[Crew Review] Big changes to email and paid ads

Adapt

Email Marketing is Evolving

iOS 15 is upon us, and the biggest eyebrow-raiser for email marketers is the suite of opt-in mail privacy features that prevents third parties from tracking email opens or other IP data.

That means the emails you send out could be reported as opened whether users actually opened them or not.

If you see small bumps in open rates and other email stats in the coming months, best not to get too excited.

Here’s what you can do.

More Marketing Maladies

According to CNBC, Amazon is piling ads into search results, which benefits top consumer brands more than anyone else.

Let me rephrase: Amazon has gone from showing a couple of Sponsored Product ads on the search results page to up to six sponsored products.

That could mean that users browsing on mobile will now take two full swipes before getting to the unpaid search results.

 
This raises the question among third-party sellers on whether or not it’s still even worth optimizing for organic search, considering all these paid ad placements on the platform.

But another way of looking at it would be that strategizing to become the Amazon Best Seller or Amazon’s Choice have become more important than ever, since those are the ones that show up right after the sponsored placements.

You will recall that Amazon’s advertising revenue grew by nearly 90% according to our analysis of its Q2 earnings, and this move could net them even more growth in the coming quarters.

What’s more, it’s not just the deep-pocketed big brands that are benefiting the most, as Amazon has a tendency to sprinkle its own products into the search results as well.

We’ve said before that advertising is the biggest threat to your ecommerce business, and it seems that the threat is becoming more and more real as we chug along.

Out With the Old

In a Thursday announcement, Amazon expanded the scope of automated removal of aged inventory and added a value-recovery option. Now, the following items can be removed automatically:

• Units that are in fulfillment centers for more than 365 days and that are subject to long-term storage fees
• Units of ASINs that haven’t sold in six or more consecutive months and that have been in fulfillment centers for more than 180 days

Of course, the practical reason is to make more room for popular products for the holidays and perhaps so you can save on long-term storage fees, and the announcement says as much.
 

If you’ve got any aged inventory covered by this announcement, a couple of your obvious choices are to have Amazon forward them to a wholesale liquidator or ask for the items back.

To know more, we’ve whipped you up a guide to the 7 Best Ways to Liquidate Inventory.

In With the New

Starting October 26, 2021, Amazon will be requiring three mandatory attributes for listings created one at a time or in bulk:

• Net Content: A new attribute set for eight Product Types (PTs)
• Item Form: A previously optional attribute that will become mandatory for 86 PTs
• Number of Items: A previously optional attribute that will become mandatory for 154 PTs

Failure to comply with this new required info would prevent any new selection creation.

Naturally, sellers see this as more busywork and possibly more reasons for Amazon to suppress products out of nowhere. Amazon uses its good old ‘improving shopping experience’ justification for this one, but some real benefit to sellers wouldn’t hurt.

Anyway, here’s the list of affected product types, if your product is on the list, better start keying in.

Speaking of New...

Amazon’s latest new idea is a three-week beauty sales event that will run from October 4 to 25, which they will most likely be calling the ‘Holiday Beauty Haul’.

The beauty category is still benefiting from the strong pandemic tailwind, as consumers have flocked to the internet to fulfill their hygienics, self-care, and makeup checklists.

Amazon is looking to use the event to lure online shoppers ahead of the holiday season, but on a higher level, it seems to want to cash in on the big online beauty sales trend and grow its share in the beauty market.

If your business revolves around the beauty category, this could be a huge opportunity going into Q4, although Amazon’s own private label brands make for some tough competition.

Premium Reopens Monday!

To make sure that all our Premium members get as much value as possible, we only open EcomCrew Premium for a limited time every quarter, and that time is next week.

If you find value in unlimited email support from two successful million-dollar sellers, access to our entire library of Secret Sauce webinars (including past ones), and seven full-length ecommerce courses in glorious HD, then Premium is perfect for you.

Plus, we love sending out these welcome packages.

Sign up to our waitlist here.