Tactics Beauty Brands are Leveraging on Amazon

The customer journey has changed, and it now almost always includes Amazon. According to a Kantar custom survey of U.S. skincare buyers in 2019, 34%47% of consumers visit the e-commerce site at some point in their purchasing process, even if they don't end up buying there.

Amazon has become a driving force in the omnichannel beauty buying experience and a full-funnel approach to converting customers. Brands can leverage numerous marketing tactics to drive awareness and conversions on the e-commerce platform. The following approaches will enable marketing teams to leverage Amazon and integrate its opportunities into beauty advertisers' e-commerce strategies.

Always-on advertising includes search term isolation on Amazon

Search term isolation is an advanced bidding tactic on Amazon. At its simplest, it is bidding on search terms that convert while negating search terms that don't. It helps scale the core converting keywords, builds rank and improves conversion rates overall while eliminating wasted spend.

This technique is driving significant growth for brands on Amazon. For example, one spa brand that the Blue Wheel team manages sees performance campaigns make up 80% of its revenue on the platform. Based on those results, it has increased investment by 68% year over year.

Beauty brands are benefiting from DSPs

Demand-side platforms (DSPs) offer many benefits for beauty brands. Brands can use DSPs to break into an untraditional consumer demographic. For example, they could target a customer in their late 20s with anti-aging products.

The core capabilities of a DSP make it a versatile option for many, although it's not right for every brand at every stage. With a DSP, marketers can target new customers based on their buying habits, interests and demographic data.

Additionally, brands can re-engage interested users or previous customers with Amazon's exclusive ASIN retargeting data. Ads are served on and off the platform on a cost-per-impression basis, serving either Amazon-generated creatives or the marketing team's custom designs.

Successful product detail pages depend on high-quality content

While advertising is certainly the key to succeeding on a pay-to-play platform like Amazon, product detail pages create the greatest opportunity to impact conversion. Optimized product pages will inform visitors about the benefits of a brand's product and, if done well, will convert them into customers.

There are several main components to a product detail page: the title, bullet points and descriptions, an image carousel and high-quality content.

Each of these has a different impact on rankings and conversion rates. Amazon crawls the title, bullet points and descriptions to determine relevance. Images and high-quality content are used to describe a product further. The visuals count for a lot: Marketers should ask themselves if their images could describe the product to a 5-year-old who couldn't read.

Optimized Amazon Brand Stores boost returns for beauty brands

An Amazon Brand Store is an opportunity to showcase a brand fully. Brands have a larger amount of customization on this page, allowing them to create category pages to organize products.

Customers also have the ability to follow a brand, allowing brands to send them updates when launching new products. On average, linking a Sponsored Brands campaign to an Amazon Brand Store has a 64% better return than linking to a product listing.

Beauty brands that follow these tactics will find more opportunities for growth and customer retention on Amazon, now and in the future. They can shape their campaigns to match their look, feel and customer expectations, and they can claim their Amazon market share before their competitors win more sales.

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