One of the latest Amazon engagement tools available to those that manage their own brands is the Manage Your Customer Engagement tool (MYCE). Currently, Amazon has both resellers and original brands selling their products through the Amazon Marketplace.

There is an ongoing shift for sellers to register their own brands. This is to help these brands get more support within the platform, and move away from resellers and retail arbitrage. For those of you that do not know, retail arbitrage is where sellers find an item cheaper at a local retail store (for example huge discount sale), and resell them on Amazon for a higher retail price. 

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What sort of tools does Amazon FBA provide?

Amazon is geared to have you sell your products as easily as possible with readily available amazon customer engagement technology to use. When you register your products to be handled via FBA (Or Fulfilled by Amazon), you are essentially having Amazon handle the entire logistical chain of your operation. That means they store your items, ship your items and handle returns for you.

On top of that they offer a slew of options to help promote your brand through their marketing services and paid keyword advertising services. They also help enable promotional and couponing tools to help boost your product above the rest.

All of these tools help with your amazon customer engagement strategy, and are intuitive and native when you sign up as a seller for Amazon, and are there to help you sell. The reasoning for this is simply that when you succeed, Amazon succeeds through their commissions that they end up charging for using the platform.

What is the Manage Your Customer Engagement Tool through Amazon FBA?

One of the latest and greatest tools available for sellers on Amazon is the Manage Your Customer Engagement Tool. This is being slowly rolled out of beta and is allowing sellers to bring a deeper level of interaction with their customers.

In the past Amazon was very restrictive on how it allowed sellers to interact with customers. The only real safe way (without breaking Amazon’s terms of service), was through their monitored platform, and that was more about customer support and being able to answer any questions. No user data was shared.

Although there was user data provided when it came to shipping out goods to customers, as a seller, you were not allowed to engage in extended marketing communications, especially outside of the platform. Doing so and being discovered could lead to a suspension of your account.

Now with that scary commentary out of the way, and a shift for Amazon to help support small and big brands, they have decided to begin offering a communications channel for marketing purposes between sellers and their customers.

There are a few requirements before going ahead with this and it’s important to note that even with these requirements it doesn’t always guarantee that the seller will be enrolled immediately to use this tool.

At the bare minimum you need to have an amazon customer engagement tool and your Brand’s Amazon Store, set up and launched. This is their built-in sub site that acts as your own mini – ecommerce platform through Amazon. Then; it’s important that you are the owner of your own brand and have it registered and approved through Amazon’s Brand Registry program.

The final step is that you need to have actual followers on your Amazon Store. This is a recent feature, so it’s important to note this one can take some time. The Amazon Posts Tool will help with getting followers on your Amazon Store and is the latest feature offered by the brand registry program.

What are the Pros of Using this New Tool in Amazon FBA?

First of all, take a quick look at the report below and you’ll see that for the longest time, the main way to boost your product was spending a significant amount of funds on marketing and advertising. It was a sustainable revenue piece for Amazon for several years now.

Source – https://www.junglescout.com/amazon-advertising-report/

What the Manage Your Amazon Customer Engagement Tool does now is open a completely new channel of marketing communication for your customers. Instead of the traditional method of competing and paying for common keywords, what this now enables is email marketing communication through the Amazon Platform.

This is a big plus, as the email comes from Amazon itself (co-branded with your logo), so it doesn’t get lost in the rest of email marketing communications. As a seller you can utilise the marketing power and brand recognition of Amazon, automatically.

It’s also really easy to use and is templated for minimal setup. It will already take some existing content you’ve created your product and simply send it out to your followers periodically.

Essentially what this tool does is provide an email marketing tool free of charge to help with Amazon customer engagement. Before there was no way to pull the customer information and implement it into a third-party email marketing tool to be able to send out marketing communications to your Amazon customers. If this was ever attempted, it would breach the terms and conditions.

Only four steps are required with content that you probably have readily available to use, as it’s similar to content needed to build out other parts of your Amazon profile.

• You need to upload your brand logo
• You need to add a product
• You need to add an Amazon standard image (don’t worry Amazon will let you know if you cannot use the image)
• You need to let Amazon know when to send it.

For a complete overview check out more information here. Keep in mind that this will only work when you add a new product, but there are additional plans to roll out more interactive and engaging features. 

Another item to consider is that Amazon will moderate and approve the email campaign before sending it out, as it needs to first adhere to their standards. They will handle the communication distribution.

What are some of the Cons of this Engagement Tool?

The Manage Your Customer Engagement Tool is still a new Amazon customer engagement tool and not widely available. It is also very limited in how it can be used in its current state. Its primary usage is via email communications, but it keeps the primary owner of the customer as an Amazon one.

There’s also a lot of set up that needs to be done via the requirements to even be considered for the tool. Each tool from the Amazon Store to Amazon Posts to Brand Registry all have their own workflows and approval processes that work independently of each other when it comes to approval.

As with most Amazon customer engagement technology there isn’t much in the way of training and support. It’s usually a mix of video learning and learning as you go. This can sometimes mean a steep learning curve for the uninitiated.

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The Bottom Line

Whether you’re a veteran seller or considering launching your brand via Amazon’s Seller program. There are plenty of tools available to help boost and eventually get sales for your products. Amazon will be always launching a plethora of tools, and this is the latest in their offering and array of tools.

The Manage Your Amazon Customer Engagement Tool is a great addition to your overall Amazon customer engagement strategy. It’s a tool that can help your marketing efforts, instead of simply having to always spend too much on advertising keyword budgets. Out of all of Amazon’s tools, this is one of the simpler ones. Once approved you’ll only need your brand logo, the item you want to promote, and an Amazon approved image to complete the setup process.

After all of this is said and done, all you need to do is simply schedule it and it’s off and away to your active client base. A seller is even able to handle multiple promotions at a time with certain limits, so all the marketing can be done on a consistent and set schedule.

When it comes to promoting items through Amazon, the two major ways were always through ad marketing, or through setting up a costly external website that would redirect to your Amazon Sales page.

That website would have its own operating and marketing running costs that needs to be maintained to get enough traction to get people to go through to Amazon. The Manage Your Customer Engagement Tool is a great part of an overall Amazon customer engagement strategy for Amazon FBA sellers as it continues to round out a complete marketing and sales ecosystem.