they were a hundred percent going to your page to purchase, they're also getting a coupon. So you might be losing additional five, 10 percent of revenue where otherwise they will spend it. But this is targeting specific groups that might otherwise hesitate to purchase and it's providing that additional incentive.

Luke Tierney: that's correct with one caveat. We have been able to do some subscribe and save coupons, which are to [00:09:00] your point available to everybody, but that's been more targeted towards. Hey, sign up for subscribe and save. You'll get in addition to the standing subscribe and save discount of like 5 or 10%.

We'll give you another 5 or another 10 percent off of your first S and S purchase. But this has been the first time that we've seen coupons roll out on Amazon that are specific to an audience and not available to anybody else. So, yes, that is awesome. I think that's really exciting.

And then do you know your LTV? So this is going to be a little bit of a plug for warning. So Amazon doesn't give you your LTV. And if those people who don't know what's LTV. Thank you. lifetime value. So over the course of the entire time that a customer is with you, like how much have they spent?

So we have a analytics partner that we used to help build our reporting. And so what what they do is they Pull from Amazon via an API. They pull all of our clients, Amazon data into a data lake. And then they start building reports on top of that, that you wouldn't get in seller central. So we can see how much repeat [00:10:00] customer revenue came in for any given time period.

We can see how much new customer revenue came in any given time period. Amazon kind of gives you a repeat customer rate, but it's frankly, it conflicts with what we see in our backend and we trust our numbers more. Cause we're getting it, you know, we're getting it straight from those data tables that everything is.

Even within Amazon system, everything is built on. So Amazon gives you a repeat customer rate that you can check out and at least get like something directional. You have your subscribe and save data. There's other things you can use to sort of back into like, what's our repeat rate generally.

And then you can see if it's going up, if it's going down. But tracking these numbers closely is. Informs very closely how we think about the kinds of promotions that we just went over and when we run them, 

Jordan Buckner: Have you been looking in terms of like seasonality? So if there's particularly like low points, then you might offer more coupons or kind of how have you been using some of those decisions?

Luke Tierney: It can be in response to seasonality for sure, but largely a lot of brands will have very well, some brands have very specific [00:11:00] targets in terms of repeat customer rate that they want to maintain. Other brands you know, especially brands that are a little bit earlier, maybe they're investing as much as they can in new customer new customer revenue, and maybe they're not leaning as much into the repeat side of things because that audience might not be built out as much yet.

We do see different. But you know, American consumers they want loyalty programs. They want to feel like they are. You know, that they have some kind of connection with, with the brand. And this isn't just me talking generally, if you look up there's plenty of data on e marketer and salesify and some of these other research organizations that release like what American customers want when they are doing e comm and it's fast shipping times it's free shipping, it's customer loyalty programs.

It's a couple other things that Amazon in general does pretty well. Which is why Amazon is. As why it stands out so much as an e commerce platform against others. But this is an opportunity to really lean in and to actually answer your question, Jordan, I realized I'm going down a bit of a side rabbit hole there.

Like what triggers us to be using some of these promotions? One, make sure you [00:12:00] got the margin for it. If you I can't say this enough. CPG brands are so margin pressured across all channels, but the way we see it. Manifesting on Amazon is brands will set themselves up in ways that make it really hard to make any money.

They might even be losing money even without, you know, running ads or you know, other promotional activities. So as long as you have margin I would heavily recommend leaning into some of these different brand tailor promotion buckets. Email marketing is a really tried and true part of digital marketing in general.

And the more opportunities we get here, the more exciting that is. And Jordan, straightforwardly, we see new customer revenue drop month over month or quarter over quarter for a brand. We're going to be advising leaning more into those new customer buckets. Within the brand Taylor promotions, if the repeat customer is dropping, we're going to be advising that they lean into, you know, bolstering that with offering promotions there.

Jordan Buckner: Well, and one good thing in terms of like the. Information data like this, it shows is right. You're like, okay, how much do we actually discount? Because do we lose money on their first purchase or not? [00:13:00] If you look at the customer lifetime value, right? Like a new customer at 70 and 60 cent, but for repeat customers, it's over a hundred dollars.

And so you're seeing with such a high repeat rate, there's a strong likelihood that that customer will come back to your brand. You know, if it was close here, where like the customer lifetime value was. For new customers of 1760 and for repeat customers, just like 25 or like really close, then you know that you have a bigger issue of one time shoppers.

And so that value might not be there to heavily discount if it's going to take you into a negative cash situation. 

Luke Tierney: Yep. And with the the example brand that we have up here, like their repeat customers are precious. And that difference between, you know, 17 and 60 cents for a new average lifetime value of a new customer versus the over a hundred for repeat.

They've leaned in really heavily to doing everything they can to like treat and maintain the repeat customers and it has showed. 

Jordan Buckner: I love that. That's really exciting. Well, this is awesome. Luke, thanks so much for being on and talking about these. And are these all [00:14:00] available within the Amazon dashboard?

Are there any prerequisites that you've seen for brands to have these tools available? Like you have to be selling a certain numbers of revenue or units or anything? 

Luke Tierney: You definitely have to have a certain amount of like some of these audiences, you have to have over a thousand a thousand, or there's numbers in that audience in order to use some of them threshold is 200.

It really just depends. 

Jordan Buckner: Okay, cool. So that if you're watching this and you're just getting started, some of these tools might not show up. Because you have to hit some of those sales to grow. Well, this is awesome. Luke, thanks so much for showing this. If your brand, you're like, okay, there's all these things that way over my head.

I need some help. I'll include the contact information for Luke to get in touch. And he and his team can see what options might be available to help you increase your 

revenue and sales and drive more Hire conversions to your Amazon listing and other paid media and from watching this, thanks so much for sharing and I hope you've learned something new.

Luke Tierney: Thanks so much, Jordan.