Brace Yourself for a Flood of Marketing Emails From Amazon Sellers, Brands

Buying from an Amazon third-party seller or brand may soon see you automatically signed up to a personalized email marketing campaign.

Amazon is launching a free new feature for sellers and brands it calls “Tailored Audiences(Opens in a new window),” which was announced during the Amazon Accelerate conference(Opens in a new window) this week. It will allow sellers to run personalized email marketing campaigns, with the goal being to “build lasting and profitable relationships with your existing customers.”

Until now, Amazon only allowed sellers to target individuals who opted to “follow” their store or brand through its website, but Tailored Audiences removes that restriction and replaces it with three customer groups that can be targeted with personalized marketing. Those groups are Repeat Customers (ordered in the past 12 months), High-Spend Customers (top 25% of spenders), and Recent Customers (most recent 20%).

Amazon allows sellers to pick customer groups to target and how often to send them marketing emails.
(Credit: Amazon)

Amazon will offer a free tool and easy-to-use campaign templates to help create the marketing emails, which can be sent every seven or 14 days. Sellers will also be able to “monitor the impact” of a marketing campaign including details such as open rate, click-through rates, emails delivered, opt-out rate, sales, and conversion.

A beta test for Tailored Audiences is already underway, and Amazon expects a full release within six months. After that, buying anything on Amazon from a third-party seller or brand could also result in you receiving marketing emails from them. It looks as though the only way to stop them is by finding the opt-out link when the first marketing email arrives in your inbox.

Hopefully Amazon realizes before the beta test is over that not all customers want unsolicited marketing emails appearing in their inbox. The best way to avoid that is either by displaying an opt-out option as part of the checkout process, or offering the ability to opt-out of Targeted Audiences campaigns completely from your Amazon account settings.

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