Mar 25, 2021
Differentiating Your Amazon and Native Website Strategies
How brands can successfully sell on both Amazon and DTC on the native brand channel
If done correctly, a two-headed strategy of driving sales on Amazon and your native website could yield huge dividends. But what does that kind of strategy look like, and how can you create a scenario where one builds off of another?
The answer is in assortment and pathways into the brand experience. Ben Knox is a bit of an expert in this area. He earned his chops working on Red Bull’s ecommerce strategy and now serves as the vice president of ecommerce and growth at Super Coffee. According to Knox, brands need to come up with an assortment strategy that both allows customers to get what they want when and where they want it, but also leads them back to the type of brand experience you want them to have. And it’s important to follow your customers where they’re going.
“Customers just shift in to Amazon because everybody has a Prime account these days,” Knox said. “It’s very easy, very dependable, great return policies, so there’s a lot of trust there. You’re already doing a lot of shopping there, so oftentimes, you’ll just find your customer base moving to Amazon in that somewhat uncontrollable way. There’s definitely things that you can do to maintain a more healthy mix.”
Creating that healthy mix between Amazon and native website shoppers seems tricky, but it doesn’t have to be. All you have to do, Knox said, is figure out the assortment and differentiation strategies that work best for your brand. At Super Coffee, that means giving customers options, but ultimately making the branded site experience just a bit more incentivized.
“We really want the consumer to be able to have perfect availability of our products and to be able to purchase our products when, where, how often, from whom they like,” Knos said. “We actually offer subscriptions on a limited basis and when we do only the 5% funding amount on Amazon, whereas our website is 15%. So naturally, loyalists and people who are really engaged with the brand will come over to us. And there’s other things like special bundles and different content and things like that the website offers that Amazon simply can’t.”
Those subscriptions are also a key reason that Super Coffee has been able to win in the online space. And there is one key driver of that success.
“We offer ultimate flexibility,” Knox said. “You can add a subscription to cart, checkout and then, go and log into your account and cancel that subscription, five minutes later and while that’s not ideal, it’s okay. And really the function of subscription itself, we’re modeling a loyalty program, in a sense.”
And that loyalty program bleeds into its other customer experience strategies, including via text messages.
“[Our texting] is actually two separate softwares that power it, which we would like to synthesize over time,” Knox explained. “So two separate phone numbers that these communications come from. So, we let people know that this is your subscription phone number and then, this is the Super Coffee personality brand phone number. And on that second one, we really nurture that as a VIP audience and so, when we do a product launch, things like that, we let people know if they want early access to the new products or early access to, let’s call it a Black Friday, Cyber Monday sale, or what have you, you’re going to get a 24 hours heads up, to everybody else, to get that early access if you’re opted into our text message database.”
To learn more about how all these strategies work together to build the ultimate customer experience, be sure to listen to Knox’s full interview on Up Next in Commerce.
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