Inspire brand loyalty on Amazon with A+ Content

Wholesalers are often reluctant to take the plunge on Amazon – and it’s no wonder. You can’t personalise your listings, you can’t connect with your customers, there’s no way to keep your customers returning and you have to play by the e-commerce giant’s rules, right?

Wrong. With the amount of personalisation on Amazon as well as a captive audience, you can actually increase brand loyalty and profits by using one of the world’s biggest e-commerce platforms.

The long and short of It? You can use Amazon and capitalise on its reach and still not compromise your brand voice or ideals. Adopting an omnichannel approach to your business can transform your business, you just have to make sure you have the right team behind you to get the most out of Amazon.

A great way to cultivate brand loyalty on Amazon is to display your brand. A great way of displaying your brand is utilising A+ Content.

What is A+ content?

A+ Content is an enhanced extension of the basic product description that allows you to use imagery and branding to showcase your product.

Without A+ Content, your listing goes straight from the bullet points to the product description and reviews section. This hides your brand from customers and makes it so much more difficult to stand out in your category.

To be able to display A+ Content, you need to be brand registered.

What does it mean to be ‘brand-registered’?

Registering with Amazon Brand Registry means that your trademark is registered on Amazon, which helps you protect your products from being sold by other sellers, meaning you can ensure customers get an accurate and trusted experience shopping with you.

But this also means that you can create A+ Content, a visual module that allows you to showcase branding and visual hooks for people to buy your product. A+ Content on Amazon is the mark of a seller that is invested in Amazon as a sales channel and among other indicators is a signal you will get a good shopping experience. Having A+ Content helps boost conversion rates and helps you acquire a higher Amazon search ranking.

What does great A+ Content look like?

A+ Content is that perfect balance of visual and copy. For visual, think the logo, infographics, lifestyle photography. For copy, think text about the hero ingredients, founder stories, and any additional marketing copy.

Branding

A+ content that features the logo and brand colours

A thorough approach

Content that goes in-depth into the product (whether it’s zooming in on a feature, or explaining what an ingredient does in detail)

Consistency

Content that uses the same tone in the copy as the listing and any other branding material

Specificity

Content that uses measurements, locations of sourced ingredients, suggestions for use etc

Premium design

Content that uses high-quality photography and graphic assets per the correct dimensions for Amazon

Case study: 5th Season

Here’s an example of A+ Content we created for our client, 5^th Season, a freeze-dried fruit snack company.

We wanted to help 5^th Season attract their Amazon target audience: snackers on the go, people who don’t like the sticky mess that comes with eating fruit and office workers or people in fast-paced environments who don’t always have the time to go and grab food. We chose existing lifestyle photography of the product in these situations to frame 5^th Season fruit snacks as being the solution to these problems.

Using lifestyle images where these products are interacting with people and objects – on the desk at work, in the bag waiting for a train – shows shoppers the aspirational: an easy, mess free snack that fits right into your life and curbs unhealthy snack food cravings.

In the ‘our scrumptious range’ section, we displayed the food snack range out of its packaging. With so many food snack brands, we wanted to show what the snack actually looks like, in order to show the quality, size and shape.

This was especially important as one of the USPs of 5^th Season is in the crunchy and squishy nature of the fruit after being freeze-dried; traditionally dried fruit typically looks shrunken and unappealing, whereas 5^th Season’s modern drying method keeps the fruit appetising and flavourful.

After this, we showed a step by step guide of how 5^th Season make their crunchy dried fruit snacks. This is to show an element of transparency, as well as explaining the sophisticated modern technology they use to dry their fruit, which, contrary to traditional drying methods, leaves the fruit crunchy, with more taste and retains 90% of the original nutritional value, all without any added sugar or preservatives.

Showcasing a special feature that the product has or a specific method your company uses elevates the product from substandard competition.

Case study: Pip & Nut

As a hero in the food snack category, Pip & Nut know how to optimise their listings with stellar A+ content.

Contrary to how we created 5th Season’s copy, Pip & Nut put their copy into an infographic rather than manually into Seller Central, which is where you create your A+ Content.

Using that perfect blend of the best soundbites from the copy with a mixture of brand colours and font, graphic design and product photography, Pip & Nut are demonstrating their extensive knowledge of their market, brand and Amazon.

On the snack listing, Pip & Nut are looking for people who are health-conscious fans of peanut butter but due to busy lifestyles, find it difficult to carry a whole jar of peanut butter around. They display the many uses of carrying these tiny snack packs around by displaying at the bottom of the A+ images of breakfasts being jazzed up with Pip & Nut, as well as baking goods made with yummy peanut butter.

Pip & Nut display a lot of things in a short amount of space here. Firstly, they use a review that is soundbite magic as part of their A+ Content; ‘answered my dreams’ fulfils a solutions-oriented marketing strategy in which their product looks like it solves a problem, while ‘dreams’ disguises its intentions with a fuzzy, emotive feel.

By using a review from a real person – you can tell she’s real by looking at her Instagram profile that is mentioned @TheGrowingButterfly! – Pip & Nut are showing social proof they are a trusted brand on and outside Amazon.

The following block of images displaying the different arrays of products have subtle differences – they have a mixture of the travel packs and jars, they have the smooth and crunchy options, they have backgrounds with different colours in keeping with their brand, they feature both male and female hands.

By featuring these products in the hands of models this also gives shoppers an indication of how big these products are to scale. This solves a big review issue endemic across Amazon where shoppers don’t notice how big (or little) items are before they order them and score listings poorly.

Pip & Nut’s final section on the snack pack listing is short, straight to the point bursts of additional information to attract their target audience. One of their symbols on a palm leaf says they don’t use palm oil, whereas another says hi-oleic peanuts in the shape of a heart as hi-oleic nuts are far healthier for your heart than standard peanuts. This synergy of design and copy is as important as integrating on and off-page incentivising to cultivate brand loyalty.

The only thing we think Pip & Nut are missing? Maybe their logo in their A+ to tie the ribbon and remind people their A+ is about Pip & Nut.

Why your brand should be on Amazon

The best thing about Amazon is that you have shoppers already searching to purchase – that’s why Amazon typically has higher conversion rates than most business’ e-commerce sites. With around 197 million people buying from Amazon a year, you should add this e-commerce site to your business strategy. Amazon shoppers have their card and banking details already saved to this trusted website.

It’s time to add Amazon to your business basket – are you ready?

Convert Amazon’s captive audience to your brand

For more information on how to get shoppers to keep coming back on Amazon, check out our blogs on repeat purchases, how to create and sustain a target audience or head over to our YouTube channel which is packed full of webinars about how to master the E-commerce master that is Amazon.

Heloise is CEO and co-founder of Sell Beyond, a team of specialist Amazon Consultants with experience in increasing sales for top brands all over the world. Whether you want to sell more in English, German, French, Dutch, Italian or Spanish markets, we optimise your Amazon operations, build your capacity and get results that scale.

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