What Has Amazon Got In Store for Brand Owners?

Our breakdown of the five exciting FREE tools for Amazon Brand Owners that are set to launch in 2022. 

 

As part of their EU Brand Owner Summit held earlier this week, Amazon announced five exciting upcoming tools that Brand Owners can expect to see launched in Seller Central in the next year:

According to Amazon, these new tools are designed to make it easier for Brand Owners to create and display content their customers will love. The tools also aim to assist in increasing brand loyalty and customer retention, as well as helping Brand Owners realise more return on investment from Amazon Advertising. 

Here’s what you need to know about the upcoming solutions that Amazon is making exclusively available to Selling Partners who have been approved through the Amazon Brand Registry:

 

1. Brand Customer Reviews 

Amazon has identified that customers feel more connected to Brands that offer direct one-to-one interaction, especially once they have placed their order. 

Their new Customer Reviews tool, scheduled to launch in Q1 of 2022, will enable Brands to collect customer reviews across all their products in one attractive User Interface that will be located in Seller Central.

Amazon states that “This tool empowers Brands to engage with customers directly over email by responding to their 1-3 star customer reviews.

“Brands can either issue a courtesy refund or gather additional information before determining how to help customers.”

Other use cases presented during the session included the use of the new review stream to identify defects in a particular product, as well as the ability to track a product’s performance over time and identify opportunities for improvement. 

Amazon was quick to stress that Brand Owners still may not ask customers to change a review in exchange for providing a refund. They did, however, suggest using the new tool to respond to customers who have posted negative reviews, with a view to turning a customer who may have had a negative experience into a brand advocate. 

 

2. Brand Self-Service Identification

Set for imminent launch in Q4 of 2021, Amazon’s new Self-Service Identification tool will enable Brand Owners to identify themselves as the owner of their Brand, in order to leverage the helpful brand-building tools exclusive to Amazon Brand Owners.

Amazon described this new tool as: “A simple, self-service way to open up a workflow to identify as a Brand Owner and gain access to all the exclusive tools available to Amazon Brands.”

In order to identify as the Brand Owner for the brands that they sell in their Amazon store, sellers will be required to submit a self-service request, which will be available to complete via the Brand Benefit Eligibility page within Seller Central. 

Once submitted, the request will be sent to the Brand Administrator for the Brand, who will be able to approve or reject the request from within Brand Registry.

 

3. Manage Your Experiments for A+

A+ content was introduced by Amazon in 2016 to help brands showcase their products. The tool allows Brand Owners to add rich images, text, and comparison modules to engage their customers and provide more information at the consideration stage of purchasing a product.

According to Amazon:

“Having A+ content on a detail page has been shown to attract more customers and can help to increase sales by an average 5.6% once the content is added to the page.”

Now, as Brand Owners continually seek new ways of optimising their purchase conversion rates on their product detail pages, Amazon is set to launch a new tool in Q4 of 2021 that will allow Brands to run randomised A/B tests on such things as product titles and images.

By running experiments, this tool will help Brand Owners to use data to build a better picture of their customers and what they want by measuring audience behaviour and attributing sales back to a particular variant of their A+ content. In other words, Brand Owners will be able to learn which A+ content drives more sales, how they can build better A+ content that appeals to their customers. Brand Owners will therefore be in a position to make more informed decisions over what content best drives conversions.

 

4. Brand Referral Bonuses

Possibly the most generous of the new tools to be announced by Amazon during the session was their proposed Brand Referral Bonus, set for launch in Q2 of 2022.

To help Brand Owners improve the efficiency of their off-Amazon advertising strategy, Amazon is offering participating Brands a monetary bonus on sales that are attributable to traffic driven to their Amazon listings via their non-Amazon marketing efforts.

Hang on a minute… How does Amazon’s Brand Referral Bonuses fit with Amazon Attribution?

Amazon Attribution is a free advertising and analytics measurement solution that was launched in 2020 to help Brand Owners grow their businesses on Amazon by optimizing their marketing efforts off-Amazon. 

The tool enables Brand Owners to learn how channels like search engine optimisation, video, display advertising, outbound emails and social media impact customer shopping activity and sales performance on Amazon.

With these insights, it is possible for Brand Owners to discover new ways to grow their businesses on Amazon by optimising the customer experiences off Amazon. 

Amazon Attribution is a prerequisite for using the new Brand Referral Bonus tool. The Brand Referral Bonus tool takes Amazon Attribution that one step further though, with monetary bonuses given to Brand Owners if a customer purchases a product within 7 days of clicking on an ad from an off Amazon source. 

Amazon stated during the session that bonuses will be set by category but will likely average 10% per merchandise sale and will be “a great way to get products discovered”.

 

5. Customer Engagement

Finally, a tool due to launch sometime in 2022 will allow Brand Owners to engage with their customers directly through Amazon to announce new products or promotions.

By enabling Brand Owners to send targeted email marketing campaigns to customers who follow their Brand on the Amazon store via a rich, flexible and easy-to-use new in-built editor, this new tool is designed to help Brand Owners increase their customer lifetime value and “make your customer engagements more valuable”.

 

After introducing the new free tools in the virtual conference’s Upcoming Tools session Amazon’s Senior Manager of Brand Experience, Jeff Nickerson, commented: 

 

“We really care about helping Brand owners succeed and we win when we help our brands grow and succeed on Amazon. So we just want to build the best tools that help you succeed and, obviously, if we do that, that’s good for Amazon as well.”

 

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