You Can Now Send Email Campaigns to Amazon Customers (Sort Of)

Amazon announced today that you can now send email campaigns to followers of your Amazon brand. This is the first time that Amazon has ever allowed brand owners to email potential customers before they have purchased a product (prior to this, all emails were done post-purchase). There's a lot of catches to what exactly you can do in your email campaigns and in this article, we'll break down what you can, and cannot do, through your Amazon email campaigns.

What is the Customer Engagement Tool?

In plain English, the new Customer Engagement tool (currently in Beta) allows you to email followers of your brands with new product announcements, new sales, and so forth.

In Amazon's words, “you can now create themed email campaigns within the Customer Engagement tool. Multiple holiday banners are available with new templates being launched monthly. With these themed templates, you can suggest gifts for upcoming holidays, New Year resolutions, travel adventures, game day, and other occasions.”

Who Can You Email?

The big caveat to the new Customer Engagement tool is that you can only email followers of your brand. People follow your brand typically from clicking through to your Amazon Brand store and then clicking “follow”.

How many followers you have will be largely dependent upon the size of your brand and your product category (and, of course, whether or not you have an Amazon brand store). Some of our brands had only dozens of followers while others had hundreds.

You can see how many followers you have by going to Stores->Manage Stores->Store Insights.

Amazon said that brands with more than a thousand followers will get the biggest impact but any brand with any followers can email their followers.

What Types of Emails Can You Send?

What types of emails you can send is the other big caveat with the new Customer Engagement tool. You're pretty restricted to what types of emails you can send and essentially have to follow one of Amazon's pre-made templates. Essentially you can send an email on a new product launch, a ‘product spotlight' email, or a holiday-themed email.

Also, your subject line choices are also restricted to Amazon's pre-written messages. Sorry for all those masters of sending click-baity emails.

Can I Send Discount Codes in My Amazon Emails?

Surprisingly, Amazon does not seem to support sending product discounts in emails at this time.

My personal suspicion is that in the future Amazon may roll out support for discounts as Amazon generally seems to support discounting products as much as possible.

When Can I Send My Brand Followers Emails?

You are also not free to send your emails whenever you like. Amazon forces you to select emails from some set interval two weeks or more in advance. Presumably, the time availabilities and your deliverability rates could be impacted by major buying seasons, such as Black Friday, Mother's Day, etc.