Coupons and Content: Your Guide to Amazon’s Latest Marketing Features

As any experienced Amazon seller knows, succeeding in the e-commerce world isn’t just about creating a product listing and turning it on. There are plenty of things sellers can do on the back-end (hello, optimized product photography!) to increase the likelihood of consumers finding and buying your products. The next step after these organic fixes, however, is Amazon advertising. While this isn’t a new concept, Amazon has been upping their game lately, releasing new marketing features that allow brands to really take their product listings to the next level. As the e-commerce world becomes more competitive, it’s crucial for  brands to take advantage of these features and make the most of their Amazon ad spend.  

Coupons

Think of Amazon Coupons as one of those deal leaflets you receive when walking into a grocery store, except all the coupons are already cut, clearly labeled, and waiting for you right next to your produce. When a customer searches on Amazon, available Coupons show up on product listings with the incentive clearly marked – $2 off, 15% off, etc. – and all the customer has to do is add the product to their cart and ‘click’ the coupon to apply it.

In Seller Central, brands can set up coupons for individual items. It’s highly recommended to try out different percentages and dollar amounts off to see how your audience responds to your Coupons. Then, after testing for a while, you can see what’s working the best. When filling out the back-end choices for Coupons, it’s important to remember that Amazon charges 60 cents for every coupon clipped. Sellers set a budget, and when this budget is reached, the Coupon turns off.

So how can you tell if Coupons are really working? Essentially, it’s all about the testing. Experiment with different Coupon amounts to see if customers will still buy a product without a specific incentive, or if the incentive is driving them to the product in the first place. It’s human nature to want ‘a great deal’ on merchandise, and Coupons deliver this feeling to customers in an online capacity.

360° Video

For anyone familiar with the Amazon business model (and, honestly, that’s all of us), we can all agree that the most attention-grabbing feature of any product listing is, of course, the product photographs. Product photography is how we see what we’re buying, how it looks from certain angles, what shade of blue we’re talking about, and more. This new Amazon marketing feature has the potential to increase the importance of product photography tenfold.

360° product videos are exactly that – videos uploaded in the exact same location as regular Amazon product photographs that show products from all sides and angles. These videos give consumers the sense of what a product is like ‘in the wild’, aka how it will actually be used, instead of just showing stagnant images. 360° videos can also show scale and size better than pictures can. While the guidelines for these videos (and understanding how to get them up on a product page) can be pretty confusing and time consuming, they’re definitely a win for innovative brands looking to attract new customers. Currently, 360° video is only available to Amazon Vendors, not Sellers, with hopes it will reach the entire Amazon platform shortly.  

Basic A+ Content

In other recent Amazon marketing news, the e-commerce platform announced that A+ content is now available to all Amazon Vendors – for free! This means that any brand who wants to provide added detail and visuals to  their products has the ability to do so.

A+ content gives sellers more space on their product listing pages to dive in deep on product and brand details. It allows for more photographs, descriptions, and even, in some cases, videos. Brands now have the ability to boost product listings with FAQs, product highlights, and even customer testimonials, which can help increase buyer conversion rates.

If all of these new features seem overwhelming to you now – don’t worry. While it is necessary for brands to take this next step and take advantage of Amazon marketing features, you don’t have to do it alone. Optimizing organic product listings alone can be tedious, and adding this extra layer of back-end management requires even more time and resources. Working with a third-party seller like SupplyKick can help take your Amazon marketing strategy to the next level for two reasons. First, since SupplyKick runs on Vendor Central, it has access to new marketing features that some sellers might not have access to. And second, the SupplyKick team has years of experience managing and optimizing Amazon product listings, making them go-to thought leaders for Amazon marketing features.

Take your Amazon marketing efforts to the next level with SupplyKick – get started today.