Do you feel that selling an Amazon private label has become harder?
You’re probably right.
With Amazon now a household name for ecommerce worldwide, it’s only natural to find plenty of sellers for virtually any product you can think of. Currently, there are over 1 million active sellers in the Amazon marketplace in the United States (Statista, 2019). The other major marketplaces such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and France each have approximately 200,000 sellers. And these numbers are growing every year.
While not all of these Amazon sellers are into private label sales, your products are still essentially competing with all of the similar products listed out there, including Amazon’s own private label brands. By building a strong brand for your Amazon private label products, you can effectively differentiate yourself from other sellers, increase the number of repeat purchases, and reduce customer churn.
In this post, we’ll discuss ways of building your brand as an Amazon private label so you can establish a competitive advantage over other sellers.
What’s in a brand?
Most Amazon sellers equate branding with having a logo on the product and on the packaging that it gets sent out with. Yes, the logo, along with your product and packaging, play an important role in building your brand. But they’re not the only things that matter. You need to go beyond just the tangible aspects of your brand – the things that you can see, hear, touch – and consider the intangible parts if you want your brand to stand out in the sea of Amazon private label products.
“Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.” – Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO & Founder
The intangible aspects of your brand consist of the emotions and experiences that customers attach to your business. Think of these aspects as your business’s personality. They are the values, ideas, feelings, and experiences that you want your customers to associate with your logo and actual products so that they will remember and purchase again from you. Of course, you want customers to feel positively towards your brand. The last thing you want is to be perceived as either generic or mediocre, which defeats the very purpose of your branding efforts.
Strategies for Building Your Amazon Private Label Brand
Now that you understand what branding entails, let’s dive into the steps you can take to make an outstanding Amazon private label brand:
1. Have a vision or a sense of purpose for your brand
Before anything else, you must first have a vision for your business. Your vision will influence your brand promise or the value that you want to bring to your customers.
A vision dictates your end goal, your mission, what you want your business to be. For instance, if you sell budget running shoes, your vision could be in the lines of: “We want our shoes to be an affordable but stylish and comfy choice for every average and beginner runner.” This vision will help guide your business strategy and help you define the right marketing mix for your Amazon private label:
- At what price point will you sell your products?
- How will you promote the products?
- Will you sell in a single Amazon marketplace or make it available on others?
Your vision can change with time, but treating it as the backbone will help build a solid foundation. It will let you create and define your brand promise and what you want customers to experience from your products. It will shape the way your business grows over time.
2. Identify your ideal customer and focus on them
To build your brand as an Amazon private label, you should be trying to cast as wide a net as possible, right?
Wrong.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make in branding is trying to please everyone. Look at the biggest and most successful brands out there and you’ll find that they all have something in common: a well-defined customer base. For instance, Apple does not attempt to attract every computer buyer out there. Instead, the company has focused on a narrow segment of sophisticated users who are technophiles and first adopters. All of Apple’s marketing – from pricing to positioning – are geared towards this ideal customer, who are willing to buy Apple-branded products even if they’re priced higher than the competitors.
As an Amazon private label, you can emulate Apple’s strategy and focus on attracting and building a loyal customer base from a narrow buyer segment. So taking off from the budget running shoes example, you can narrow your audience to fashion-conscious buyers who want high-quality, stylish running shoes but don’t want to spend too much on them. You can then fine-tune your PPC ad messaging and spending to this audience on Amazon and anywhere else you choose to sell.
Shameless plug: SellerLegend’s customer dashboard helps you identify your most profitable customer segment so you have an idea of which customers to focus on in your branding efforts.
3. Connect on an emotional level with your buyers
Humans respond deeply to emotional cues. We are more likely to remember things that make us feel something, whether it’s happiness, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise, or fear.
So the key to building a remarkable brand is emotional connection. How do you do this?
Reflect their values. People are drawn to people who are similar to them. That’s just human nature. You can do this in your tagline and in the messages you send out to customers. If your target customers are green consumers, for instance, then make sure your brand messages reflect that.
Be responsive to customer needs. People like brands that care about them. And it often doesn’t take a lot to make them happy: simply asking about their experience and what can be improved about your products, then actually implementing their suggestions if you can, goes a long way in earning your customers’ trust.
Have a sense of humor. Nothing can endear your brand to customers as fast as making them laugh. Take it from brands like the Dollar Shave Club, which was able to transform a generic product such as a razor into something that customers actually want. As an Amazon private label, you might not have a lot of elbow-room for humor in your product descriptions, but there’s no reason you can’t inject it in your other channels such as on social media.
Be bold. Surprise your customers once in a while (in a good way, of course). Take a stand, especially on things that are aligned with your brand values. By doing this, you may alienate some people but will also be increasing loyalty among customers whose values are similar to your own. It’s risky, but would you rather be known as a brand that stands for something or be just another cookie cutter company?
4. Focus on consistency
Being consistent is crucial in your brand presence as an Amazon private label.
Consistency is a hallmark of trustworthiness. As a customer yourself, you probably don’t like something that looks fickle or inconsistent. For instance, if you saw a luxury item being sold dirt cheap, this instantly sends alarm bells ringing in your head. You immediately judge the item to be either a knock-off or defective and would not even think of purchasing the product.
Here’s another hypothetical situation: Your brand speaks about caring highly for customers. The customer buys the product but discovers some defect. They then proceed to send an email to your customer support team. But they get no response after a week of sending their concern.
So you see why having a consistent customer experience across your marketing mix, your brand promise and the actual customer experience with your product and customer service.
5. Underpromise and overdeliver
A lot of customer experience is all about managing expectations.
You want customers to have strong, positive feelings for your Amazon private label? Be ready to meet – or even exceed their – expectations. You can do this in simple ways, such as ensuring that your products are of high quality, are described accurately in your listings, and are packaged securely and properly according to Amazon standards.
While you might not have that much control over shipping and delivery windows especially if you sell using Amazon FBA, you can at least make sure that customer expectations are managed in all other aspects of your brand through the use of great product images or videos and noteworthy packaging design.
Think of ways to delight your repeat purchasers and actually do it. By doing so, you will gain loyal customers who will miss your private label brand and your products if they can’t find it on Amazon.
Future-proof your Amazon private label business by investing in branding
Anyone with decent capital can open an Amazon seller account these days and start a private label. But if you want to ensure that your Amazon private label is set up for future success, then you must consider brand building as an investment. It won’t be easy, but it’s worth it in the long run when you’ve earned the trust, loyalty, and love of repeat customers.
