Email marketing is a powerful marketing tool. It’s quick, personal and effective, usually generating a far better return on every dollar spent than other marketing or advertising channels.
For a long time, you couldn’t do email marketing as an Amazon seller, unless you built your own email list. But that’s changing.
Amazon’s new Manage Your Customer Engagement tool lets you do something really incredible – send email marketing content to actual Amazon customers. Keep reading to learn how to use it, and whether this changes the Amazon marketing game.
What is the Amazon Manage Your Customer Engagement (MYCE) Tool?
Manage Your Customer Engagement is a tool that lets third-party Amazon sellers send marketing emails to Amazon customers.
Amazon’s rules for buyer-seller messaging strictly prohibit brands from sending any kind of marketing-related or promotional material in messaging to Amazon customers. But this gives brands a way to do so that’s 100% legal with Amazon.
It’s not quite a complete solution. You don’t actually get your customers’ email addresses, and you don’t have a blank slate to send whatever you want in the emails. It is still a powerful marketing tool, however.
Manage Your Customer Engagement allows you to email people who follow your brand on Amazon, as well as regular/repeat buyers of your products.
Each Amazon Brand Store has a “Follow” button, where people can opt in to receiving your marketing updates.
You’ll also find a follow button on Amazon Posts:
This video from Amazon’s Seller University channel walks you through using the MYCE tool:
Who Can Use Manage Your Customer Engagement?
To use the Manage Your Customer Engagement Tool, you need to be Brand Registered, with an active brand store. You’ll also need actual followers to email.
Manage Your Customer Engagement is free to use, as with all Amazon Brand Registry tools, such as Amazon Attribution and A+ Content.
How to Use MYCE
The video above gives a solid walkthrough on how to create a MYCE email marketing campaign.
- Choose a shopping event theme for your email
- Select the primary product to be featured in the email
- Select a supporting image (you can use one of your product’s existing images, or upload a new one)
- Add up to four supporting products (these will show up below the primary product)
- Set the dates for your campaign to run
- Customize your email subject line and section header, and add your brand logo
- Name your campaign
As you can see, campaign setup is quick and easy.
Once you’ve set this up, you’ll need to wait for your campaign to be approved. This takes a minimum of 72 hours.
What Kind of Emails Can You Send?
It is unfortunately quite limited in what you can send with the Manage Your Customer Engagements tool.
The template is pretty strict, and there’s not much room to customize it, or to write your own copy. It also needs to be approved by Amazon before it’ll go live.
Here’s an example of a MYCE email provided by Amazon:
You won’t be able to do anything like link to off-Amazon sites, or respond personally to customers. It’s basically just a standard Amazon marketing email, only you get to customize it with your own products.
For more details on MYCE, check out this article in Amazon Seller Central.
Is Manage Your Customer Engagement Better than Building Your Own List?
Let’s get this out of the way. Manage Your Customer Engagement is a really useful tool. But it doesn’t replace the need to build your own list and send your own marketing emails.
There are plenty of good things about MYCE:
- The trust factor from Amazon means you’ll likely get more opens, clickthroughs and conversions
- Emails themselves are well-optimized to convert
- It’s free
- You can send emails to actual Amazon customers
There’s basically no reason not to use this feature if it’s available to you, and if you have followers or repeat customers you can email.
But we’d still advise you to build your own email list.
An email list gives you a brand asset you control. Your followers on Amazon are still, in the end, Amazon customers.
People on your email list are your customers. You can send them whatever marketing material you like. You can direct them to off-Amazon sites, you can actually communicate with them and build relationships with them.
Your list can be uploaded to ad platforms like Facebook and TikTok to create custom audiences. And if anything goes wrong on Amazon, or you simply want to migrate away from Amazon to sell on your own site, on a platform like WooCommerce or Shopify, you can send traffic from your email list.
There’s no need to think of it as one or the other – you can absolutely build your own email list, while using Manage Your Customer Engagements. The more opportunities you have to promote your products, the better.
The Best Way to Do Amazon Email Marketing
Top Amazon sellers today are using all the tools at their disposal to grow.
That means utilizing MYCE, and at the same time building a list independent from Amazon.
Here are some tips on how to do this.
- Send external traffic to your product listing, running through a landing page with an email optin.
- Offer a lead magnet or an exclusive discount on the landing page as an incentive for people to opt in to your email list.
- Create product inserts that go inside your packaging, with a link to another landing page where people can add their email and join your list.
- Regularly email your list with helpful content, resources related to your products, exclusive discounts and offers to keep your list fresh.
Email marketing remains the most underutilized Amazon marketing channel. Few sellers have an email list, and even fewer actively use it.
Those who do have an email list have a massive competitive advantage. And whether you do or not, the Manage Your Customer Engagement tool is a powerful new way to get into the email marketing game and drive fresh sales for your store.
