One of the simplest and most effective ways to maintain and scale baseline revenue is to invest in brand loyalty marketing. With hundreds of thousands of competing brands on Amazon, brand loyalty marketing is a great way to drive loyal customer re-engagement, repeat purchases, and brand expansion.

With intentional nurturing, brands can garner significant market share through word-of-mouth marketing, driving positive star ratings, reviews, and traffic resulting in a lift in organic rank. As you develop a higher repeat purchase rate and Subscribe and Save (SnS) volume, it becomes increasingly difficult for competitors to outrank you within your relevant category, solidifying your brand as the default brand for not only your existing customer base but also potential new shoppers browsing on Amazon in that category. In other words, investing in brand loyalty efforts is critical to remaining competitive on Amazon. 

4 strategies to maximize brand loyalty

As you look to invest in brand loyalty campaigns, it’s important to focus on driving an increase in new-to-brand customers first so you can re-engage with, and nurture them into repeat purchasers. The Amazon DSP is a great way to build campaigns that directly help you achieve these objectives. 

Brand Awareness

Brand awareness strategies play a critical role in capturing and cultivating new-to-brand (NTB) users who mimic the traits of your loyal customers. We recommend leveraging “always-on” strategies that help drive brand visibility and reach on Amazon through the following campaign types: 

In-Market

Increase your reach and brand visibility by targeting relevant pre-made first audience segments which are In-Market for products similar to your brand. This allows you to connect with a large group of users actively shopping in the relevant categories and draw in new-to-brand users.

Competitor Conquesting

Competitor conquesting helps drive consideration, traffic, and engagement by targeting relevant competitor brands so you can win over their share of voice on Amazon.

Contextual Targeting

Similar to Competitor Conquesting, Contextual targeting drives consideration by targeting high-intent and active shoppers on Amazon. The difference is that Contextual Targeting relies on the Amazon algorithm to define that audience on the backend, whereas, for Competitor Conquesting, you have control over audience definition. Scale can be limited here due to inventory limitations as they can only run onsite, however, it can be a great source of new-to-brand acquisition.

Remarketing

Remarketing is a fundamental Amazon DSP strategy intended to re-engage lapsed product purchasers within a brand's existing customer base. This is the most effective tactic to drive consumer repurchase intent (repeat purchases) and foster customer retention. Brands with a high repurchase frequency often see a significant lift in their overall ad attributed and total sales, maximizing their revenue while minimizing the cannibalization of organic sales. In addition to sales lift, Remarketing can be a significant driver of Subscribe and Saves (SnS) which is a strong indicator of a user’s commitment to the brand as they are more likely to repurchase once subscribed.

Cross-Selling

Similar to Remarketing, Cross-Selling is another retention strategy aimed at driving brand expansion and maximizing household brand loyalty within an existing customer base through cross-promotion of products. With this strategy, brands see their user basket size increase over time by targeting loyal customers with products they are likely interested in purchasing but may be unaware of. Brands deploying this tactic see a lift in total sales along with potential SnS for a fraction of the advertising cost.

Subscribe and Save

Subscribe and Save (SnS) signifies a user’s commitment to the brand. Once a user hits that button, they are locked in and won over. SnS campaigns aim to convert repeat purchasers into subscribers. This can be deployed leveraging customizable AMC audiences with SnS-focused creatives. For example, you can build an AMC audience targeting customers who purchased X ASIN multiple times in the last 365 days but who have not subscribed yet. By negating existing subscribers, you minimize overlap with your other retention efforts thereby ensuring greater efficiency.

KPIs to measure the success of your brand loyalty campaigns 

By focusing on a full-funnel Amazon DSP approach, you can build a loyal customer base, while being mindful of the necessity to expand your brand’s reach for top-line growth and long-term efficiency. To measure the impact of your brand loyalty campaigns, we recommend tracking a set of both upper-funnel and bottom-funnel metrics to gain granular insight into the impact of your brand loyalty campaigns both short and long-term. While many advertisers solely focus on Return-on-Ad-Spend (ROAS) as this gives you a snapshot of your advertising performance, there are other metrics like Lifetime Value, Cumulative Reach, Subscribe and Save Subscription Rates, among others, that paint a more robust picture of the success of your brand loyalty campaigns. 

Increasing new-to-brand metrics helps grow your re-engagement audiences

In the long term, tracking new-to-brand sales is recommended to assess overall brand growth. To take this a step further, the percentage of purchases new-to-brand (%NTB ) indicates how well your awareness campaigns are driving immediate purchases within a selected audience, as well as NTB sales acquired in re-engagement Amazon DSP campaigns. By increasing the number of NTB users, there is a larger opportunity for Subscribe and Saves, and repurchases. 

3 top-of-the-funnel metrics that indicate bottom-of-the-funnel growth

Beyond just measuring your sales, other metrics signal strong performance at the top of the funnel, likely building upon your sales growth, subscriptions, and repurchases at the bottom of the funnel. These include: 

Cumulative reach

This represents the number of unique users exposed to your campaigns. While re-engagement with ads is important, so is expanding your reach. By reaching more unique users in your awareness campaigns, there is a larger opportunity for re-engagement. 

Detail Page View Rate (DPVR) 

This metric is the number of total detail page views relative to the impressions served. A healthy DPVR that increases over time is a signal that users are engaging with your ads and want to learn more about your products. 

Effective Cost Per Detail Page View (eCPDPV)  

It’s important to get users to your product pages, but similar to sales, you want to do this efficiently. eCPDPV is the cost associated with driving users to your product page. 

Analyzing your Cumulative Reach, DPVR and eCPDPV together will help you identify incremental Amazon DSP strategies and audiences that align with your brand and that have a higher likelihood of being a lifetime customer.  

Increased Subscribe and Save Subscription Rates reduce re-engagement ad spend while driving sales 

A strong indicator of propensity to purchase is if a customer has purchased from your brand before. This is especially true for those within the consumer packaged goods category (CPG). Focusing on increasing your Subscribe and Save Subscription Rate (SnSSR) metrics across your ad strategy can drive up repeat purchases and loyalty. SnSSR is the ratio of how often customers signed up for a free trial or paid subscription for your products when your ad was displayed. When users continue to repurchase, this can reduce re-engagement ad spend with those whom you have won over while also gaining recurring sales. Over time, a higher SnSSR can indicate that you are targeting the right audience group in upper-funnel awareness campaigns. 

Brand loyalty campaigns drive increased Lifetime Value 

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is an additional metric that is not available in standard Amazon DSP reporting but is available via the Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC). Lifetime Value of a customer is the measurement of the total revenue that will be generated throughout the lifespan of a customer. Evaluating this metric for your brand can determine how much value you should place on loyalty. This is also a great metric to track when gauging the long-term impact of your loyalty campaigns on total revenue. Returning customers on Amazon locked into subscriptions or who come back to repurchase a variety of products from your catalog increase your LTV while reducing ad spend associated with re-engagement. And when you measure your LTV in relation to your Customer Acquisition Cost it can help you assess the profitability of your campaigns. 

Final Thoughts

Brand loyalty campaigns are a critcal strategy to not only drive sales but to increase the Lifetime Value of your customer base. Remember to leverage brand awareness campaigns to drive new-to-brand shoppers that you can re-engage with, and nurture into repeat purchasers, and ultimately subscribers. As you move shoppers down the funnel and convert them into repeat purchasers, you can reduce wasted ad spend and see a greater impact on the profitability of your campaigns. 

To learn more about how to launch brand loyalty campaigns on the Amazon DSP, reach out to us at hello@perpetua.io.