Amazon’s Buy with Prime program offers exciting new ways to sell both on Amazon and off, but with it comes some unique marketing challenges. To help direct-to-consumer (DTC) sellers navigate this new style of marketing, Amazon has recently released some Buy with Prime Marketing features, including new advertising methods and email marketing campaign types.
In this guide, we’ll explain what those new features are and how they can benefit you. Note that we’ve already written a detailed Buy with Prime guide that explains how it works and who can use it, so below we’ll just focus on the newest marketing features created for the program.
Let's begin!
Imagine advertising your personal DTC online store directly on Amazon.com. This could be a major opportunity for more sales! For registered Buy with Prime sellers, that’s exactly what this is. The new Sponsored Brands advertising puts your products directly in Amazon search results, no matter whether you’re selling them through Amazon or on your own site.
These ads look just like other entries in Amazon's search results, including the advantageous Prime badge. When clicked, they link directly to your Amazon Store page, where you can list your off-site products if you’re participating in Buy with Prime. At the moment, this form of Sponsored Brands advertising is invitation-only, but we can expect a wider rollout in the coming months.
In addition to Sponsored Brands ads, Amazon is also unveiling a new type of co-branded ad for social media. Sellers are able to target certain customer groups on Instagram and Facebook in ads funded and managed by Amazon. The ads send interested prospects straight to the product page on your DTC site as long as the product is enrolled in Buy with Prime.
Like Sponsored Brands ads, these social media ads are currently invitation-only but are expected to open up in the future.
At the September 2022 Accelerate seller conference, Amazon announced a groundbreaking new improvement to its Customer Engagement tool. In the past, sellers have only been able to send marketing emails to brand followers. With the new Tailored Audiences program, they can expand their audience to anyone who’s previously purchased their products.
Tailored Audiences introduces three new types of audiences to target:
These all include filtering by customer segments and sending different types of emails, such as new product announcements or repeat purchase offers. Tailored Audiences is currently in beta, but it's supposed to open up to all U.S. sellers in “early 2023,” according to this Amazon press release.
The Buy with Prime badge is more than a cute graphic. For many shoppers — especially Prime members — it's a vote of confidence and a signal of trust. That’s a big deal if you’re asking first-time visitors to buy from your own personal site.
As part of the Buy with Prime Marketing Toolkit, the Buy with Prime badge is a graphic you can put on your own DTC site so shoppers know you’re legitimate. Because Amazon is a trusted name in eCommerce, seeing their emblem on your site is a shortcut to earn their trust and drastically increases your chances of conversion.
Even shoppers who don’t use Amazon can still recognize this symbol, and that gives you extra social proof to incentivize a sale. For Amazon regulars, the Prime badge is synonymous with speedy free delivery, near-instantaneous checkout, and free returns, all benefits any eCommerce seller would want to be associated with.
The final feature of Amazon’s Buy with Prime Marketing Solutions is an enhancement to Alexa that improves answers to product-related questions. Essentially, the Customers ask Alexa feature allows sellers to add custom answers to frequently asked questions about their products. These specialized responses are attributed to the brand and are not paid or sponsored.
Brands registered with the Amazon Brand Registry will be able to access Customers ask Alexa from Seller Central, where they receive a list of the most common questions from Alexa users regarding their products. Sellers submit their custom answers, which then go through content moderation and quality checks before landing in Alexa speakers.
Like some of the other features, Customers ask Alexa is currently invite-only but is expected to roll out to all registered brands sometime in 2023.
Buy with Prime offers sellers a great new opportunity to promote their own personal sites within Amazon itself. But as with every game-changing innovation, it comes with its own peculiarities and obstacles. The goal of Amazon Buy with Prime Marketing Solutions is to mitigate these problems and smooth out the wrinkles created by this new and different way of advertising.
The features listed here are all still in the experimentation phase and require an invitation from Amazon. But even if you don't have access to them just yet, be sure to keep your eye out for a wider release soon. And, if you haven't already, check out the eligibility requirements for Buy with Prime right now! That way, you'll be ready to adopt these new marketing methods the moment they become available. Good luck!
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