Best Tips on How To Develop an Effective Amazon Email Marketing Strategy

Does Amazon email marketing work?

According to Statista, people spend less time reading brand emails. Does it mean email marketing is not effective anymore? Consider this graph. It shows that email marketing revenue will keep growing, reaching $17.9 billion by 2027.

But how does it help e-commerce businesses grow? Here are possible use cases for email marketing in this industry:

• Driving more traffic to the website — for example, via sending digests with blog articles
• Attracting attention to special offers, discounts, and other events
• Supporting customers on each step of the sales funnel — confirming the success of each completed action and encouraging them to keep going
• Upselling — drawing customers’ attention to more expensive items
• Fostering relationships with customers by offering them personalized recommendations
• Helping customers on their journey with transactional emails that guide them further and indicate success or failure

All of these outcomes directly affect your sales. But these use cases are mostly applicable to online stores with their own websites or apps. What if you’re running an Amazon store — will email marketing help you? Now let’s find out how Amazon sellers can benefit from marketing emails.

How an email marketing strategy can help Amazon sellers

Each dollar spent on email marketing produces $36, making it much more cost-effective than social media and other content marketing formats. But does it work the same for Amazon sellers? Let’s take a look at how emails can help your Amazon business.

Get more reviews

94% of shoppers base their purchasing decisions on ratings and reviews — this factor turned out to be even more important than pricing.

Even better, product pages with reviews have a 120% higher conversion rate compared to pages without reviews. Positive reviews are especially powerful — a change in the store rating from 3 to 5 stars yields a 12% increase in conversions on Amazon. And it’s not just about conversions — reviews increase the store ranking, therefore, you’ll be more visible in the search output.

One way to get more reviews on Amazon is by sending review requests. And, according to the aforementioned studies, more reviews mean more sales and a better brand reputation.

Acquire new customers

Getting more reviews is not the only way to increase sales. According to the ReferralRock survey, 80% of B2C marketers reported that affiliate marketing works well for customer acquisition in e-commerce. Marketing emails allow you to run an affiliate campaign for your Amazon store and get more customers — which means more sales. 

Increase brand loyalty

Emails help you establish a rapport with your customer and trigger repeat purchases. Follow-ups after each step in the sales funnel, special offers, loyalty programs, and a stable contact in general foster warm relationships with customers. As a result, they get attached to your brand and stay with you for longer.

The key takeaway is that email marketing for Amazon sellers works — it increases sales, improves your store’s visibility and brand reputation, and helps with both acquiring new customers and keeping in touch with older customers.

Types of marketing emails for Amazon sellers

We’ve already discussed how email marketing can benefit your Amazon store. Now let’s take a closer look at the types of emails Amazon sellers can use.

Welcome emails

Welcome emails are sent after the first interaction with the brand, usually after a customer signs up or subscribes to your email newsletter. But if you’re an Amazon seller, it’s more reasonable to send a welcome email after the first purchase. In a welcome email, you introduce customers to the brand and show them what to expect and what you have to offer.

According to the study by GetResponse, more than 50% of customers open welcome emails — and this type of emails has a 16.05% average CTR, which is 3 times higher than regular newsletters. 

Here’s an example of a welcome email for an Amazon store:

Your welcome email doesn’t have to be long. Its main objective is to tell your customer about your brand and what you sell on Amazon, and motivate them to perform the target action.

Reviews

Two years ago, Amazon implemented their “Request a review” feature. This button on the Manage Orders page allows you to trigger automated emails that will ask a customer for a review of this specific order. These emails look like this:

But do these review requests work? According to JungleScout, after Amazon released this feature, the average number of reviews per store increased from 3.6 to 25.9. As we’ve mentioned earlier, more reviews mean an increase in visibility, which leads to more sales.

Birthdays

Have your friends ever forgotten about your birthday? If so, how did you feel about the situation? If you want a loyal customer, you need to show them that you care. The survey conducted by McKinsey confirmed it: 78% of consumers claim that personalized content from brands makes them more likely to repurchase. Therefore, birthday emails improve customer experience and make your customers more likely to stay with you for longer. And since Amazon allows sellers to generate coupons and promo codes, you don’t have to think twice about the gift.

Here’s an example of a birthday email:

Don’t overthink this — birthday emails are usually short and only include a genuine holiday message and a special offer for your customer.

Thank you

Just like birthday emails, thank you emails help you foster warm relationships with customers by showing them that they’re noticed and valued. It’s especially important for small businesses that live off the benevolent community. Expressing gratitude for collaboration, unlike giving out promo codes, won’t increase your sales immediately. But small signs of appreciation will drive more repeat purchases in the future.

Here’s an example of a thank you email.

This is a template of a post-purchase thank you email. However, it’s not the only reason to send such emails. You can use other triggers like your Amazon store’s “birthday”.

Getting started with Amazon email marketing

Now that you know the most common types of emails that can benefit Amazon sellers, let’s take a closer look at how to promote your Amazon store with marketing emails.

Use Amazon’s marketing tools

Recently, Amazon launched its own tool for marketing emails. It’s called Customer Engagement and it allows you to send emails to the users who clicked “Follow” on your brand page. 

This is an example of a “New product announcement” email created with the Customer Engagement tool. Other options include 7-day deal details and gift event guides — more types of campaigns will be implemented in the future. Here’s how to set up a campaign:

• Select an event type.
• Select Amazon products you want to promote and the supporting images.
• Upload your brand logo and choose the color of your email header between light and dark.
• Select the subject line and the section header — the keyword here is “Select”, Amazon doesn’t allow you to edit email subjects or headers.
• Schedule the campaign.
• Click “Submit” and wait for the moderators’ approval — your campaign status will change to “Suspended” if it doesn’t meet the requirements.

This tool doesn’t allow you to experiment with email design and content, including any additional CTAs — all you can do is add images to Amazon’s pre-made templates. However, if you’ve never worked with marketing emails before, it’s a good place to start — Customer Engagement is simple and free, and it doesn’t require any extra knowledge. 

Build an email list

What if Amazon’s Customer Engagement campaign options don’t tickle your fancy? You can run a fully customizable campaign using third-party tools — but here’s the problem. 

Amazon doesn’t let sellers build email lists directly on the platform — if you do it, your store might be permanently suspended. Buyers and sellers can only communicate in the Amazon Buyer-Seller messenger — and in this case, advertising is prohibited. Customer Engagement allows promotional emails, however, they’re sent from the Amazon domain and you still don’t have access to your customers’ email addresses.

The solution is building an email list outside Amazon. Here’s how:

• Start a blog. Offer users educational or entertaining content and suggest them subscribing to your newsletter so they wouldn’t miss the freshest blog updates. 
• Make your emails more valuable. Customers need a valid reason to subscribe to your emails — they’re basically doing you a favor. In return to that favor, offer something exclusive — sneak peeks, special offers, or exclusive subscriber-only content. 
• Use your social media. For example, you can get email addresses from Instagram followers.

How can you attract customers specifically to your Amazon store? Consider an email like this.

If you want to grow your Amazon sales while building the list of emails somewhere else, send your customers an announcement email with a CTA button that redirects subscribers to Amazon. 

Starting an entire blog or growing your social media followership just to get email addresses seems like too much work. However, content marketing is a long journey — you’ll have to wait for at least 6 months to get the first results. But in return you’ll get a list of real subscribers that will boost your business on Amazon in the future.

Come up with a strategy

A good email campaign starts with an email marketing strategy. It only sounds scary — use our email marketing tips for your next campaign.

Define your success criteria. You can’t evaluate the efficiency of your email campaign if you don’t know what exactly you want to achieve. Use the SMART framework to set the goals:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Emails are a versatile instrument that allows you to reach goals like increasing website or Amazon store traffic, sales, brand recognition, and more. But unless you set the deadline and specific metrics, the goal of your campaign won’t be specific enough. For example, a good campaign goal is “Increase the number of Amazon reviews by 40% by the end of Q4 2022”.

Define your target audience. Imagine you have two friends with different hobbies, jobs, values, and character traits. Will you discuss the same topics and spend time the same way with them? Your customers are not all copies of one person — they vary in many characteristics like gender, age, location, past purchases, and so on. Knowing these key characteristics of different customer groups and tailoring email content to their needs will increase the efficiency of your campaign. 

Choose the type of emails. Your campaign goals and the target audience affect the choice of email content. For example, if you want to work on relationships with existing customers, thank you emails and birthday emails will help you establish the buyer-seller rapport. But if you want to grow the customer base, running an affiliate email campaign is a better choice.

Optimize your emails

Email optimization is a number of measures you implement to increase the efficiency of your campaign before sending. Here’s what you need to consider:

• Subject line — it should be descriptive and clear but short enough to display correctly on all devices.
• Loading time testing — if your email contains media files, it might take too long to download, so you need to compress images and GIFs.
• Design testing — if your email is more complex than plain text, you need to make sure your layout is optimized for mobile devices.
• Improving deliverability — setting up email authentication will make your domain more trusted by email providers and you won’t end up in the spam folder.
• Email list segmentation — according to Hubspot’s 2021 research, it’s the most effective email marketing tool.

But even a good strategy and optimization doesn’t guarantee you immediate success — you can’t predict 100% of the campaign outcome. That’s why preparing an email campaign is more than hours of proofreading content copies.

Best strategies to get your hands on

As we mentioned earlier, not the entire outcome of your email campaign is under your control. However, some of these strategies can help you get better results.

Send out automated review requests

The “Request a review” button on Amazon is convenient but it has four major drawbacks:

• You have to request reviews manually for every single order.
• You can only request reviews once per order.
• You can’t schedule requests so they are sent after a customer receives the order — emails are sent whenever you click the button.
• The button works only within 5–30 days after the order.

Now imagine that you need a winter coat review from a person who bought it in August. This is one of the reasons why it’s better to set up your own automated review request email campaign. To do this, use external software for marketing emails or tools like FeedbackWhiz that are designed specifically for feedback requests. 

Offer your email subscribers special promotions

We mentioned that giving a special value to emails increases your chances to get more subscribers. One of the ways to do it is by sending promotional emails with discounts and coupons that are available only to email list subscribers. The data from Blippr backs it up — according to their 2-year study, 81% of customers like receiving promotional emails and 88% of customers say their preferred channel for coupons is email. But even though your subscribers will enjoy special offers, take these nuances into consideration:

• Don’t overdo it. According to a survey, 69% of people unsubscribe from email lists because there were too many emails. Don’t overwhelm your audience with advertising and stick to one promotional email a week.
• Think of hyperlinks. You’ll have to include links to product pages in promotional emails but where will they lead — Amazon or your own website? Study your target audience and think of your campaign goals before making a decision — think of which option is more comfortable for your customers and which platform you want to promote.

This special Amazon prime offer email shows how you can draw attention to your Amazon store with promotional emails. It’s minimalist, not too wordy, and its CTA is crystal clear.

Here’s another example of a promotional email for an Amazon store. You don’t have to offer discounts all the time — discovering updates earlier than others feels special to customers too. And using third-party software to create new product announcement emails gives you much more creative freedom when it comes to design and content copies.

Create email drip campaigns for new subscribers

A drip campaign is a sequence of automated emails sent after customers’ actions. Such emails are written once and then sent automatically after your triggers of choice, which requires external software. Drip email campaign examples include:

• Welcome emails after subscription to an email list
• Order confirmation and notification emails
• Cart abandonment emails
• Review requests after engaging with customer support
• Opt-out emails

Such campaigns are important because they work for re-engagement and, most importantly, turn visitors into customers. For example, if you send a welcome email with a short guide on what’s in store, chances are, customers will look through your catalog and consider buying something from you. Or, if your customer put items into the cart and forgot about it, a reminder will increase the chance they will end up purchasing. Finally, automated drip campaigns save you a lot of time on management — instead of talking to each customer through Buyer-Seller messages on Amazon, you can use a series of pre-written emails that will be sent automatically.

Run A/B tests

You may have many ideas for emails but not all of them will work. The best way to use your marketing budget wisely and make the most of your channels is A/B testing. An A/B test is a marketing research that compares the metrics of two email versions and allows you to use the one that yields the best results.

Here’s what you can run A/B tests on:

• Email subject lines — to choose the one that generates higher open rates
• CTAs — to choose the call-to-action with higher conversions
• Email content — especially media, like GIFs and videos
• Email design

You can test anything but make sure you test only one variable during one experiment — it will help you get clearer results with less confounding factors. The emails you send should be identical except for one small detail, for example, a subject line. Then, select a small sample of subscribers, divide this group into two parts, and send email A to one part and email B to the other. After comparing the metrics, choose the best performing version of your email — and feel free to run the campaign.

Wrapping up

If you’re an Amazon seller, don’t sleep on email marketing — it’s a great instrument that will help you get more reviews, increase sales, and boost customer loyalty by improving communication with them. To get the best results from your email campaign, get your hands on these strategies:

• Send automated review requests — Amazon’s “Request a review” has too many limitations, so it will be more effective to create your own automated sequence.
• Build your own subscriber list — by “own” we mean the list that doesn’t belong to Amazon, and the best way to collect emails outside Amazon is to create a blog and add opt-in forms on your website.
• Offer special promotions to your subscribers — customers like receiving coupons via email, but don’t send these too often or you will lose subscribers.
• Create email drip campaigns — set up automated email sequences that will follow the customer during their journey.
• Run A/B tests — it will help you improve email performance and spend less money on marketing.