How to understand your customers on Amazon (and why you should!)
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Do you know who your customers are? Do you know why they like you?
Amazon knows its customers. It has spent decades perfecting its customer experience, using data and machine learning to work out what shoppers want, and delivering it.
It’s this “customer obsession” that has led to Amazon becoming one of the world’s largest and most successful brands.
Take a leaf out of Amazon’s book, and use the data Amazon provides, to find out who your customers are and how you can impress them.
Why get to know your Amazon customers?
The deeper your understanding of who your customers are and what they want, the more likely you’ll get good results targeting them.
It’s easy to pay for advertising and generate new customers on Amazon. Turning those customers into repeat business, using them to target lookalike customers, and making sure your ad spend stays as low as possible doing it, are more difficult - but they are well worth doing.
There are a few things you can do with customer data on Amazon. You can build an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to improve your marketing and product development, you can streamline your advertising to target lookalike audiences, and you can use re-targeting and cross-selling strategies to turn existing customers into repeat customers.
Tip 1: Use customer reviews
Amazon is a world leader in soliciting genuine customer feedback. Don’t waste it - use the reams of valuable information to get to know who your customers are and what they’re looking for.
Make a list of all the things they like about your product as well as the things they don’t like - and look for further clues to who they are. Reviews are often very personal, sometimes even emotive. Lots of shoppers include information about who they bought the product for, what their family members thought of it, and how they’re using it in their everyday life. In a world full of aggregated data and AI-generated text, reviews offer fantastic insight into the real human side of shopping behaviour.
You don’t have to stick to your own customer reviews, here. Your competitors’ Amazon reviews are all there for the world to see - read them to find out:
- What they’re doing differently
- What their customers like about their product that you can copy
- What customers don’t like, that you can avoid
- Any opportunities for you to emphasise your own product’s superiority in your marketing.
Tip 2: Use Brand Analytics
We’ll come to AMC in the next section, but if you’re not yet using AMC, Brand Analytics is your best tool within Amazon for reading customer data.
Brand Analytics gives sellers plenty of data and free reports into how customers perceive their brand on Amazon. The reports include:
- Top Search Terms - the most frequently used keywords and most-clicked items and categories
- Demographics - sales segmented by age, gender, income, education and marital status (available only in US)
- Repeat Purchase Behaviour - how often shoppers make a repeat purchase
- Market Basket Analysis - other items shoppers bought alongside yours
- Search Catalogue Performance - impressions, clicks, cart ads, and purchases for your product after a search
- Search Query Performance - the same metrics for brand-specific searches.
See how this data is useful for getting to know customers?
You can use the Demographics report to draw up your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and use this imaginary customer to target your marketing.
For example, Amazon now offers an AI tool for creating lifestyle images of your products in context. If you know who your ideal customer is, you can choose appropriate ‘backgrounds’ for lifestyle images.
Your ICP can even be used for new product development.
You can also use this data to make better decisions about how you spend your advertising budget. For example, Market Basket Analysis is great for cross-selling and bundling. [expand] Knowing your top searches will help you refine campaigns based on keywords.
Tip 3: Use AMC
Amazon data is now both richer and easier to read than it ever was before. You get more detailed information, and better tools for making sense of it. Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) gives you many different ways to read your data and cross-reference different data points.
Here are some of our favourite AMC use cases for finding out more about who your customers are:
- Path to Conversion: Allows you to identify the most popular conversion paths on Amazon - so you can see which of your ad type combinations is the most optimal
- ASIN Overlap: Shows which ASINs are frequently purchased together, so you can plan remarketing campaigns
- Branded Searches: Allows you to explore how DSP impacts branded searches. It can also help you calculate the branded search rate as well as the cost per branded search
- High Value Customer Segment Analysis: Allows you to identify the customer segments with the highest purchase values, so you can create targeted audiences for new ASIN launches and cross-selling campaigns
- Cross-Device Path to Conversion Analysis: Helps you understand how customers move between PCs, phones, tablets and TVs on their journey towards purchase
- Geo Location: Enables you to evaluate campaign KPIs such as unique reach and conversion rates broken down to postal code levels.
It’s all about the customer journey.
These use cases on AMC are subtle but very effective ways of understanding how customers find your products on Amazon. They allow you to refine and enhance your ad campaigns, using the keywords your customers are most likely to search for, the different combinations of ads your customers are most likely to respond to, and the audiences you’ll find the most success in targeting. So you save on your ad spend, you optimise the effectiveness of each ad, and you get to know who your customers are.