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How Amazon Sellers and Brands Can Build a Powerful, TOS-Compliant Email List

In this guest post from LandingCube, learn how to build a robust email list and uncover the ways your Amazon operation can benefit from doing so. By Andrew Buck November 12, 2018
How Amazon Sellers and Brands Can Build a Powerful, TOS-Compliant Email List

With the number of retailers on Amazon constantly increasing, competition is heating up. Many are finding that it is no longer sustainable to rely solely on organic Amazon traffic. More external marketing efforts are needed to get ahead. Email is a marketing tool e-commerce businesses have leaned on for years. While Amazon doesn’t make it easy for sellers to integrate email marketing into their business, there is a way you can build an email list and stay on Amazon’s good side.

Why Build an Email List?

Why Build an Email List?

As Amazon becomes more competitive, success on the largest e-commerce marketplace takes more sophistication. Maintaining profitability requires constant work optimizing your Amazon listings and pay-per-click ads, while staying on top of changes to Amazon’s search algorithm. Not to mention there is always the threat of Amazon suspending your account or even launching competing products. There are several ways an email list can not only protect your business, but take it to another level.

Drive Traffic Straight to Your Listings

When someone makes a product search on Amazon, your product is never going to show up on its own. Your listing needs to stand out from all the others that appear on the search engine results page, as well as the paid ads at the top of the page. Depending on your type of product, it can be difficult to make a listing that jumps out from everything else on the results page. If you can send interested customers directly to your listing, you bypass a lot of this competition. Where Facebook and Google ads are becoming increasingly expensive, email is the opposite. An eMarketer study on email marketing shows a median ROI of 122%.

Nurture Relationships and Bring Back Repeat Customers

Repeat customers are the heart of any business. According to an Adobe Digital Index report, 40% of businesses’ revenue comes from just 8% of their customers, yet Amazon’s restrictions on marketing to their customers means Amazon sellers are inherently on the back foot in this regard. Having an email list allows you to keep lines of contact open between your customers and cultivate relationships that encourage them to come back. If you can generate repeat customers, you’ll be a step ahead of the vast majority of competing Amazon sellers.

Mitigate Risk by Selling Outside of Amazon

The biggest fear of Amazon sellers is having their account suspended. Even if you are able to open a case and lift the suspension, a week or two on the sidelines means a ton of lost sales and lost ground in the battle for SERP rankings. A suspension can seriously injure your Amazon business, and it can happen for the smallest reasons (or even by accident). If you are hit with a suspension, and you’re selling only on Amazon, you have also lost all your customers. That’s because they’re technically not your customers. They are Amazon’s. With an email list, however, you still have something. Even better, if you use this email list to build your own online store, you have another platform to fall back on if Amazon isn’t there. If worse comes to worst, you can use your email list to send out offers for your store, or build Facebook lookalike audiences to start driving your own traffic.

The White-Hat Way to Collect Emails

The White-Hat Way to Collect Emails

With Amazon accounting for almost half of all product searches online, it would be foolish to abandon the platform completely. However, you also need to ensure you’re not 100% reliant on Amazon to stay alive. While building an email list is a great idea, you should ensure you don’t run the risk of breaking any of Amazon’s terms, which can be tricky. Amazon considers any contact with customers after they reach Amazon to be a violation of their terms. If you can get in before that, it’s fair game. A customer isn’t going to give away their email for free though. You need to incentivize them. There are two types of incentives that tend to work best for Amazon sellers.

Content Giveaways

Offering some kind of value-add related to your product is a great way to get someone to hand over their email and not think twice. Even better, the giveaway can also increase your chances of making a sale and getting value out of your product. For many products, an instructional eBook fits nicely. It could be a book of recipes for kitchen products, or a book of exercise routines for fitness equipment. After getting in front of the customer in an external traffic source, you can send them to a landing page instead of straight to your listing. On the landing page, present the offer to the customer if they sign up with their email, then send them on to Amazon. As you are asking them for their email before they go to Amazon, it’s 100% legal by the terms of service.

Discount Promo Codes

As an alternative, you can offer discount promo codes on the landing page as the incentive. This is a great option that can be applied for any category. A monetary incentive appeals to every customer. Plus, on top of capturing emails, a promo campaign will help increase sales and, subsequently, your search rankings. Specialized landing page tools for Amazon can help set up this kind of sales funnel. Once again, your aim is to get in front of potential customers on Facebook, blogs, or wherever they spend time online, with an attractive offer. It gives you the chance to build an email list of people interested in your brand, who you can market to in the future. At the same time, you see an uptick in sales volume, due to the promotion.

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About the Author

Andrew Buck is a writer and digital marketer from New Zealand, now based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Outside of his work with LandingCube, Andrew is an avid film buff and a keen martial artist.

Once You Have an Email List, Use It!

After doing the hard work to build an email list, make sure you put it to good use. An email list is amazing for new product launches. Having a list of engaged leads cuts down the cost of getting your sales off the ground, so your product can start generating organic sales. Outside of launches, use your email list to follow up for product reviews, customer service, cross-sells, and upsells. Email is, and has long been, one of the most valuable tools for all businesses. If you know how to build an email list while staying in line with Amazon’s terms, not only will you be able to optimize your customer experience, but increase touchpoints as your scale.

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