As eCommerce & marketing teams moving from one tentpole event to the next—Black Friday to Prime Day to Back-to-School—it’s easy to let brand loyalty campaigns take the back seat. But loyalty strategies need advertising support too. You want to turn those New-to-Brand shoppers into returning customers and advertising can help. In this guide we will show you how easy it is to set up and maintain brand loyalty with Amazon DSP, ensuring that your hard-won customers keep coming back.
If you’re targeting Amazon shoppers, Amazon DSP, or Demand-Side Platform, can be hugely valuable in activating your retention strategy. In this step-by-step guide to driving customer loyalty with Amazon DSP, we’ll explain how to turn New-to-Brand customers into loyal fans. We’ll cover how to:
- Identify and target high-value customer audiences using Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) data.
- Develop a strategy for brand loyalty marketing that won’t overwhelm customers.
- Measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.
How to leverage brand loyalty advertising for your new customers.
Whether you’re aiming to smash your Prime Day sales targets this year with sell-out promotions or simply enjoy the benefits of all the extra traffic, now’s the time to plan your customer loyalty journey for shoppers from acquisition to retention.
How does Amazon DSP help build brand loyalty?
Unlike search advertising (e.g., Sponsored Display or Sponsored Brand), Amazon DSP is Amazon’s programmatic advertising tool that allows you to buy display advertising as well as video and audio ads at scale. You can use it to precisely target audiences by leveraging Amazon’s vast first-party shopper data. This allows you to create campaigns tailored to customer behaviors such as browsing habits, purchasing history, and search patterns.
Amazon DSP is ideal for developing loyalty because it supports retargeting, helping you re-engage with shoppers at different stages of their journey. It’s especially effective for building long term relationships with New-to-Brand shoppers, dormant customers, cart abandoners, or shoppers who’ve bought a competing product.
How to build a brand loyalty advertising campaign in three steps using Amazon DSP.
Step 1: Develop your audiences using Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a secure, cloud-based solution that allows you to perform in-depth analytics and build custom audiences using data from Amazon Ads campaigns combined with your own first party data. Amazon’s ‘walled garden’, or data clean room allows you to combine and analyze data from multiple sources securely. Here’s an example of how you can use AMC for a brand loyalty advertising campaign:
Let’s assume you are an electronics brand launching a new line of wireless headphones. You want to target shoppers likely to convert. Here’s how you might do that using AMC:
1: Integrate and analyze the data
Upload your first-party data, such as customer email addresses or past purchase history, then query Amazon’s anonymized data to look for signals like ad engagement and browsing behavior. Using *SQL (more on this to follow), you can mine AMC data to identify shoppers who:
- Viewed your headphone product page in the last 30 days.
- Clicked on a related ad but didn’t purchase.
- Bought complementary products (e.g., headphone cases or portable speakers).
[*If you don’t have SQL skills, you’ll find it easier to build AMC custom audiences using tools like Pacvue’s advertising console.]
2: Build the custom audiences
Based on this query, AMC helps you define these audiences:
- Shoppers who showed interest but didn’t convert (This is your remarketing audience).
- Shoppers with behaviors similar to your high-value customers (This is your lookalike audience).
3: Activate the audiences
Export the custom audiences to Amazon DSP (or Sponsored Ads) and target these shoppers with tailored ads. You might want to offer a promotion for the headphones or a limited-time discount.
4: Measure and optimize
AMC helps you analyze your campaign performance too. You can track engagement, conversions, attribution, and ROI. From there, you can refine your targeting based on the audience that performs best.
Step 2: Establish your post-Prime Day advertising offer
Now that you can segment your audiences, you can create highly personalized offers. Let’s stick with the electronics brand scenario. Here are some offers and messaging ideas for different audience segments:
New-to-Brand customers who recently purchased one of your products during Prime Day
- **Offer: Bundle discounts or cross-sell offers. For example, “Get 20% off headphones when you pair them with your recent purchase.”
- Messaging: Highlight how the headphones complement their recent purchase, e.g., “Perfect match for your new [product]”
** Brands in other categories such as health and beauty, grocery or household could also offer ‘Subscribe and Save’
Dormant customers who haven’t bought from your brand in a while
- Offer: Re-engagement discounts or loyalty incentives. For instance, “We miss you! Here’s 25% off your next headphones purchase.”
- Messaging: Create a sense of urgency or exclusivity, such as “Limited-time offer just for our loyal customers.”
Shoppers who had your product in the cart during Prime Day but didn’t buy
- Offer: Free shipping, limited-time discounts, or small add-ons (e.g., “Get a free carrying case with purchase”).
- Ad: Use reminders and FOMO (fear of missing out), like “Still thinking? Grab your headphones now with free shipping!”
Shoppers who bought a competitor product
- Offer: Competitive switch discounts or feature-focused promotions. For example, “Switch to [brand] and save 15% on premium sound quality.”
- Messaging: Focus on differentiators like sound quality, durability or exclusive features: “Upgrade to [brand] for the ultimate audio experience.”
Step 2: Build Amazon DSP creatives
Types of Amazon DSP ads
Amazon DSP Ads are completely customizable so you can add headlines, logos, and use custom images. Three popular types of DSP ads include responsive, static image, and video ads, each with their own unique use cases.
- Responsive: These ads are preconfigured Amazon templates that automatically populate by selecting a product image and title from the ASIN page. The size automatically adjusts to fit different site requirements. They are easy and quick to set up although there’s little room for customization.
- Static Image: These are custom image ads that lead shoppers to your brand store or another site. Custom images tend to yield higher brand awareness and better click-through-rates (CTR).
- Video: Like static image ads, you can create custom videos that link to brand stores or non-Amazon sites.
Three easy ways to build custom ads for Amazon DSP
By combining Generative AI with Amazon’s own creative tools, you can turn your brand loyalty advertising creatives around quickly.
- Leveraging Gen AI
With Amazon’s recent launch of “Image Generator” within the advertising console enables advertisers to generate images in different dimensions. Image generation is a free, self-service tool that uses AI to generate enhanced creative images for advertising campaigns.
- Using Amazon’s built-in tools
Amazon Creative Builder and other tools built into the advertising platform help you design visually appealing ads with Amazon’s native templates. You can also quickly adapt existing creatives to fit multiple formats (e.g., Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display).
- Using tools native to your advertising console
For example, if you’re using Pacvue, check out our content creation tools that are built into our campaign workflow process.
Step 3: Measuring the impact of your post-sales retail media strategies.
From the moment you launch your brand loyalty advertising campaigns, you’ll be on a continual path of improvement. Measurement is a complex part of the campaign process that you can’t afford to skip; from split-testing your creatives and your offers to comparing channel effectiveness. You can find detailed resources about how to measure retail media campaigns here, including a deep dive on incrementality vs. ROAS and attribution modelling.
If you’re running complex loyalty campaigns at scale, you’ll probably be using an advertising console like Pacvue to help you. Briefly, let’s look at the kinds of insights you can get through automation technologies and dashboards to improve your Amazon brand loyalty marketing campaigns.
How to enhance Amazon DSP performance measurement using automation and integration
The big benefit in using advertising consoles like Pacvue is the ease at which you can draw insights, and the automations that allow you to continually refine your campaigns for success.
These smart optimization tools for advertisers offer configurable rules, AI algorithms, and automation. They can automatically adjust bids based on performance metrics, ensuring the most efficient use of your DSP budget.
Importantly, the reporting and insights are customizable and presented using highly visual dashboards. Managing all your advertising campaigns from one console means you can measure Amazon DSP performance alongside other retail media channels.
Pacvue can help you measure your campaigns more easily with rules-based bid management, an AMC integration and our iROAS (incrementality) measurement console that captures more accurate ROAS and performance measurement, beyond attribution.
Access Amazon DSP the easy way with Pacvue’s advertising console
With Pacvue’s industry-leading DSP automation and analytics layered onto Amazon’s exclusive onsite and expansive offsite inventory, brands and agencies can reach highly relevant potential customers at every point in their customer journey in a scalable and dynamic way. Here are just some of the advantages you can gain:
Enhanced audience targeting
With Pacvue, you can securely upload your 1P data into Amazon Marketing cloud, combining on-Amazon and off-Amazon data to gain a holistic view of your customers. This integration allows you to analyze user lifetime value, understand conversion paths, and identify overlaps between different customer segments.
By leveraging these insights, you can make informed decisions, optimize your marketing strategies, and enhance the overall customer experience.
Streamlined campaign management
AMC Audience Targeting and Bidding Controls (Shopper Cohorts) represents a significant advancement in how brands and agencies leverage Amazon Marketing Cloud insights within Pacvue. Traditionally, Sponsored Ads employed keyword- and demographic-based targeting; with this update, advertisers can harness deep audience traits to shape more relevant and effective campaigns. This new control mechanism goes beyond basic targeting by allowing campaigns managers to increase bids for specific AMC audiences – effectively optimizing ad spend towards higher-value consumers.
Simplified campaign creation
Pacvue’s Campaign Template Library and Super Wizard AI are designed for taking the complexity out of setting up your campaign. You can launch campaigns faster and respond more quickly to emerging opportunities, even if your experience with DSP is limited.
Optimized ad scheduling
Pacvue’s AMC-powered dayparting ensures your ads are displayed during peak performance times, making the best use of your budget.
Efficient creative development
Pacvue’s DSP Creatives tool helps you develop static image and responsive DSP creatives directly within the Pacvue platform. It’s fully-integrated into the campaign workflow so you don’t have to rely on external tools, saving time, money and keeping your creatives consistent.
Performance-driven ad optimization
Our rule-based automations allow you to dynamically allocate budgets, adjust bids, and manage under-performing ASINs. These real-time optimizations are designed to improve overall return on ad spend (ROAS) without the need for constant, manual maintenance.
Drive long-term growth with Amazon DSP & Pacvue
With Amazon DSP, you can leverage advanced targeting capabilities, first-party shopper data, and programmatic tools to retain new customers and re-engage dormant ones. By integrating Amazon Marketing Cloud and utilizing automation platforms like Pacvue, the process of audience segmentation, creative development, and performance measurement becomes streamlined and efficient.
Post-sales events are your biggest opportunity to nurture loyalty through personalized offers and compelling creatives. By focusing on audience insights, tailored messaging, and continuous optimization, you can turn event-motivated shoppers into loyal advocates, ensuring sustainable growth and maximizing the lifetime value of your customers.
For further help setting up your Amazon DSP campaigns, get in touch with our team.
