Engage & Retain Shoppers Through Amazon Follow
Amazon is a never-ending ocean of products. With countless categories and subcategories (and even subcategories WITHIN those subcategories) for customers to browse through, it can be difficult to filter out the noise and stay connected with consumers who have had positive experiences with your brand.
Enter Amazon Follow. Amazon Follow allows shoppers to receive notifications and updates from their favorite brands by simply clicking the ‘Follow’ button on Amazon Brand Stores, Amazon Posts, and Amazon Live feeds. This feature personalizes and streamlines the shopping experience, enabling customers to stay in touch with the brands they care about most.
The Follow feature is becoming a valuable tool for brands. It acts as a loyalty-generating platform through which you can inform customers about new products, promotions, and recently shared Posts. Brands selling on the Amazon US platform will see a ‘Follow’ button automatically populating on their Brand Store, Posts, and livestreams, so there is no set up work that needs to be done on your end.
See below for a bit more information about how the Follow tool can benefit your brand on Amazon.
Benefits of Having Amazon Followers
You Can Connect with Followers Via the “Manage Your Customer Engagement” Tool.
The more followers your brand has, the more customers you can speak to through the Manage Your Customer Engagement (MYCE) tool. This tool is free and allows you to develop email notifications from Amazon’s built-in templates and send them directly to your followers. There is generally limited opportunity on Amazon for brands to speak directly to their loyal customers, but MYCE gives them the unique ability to keep followers up to date on any product or promotional events.
There are three ways that the MYCE tool can benefit your brand:
1. You Can Promote New Product Launches.
To bring further awareness to a new item, you can create an MYCE notification that showcases your innovation. The beauty of this approach is that the notice will be sent to shoppers who have not previously purchased the featured ASIN, meaning the vast majority of your followers will receive the email.
Amazon followers have high engagement rates with these emails because they’re eager to see what their favorite brands are going to do next. This rings true through the results we’ve seen – GO brands have experienced a 35% open rate and a 1.8% click-through rate. Typically, strong email open rates and click-through rates within the Retail industry fall at 17.1% and 0.7%, respectively (source).
2. It Can Build Your Repeat Customer Base.
When you structure your campaigns with cross-selling in mind to highlight already-established items customers haven’t purchased yet and encourage them to convert, you will drive those featured ASINs’ performance and help secure your brand followers as loyal shoppers.
These loyalty email campaigns have proven successful for our clients and can result in a 31% open rate as well as a click-through rate of 2.4%.
3. It Provides You with a Deeper Understanding of Your Amazon Customer.
You can review MYCE metrics such as click-through rate, conversions, and sales to understand what promotions and products your brand followers prefer.
Amazon Follow Gives Your Deals Greater Visibility.
When a shopper decides to follow you, they are more likely to see your brand’s deals on their Amazon homepage. The more followers you have, the more people will see your discounts, go to your product detail page, and convert. While this is obviously a year-round benefit, it is especially critical during keystone events such as Turkey 5, New Year New You, and Prime Day.
Amazon Follow Increases Your Amazon Live Audience.
Amazon Live is a livestreaming platform that gives brands the opportunity to showcase their promotions and specific product selections in real time. Amazon Live has a greater impact with a larger audience watching and having ample brand followers makes it easier to build out that audience. Your brand’s followers can choose whether they want to receive notifications when you start a livestream, so you’ll want to accumulate as many followers as possible to increase the number of people who opt-in.
Now that we’ve shared the fundamental reasons why you want your brand’s follower count to be as high as possible, here are some tactics to implement to get more shoppers to join your following.
Strategies to Grow Your Amazon Follower Count
1. Leverage Amazon Posts
Amazon Posts are a brand building tool that show up on Brand Stores and product detail pages. Like social media, they showcase product benefits and differentiation through text and imagery, and the purpose of this is to drive shoppers to the brand’s listings. Posts also contain a ‘Follow’ button in the top righthand corner that customers can click if they are interested in keeping up with your brand. To encourage more shoppers to click that button, we recommend doing the following:
Have a consistent Post regime. Share a new Post at least 3x/week and pre-schedule them ahead of time to stay top of mind for consumers.
If your brand plays in multiple categories, Post throughout all of them. This will result in maximum visibility across category feeds and competitor PDPs.
Display eye-catching imagery and compelling copy. Be sure to include enticing calls-to-action that drive engagement.
When we have implemented these Amazon Post strategies for our clients, GO has seen a nearly 50% increase in follower count by month 5.
2. Utilize Sponsored Brand Advertising
One area where consumers can access the ‘Follow’ button is on the Brand Store. To increase traffic to the Brand Store and up the likelihood of shoppers clicking that button, we strongly suggest investing in Sponsored Brand advertising.
Sponsored Brands are customizable ads that feature your brand’s logo, a headline, and multiple products, and they can direct consumers to the Brand Store, a product list, or product detail pages. The advantage of using Sponsored Brand ads is that it can show up as a banner at the top of Amazon’s search results, putting you in an optimal position to catch the consumer’s eye and get them to visit your Brand Store.
The Brand Store is one of the best places to get consumers to follow your brand. This is because:
The ‘Follow’ button follows visitors throughout their Brand Store journey. The button shows up in the top left corner of the Brand Store’s navigation bar and stays there as consumers move from page to page.
It builds brand affinity and likeability. The Brand Store is a great place for you to promote your brand’s benefits, differentiation, and company background to engage consumers and make them fans of your products. If consumers like your brand, it increases the probability of them following you.
3. Pursue Amazon Live
Having real people endorse your products during a livestream is an excellent opportunity to boost your follower count – especially since the ‘Follow’ button is available on every Amazon Live feed. To make the most of this platform, be sure to:
Have the on-camera brand representative encourage viewers to click the ‘Follow’ button. We recommend they do this at least two times during the livestream, once at the beginning and once at the end.
Highlight new promotions, new items, and best-selling product lines during the stream. This will give consumers a better idea of if your brand is up their alley and if they are interested in hearing more from you.
Strategies like these will take your Amazon follower count to the next level. You can certainly pick and choose which tactics you’d like to utilize, but our team has noticed that implementing all of them in tandem truly generates the greatest follower growth.
IT’S GO TIME.
Don’t have the bandwidth to execute the Amazon follower strategies above? Connect with the GO team to help you take advantage of this valuable tool to connect directly with loyal and engaged consumers.