The Amazon Guide to Reaching High-Value Shoppers
The story of the year is that targeting on Amazon is becoming much more custom. Between Brand Tailored Promotions and bid boosting, it's now possible to market your products differently—through discounts or ads—to different groups of shoppers.
Nowhere is this more apparent than when we're talking about "high-value shoppers," meaning the cohort of people who spend a lot on your brand (or are projected to spend a lot on your brand). Any Amazon brand can now advertise—or discount—differently to people who they know are likely to spend a lot on them in the long run.
This allows savvy advertisers to make much smarter budgeting decisions, and spend extra ad dollars on shoppers who they know will drive a big return.
How to Create an Audience of High-Value Shoppers
The process of targeting high-value shoppers differs depending on whether we're discussing ad campaigns or targeted discounts.
Brand Tailored Promotions relies on an audience of high-value shoppers that is pre-built by Amazon. You don't have to do any work to generate that audience yourself—but you're also, of course, limited to Amazon's definition of high-value shoppers.
By contrast, when you want to run targeted ads, you have to create this high-value shopper audience yourself. Creating your own high-value advertising audience is only possible in Amazon Marketing Cloud. AMC can tie all of the purchases of your products to the relevant shoppers, letting you see which shoppers are repeat buyers and the average price of what they buy.
Sum all of that up, and you can easily separate out the high-value shoppers—usually the top 5% or 10% of spenders—from the rest of the group.
The Intentwise Explore query and audience library has built-in, pre-written queries and audiences for high-value shoppers. You can customize them, and schedule them to run in the background, with a single click.
Do You Need Shopping Insights to Build a High-Value Audience?
The downside of creating your own high-value audience in AMC is that if you want a full view of your high-value shoppers, you need to count organic purchases—which requires a subscription. A truly high-value shopper is someone who repeats purchases or buys an upsell without the intervention of an ad. In AMC, accessing organic, non-ad-attributed data requires the Shopping Insights subscription from AMC's Paid Features.
Good news: audience creation using Shopping Insights is now free—forever. (Read more about that AMC Shopping Insights subscription here.)
What You Can Do With High-Value Shoppers on Amazon
The beauty of segmenting out high-value shoppers is that it makes your advertising decisions more sophisticated. With a high-value shopper audience at your fingertips, you can benefit from three core strategies:
Smarter Spending Allocation
If you know someone is a high-value shopper, they are probably very likely to buy more products from you in the future. So it's well worth spending extra money on ads to convert them, as compared to the typical shopper.
Bid boosting in AMC becomes especially useful in this context. With bid boosting, you can attach a custom-created audience to any of your ad campaigns. You can build an audience of shoppers who are already big spenders of your brand—or an audience that looks a lot like this high-value cohort. From there, just attach that audience to your Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands campaigns, and you can automatically bid higher whenever someone from that cohort sees your ads.
(For more on the mechanics—and limits—of bid boosting in AMC, read our whitepaper here.)
Direct Targeting via Sponsored Display and DSP
Specifically for Sponsored Display and DSP ads, you can now directly target high-value shoppers and run ad creatives that speak to them specifically. This opens up all sorts of possibilities: you might push an upsell product on them, or hype up the quality of your brand to build loyalty.
Creative Analysis and Attribution
AMC maps out every single one of your shopper journeys, then lets you aggregate them at scale. Once you've segmented out a cohort of high-value customers, you can look back at how they came to your brand. Is there a particular ASIN, or set of ASINs, that brought a disproportionate share of high-value shoppers into the fold? Consider boosting advertising for that ASIN to draw in more of these valuable shoppers.
Tailor Your Deals to High-Value Shoppers
Amazon doesn't let you change the price of a product based on the shopper—but through Brand Tailored Promotions, you can offer discounts to high-value shoppers. These shoppers won't be notified of your deal, but if they stumble on your product page or see the product in search results, they'll see your discount. It's a way of drawing in a coveted audience.
That might not always sound appealing—after all, you already know they're going to be high spenders. Why give your biggest spenders a discount upfront? The truth is, the best strategy varies by context. If your product has a high repeat purchase rate (the way a supplement does), then taking a small loss upfront is likely to pay for itself: once a shopper buys from you once, they'll probably keep buying. If you have a slim profit margin and/or repeat purchase rate, the calculus is different.
Are There Downsides to Targeting High-Value Shoppers?
The category of "high-value shoppers" is inevitably based on past data. If you're only going after people who already spend a lot on your brand—or who simply behave similarly to those big spenders—then you're doubling down on one type of shopper.
High-value shoppers are a key category for deciding how to allocate money, but exclusively going after that group isn't necessarily going to grow your business. The work of a savvy advertiser is to always find new kinds of shoppers to reach—through better targeting, different product types, and new audiences you don't yet know will be valuable. High-value shopper targeting is a powerful tool to have in your toolkit, but it shouldn't be your end-all-be-all.
