Best Practices For Amazon Email Marketing
As an Amazon merchant, and as someone that inspects, advises and consults for hundreds of other Amazon merchants, I see a lot of email series written for buyers of Amazon products. I also frequently get the question, “What are some email marketing best practices for Amazon?”
So, how do you write the perfect Amazon auto responder series?
Well, I’m not sure if this one is perfect, but it sure gets good results, so let’s go over what we have found works really well. Everything about writing emails should be done for the following reasons.
#1 Get Positive Reviews
#2 Get Your Customers Coming Back To You
#3 Get New Customers To Buy Your Product
We’ll start with the sequence of emails which should be sent after the purchase has been made.
Email 1 – Informative
The customer has just bought your product. It’s something you’ve put a lot of thought into, and you know your product well. However, the buyer doesn’t, so it’s up to you to inform them of what they just bought. This is called the Informative email. You basically want to tell your customer about what they just bought, and provide some guidance on how to use the product (it may seem obvious to you, but tell them anyway). Introduce yourself and tell them when they can expect the product to arrive and what they should do with the product when it does arrive. End this Informative email by stating that more emails will be coming later once the product has arrived. This is known as “opening a loop”, which builds anticipation about more quality information soon to follow. Marketing tip: Educate your buyers. I checked out my competitor’s listings for 1 star reviews, found some common complaints about their product (which my product also has) and informed my buyers why this particular feature is necessary. Now I get 5 star reviews mentioning how great this feature is. I educated my buyers and turned 1 star reviews into 5 star reviews from this single email. Can you act proactively and provide questions to answers about your product before they actually arise?
** Usually, this email should be sent on the second day after your customer has made a purchase. Remember that Amazon will have already sent a few emails, and you don’t want to get lost in the flurry of order confirmation emails.
Email 2 – How Did We Do?
If you’re using Amazon FBA to fulfill your products, you should be safe estimating 5 days for your product to arrive. If you’re using FBM (your own fulfillment), it will take longer. Regardless, give your customer two additional days to make sure the product arrived safely and has met or exceeded their expectations. What works best is to ask the question, “How did we do?” The idea is to use this as a filter to catch any potential customer service problems which may have happened during the arrival of your product. Or, maybe they just didn’t like the product. This provides the opportunity to identify those customers that you don’t want posting a review, which is one of the primary reasons for having an Amazon auto responder email series.
Email 3 – 1st Review Request
Wait an additional 2 or 3 days after the How Did We Do email, and then go for a positive review request. This email doesn’t need to be long, but it should have a single easy to follow call-to-action: get a review for the product. There’s no question that reviews drive sales, and raise your sales rankings, so it’s critical that this email be well crafted, simple, and to the point. Below is an example of an email that I use for my own clients, which brings me a steady and unstoppable string of reviews for my products.
Sample Email – Subject Line “Honest Feedback”
| Dear John, Thank you for your recent purchase on Amazon.com! We’re sincerely appreciative and we’d love to hear your honest feedback about the product. | |
| Posting a review is easy. Just click the below button to leave your feedback for the product. | |
| If the above link does not work you can find the item by searching on Amazon for “your product’s name“, click on the customer reviews for that product > See all customer reviews > “Create your own review” button, and submit that review. | |
| We are a small company, so your product feedback will help us improve our business. | |
| Thanks very much. | |
Some of the emails I’ve seen here also use humor quite effectively. Anything with personality will work, especially if you represent a strong brand outside of Amazon. If you have an ebook, this is a great place to include a downloadable link, but make sure the link is on Amazon’s servers. Otherwise, they’ll strip out the link. Amazon is very strict about not sending their clients away from the Amazon sales ecosystem. Be sure to use the words – “Honest Feedback” – and not something like – “Leave us a 5 Star Review, and then offer them something in exchange for that review. That would be bribing, and Amazon doesn’t like this, nor is it ethical, but I don’t need to tell you that.
Offering another product for free, in exchange for honest feedback, is allowable. I’ve seen this used effectively. I personally don’t use this because I get enough reviews without it, and it would be expensive and difficult to track. Since the review process is an anonymous process, it will be difficult to track who left a review. It can only be done by manually checking, but, you can try by simply saying something like, “If you do leave us a review, we’ll be sure to include you in other great offers, etc.” Say that you’re going to check-up on them, even if you don’t. For the most part, we must presume that people are honest, so if you are running a launch and want to give away a free product in exchange for reviews, it’s usually enough to say you will check-up on your reviewers, even if you don’t do it.
Email 4 – 2nd Review Request
This email is sent 2 days after the 1st request, and it should only go out to people that didn’t read the 1st review request. WaveReview is a software platform that can automatically do this for you. Otherwise, I’m not too sure what you can do about verifying someone has read your email. We find that, by resending this email to the people who didn’t read it the first time, you can increase your review conversion rates by as much as 30%. If you’re not a WaveReview user, you may experiment with sending this email twice. It can be the same email, just add a Re: to the subject line >> Re: Honest Feedback
Email 5 – Promo Special
After the review requests have come and gone, you don’t want to lose the momentum you’ve gained with this new customer. Go for another sale, but remember, don’t lead them away from Amazon. Lead them to another one of your Amazon products, and create a special coupon to entice them. You can also use this opportunity to increase the sales on one of your products that may be lagging in sales. Remember that a big part of the Amazon algorithm is that sales beget more sales. Send this Promo Special email 7-10 days after your 2nd review request email.
Email 6 – Do You Need Some More?
Send this email near the expected end of life for this product. As an example, if you sell a vitamin product and know that it should last your customer 3 months, send this email about 2.5 months after their purchase. It’s likely that they may be getting ready to repurchase, and you want to send a timely email to make sure that they purchase from you again. You can always offer a small discount to ensure the sale, and again, always use personality where appropriate.
There it is! 6 emails is a start, but the Informative Email, the 1st Review Request and 2nd Review Request are essential to a successful Amazon auto responder email series. Of course, you can experiment with other strategies, or add/subtract emails to fit your requirements.
If you have some further comments, or questions, feel free to post a comment below. We’ll be sure to answer you, and we’d love to hear your thoughts!
Happy Emailing…
