Health & Personal Care Brands' Success on Amazon: Learnings From Advil and Seventh Generation
Shoppers are putting more and more spend toward Amazon for Health and Personal Care: Amazon has a 19% share of wallet in the Health & Personal Care category.
The Health & Personal Care category is also growing on Amazon:
- Buy rate is up 14% year-over-year
- Purchase frequency is up 14% year-over-year
- The percent of basket spend is up 4% year-over-year
Who is the average Amazon Health & Personal Care shopper?
The average Amazon Health and Personal Care shopper is:
- Gen X or Millennial
- Prime members
- High income (>$80K)
- Majority white
- Married
- 3+ person households
- Have children
- 4+ year college education
- Suburban or urban
And here’s how their shopping habits compare to the average Amazon shopper:
- 17% more likely to purchase online weekly
- 70% shop online to save time
- 50% shop online to save money
- 14% more likely to buy in bulk online
- 13% more likely to use Smart Home devices like Siri, Google, and Alexa
On the other hand, 21% of people surveyed by Numerator haven’t bought Health & Personal Care products on Amazon yet. There’s still a big opportunity in the Health & Personal Care category, especially in the highest growth categories: Household, Baby, and Vitamins/Supplements.
Challenges for Health & Personal Care brands
Why is it so hard to break into Amazon Health and Personal Care?
- It’s a big market with tons of opportunities — and a lot of competition
- It’s harder than ever to get approved to start selling in the Amazon Health and Personal Care category.
- Amazon pays close attention to customer experience and safety, with strict requirements to deter counterfeit sellers
Opportunities for Health & Personal Care brands
Subscribe and Save opportunities can help turn customers from brand agnostic to brand loyal.
Here’s how:
- An Amazon customer is shopping for Health & Personal Care products
- They see the lower price and convenience of regular deliveries with Subscribe and Save
- The subscriber adds your Subscribe and Save-eligible product to their cart
- You now have a loyal, repeat customer
- Your customer views you as a trusted seller (and is more likely to buy more of your products!)
With a dedicated Subscribe and Save storefront, you attract engaged shoppers and reliable repeat business.
You can also sell on the Amazon FSA store, which lets you accept FSA (Flexible Spending Account) & Health Savings Account (HSA) payments, opening the door to even more purchases.
To gain an advantage in this competitive category, work on building your brand presence outside of Amazon. Brand isn’t the most important factor to these shoppers, but awareness and credibility do matter! If no one has ever heard of your brand before seeing your listings, you’ll have a difficult time building a customer base.
Seller and product requirements for Health & Personal Care
Amazon has some strict requirements for sellers (and their products) in the Health & Personal Care category. You must be enrolled in the Professional seller plan with these metrics:
- Less than 1% order defect rate
- Less than 2.5% pre-fulfillment cancel rate
- Less than 4% late shipment rate
And you must provide this documentation from your manufacturer:
- Three invoices from a manufacturer (not a wholesaler)
- Proven purchase of at least 10-30 units within 90 days
Your products must be new and listed under the manufacturer’s UPC, and product listings should include:
- Image of packaging (showing ingredients/nutrition facts)
- Ingredients listed in Inventory File Template
You must list all ingredients for over-the-counter medicines and dietary supplements and show the back of the packaging (ingredients and nutritional information) as the second image on product listings.
Here are some tips for complying with Amazon’s strict requirements:
- Upload all necessary content to the product detail page
- If your product makes statistical claims, include the source and date of the study
- Don’t make any unrealistic or excessive claims
- Check that your product is not on the restricted product list
- Make sure your product is labeled correctly according to Amazon’s guidelines
Positioning opportunities on Amazon with creative content
There are four main ways to creatively position your Health & Personal Care products on Amazon:
- Stores
- Enhanced content
- Detail page images
- On-page content
Check out these examples of brands making the most of their brand presence on Amazon:
Advil + Amazon Brand Stores
Advil partnered with Tinuiti’s Amazon Creative Team to design, develop, and deploy a customized and responsive Brand Store to promote an immersive shopping experience.
You can view the entire Advil case study here.
Seventh Generation
Seventh Generation worked with Tinuiti to scale their Amazon Vendor operations. They were able to significantly improve their online advertising efforts through AMS, leading to higher-order volume and lower ACoS. How’d they do it?
- Seventh Generation restructured their AMS campaigns to bid aggressively on the keywords and products most likely to convert
- They also customized their landing page, giving the brand increased exposure on the Amazon Marketplace
For Prime Day, Tinuiti created 55 new campaigns for Seventh Generation to increase brand awareness. The brand saw a 100.55% increase in total sales on Amazon Prime Day in 2017 (compared to the previous week).
You can view the entire Seventh Generation case study here.
3 advertising strategies for Health & Personal Care Brands
Here are three more advertising strategies for Amazon Health & Personal Care Brands.
1. Developing a consistent brand messaging mix
Your product and brand messaging should stay consistent but serve different purposes.
For your product messaging, communicate the main reasons to buy, describe the product complexities, and address product-related FAQs.
For your brand messaging, communicate the key elements of your brand by telling your brand story, developing your brand tone, and establishing brand equity.
2. Pay attention to where your shoppers are in the funnel
When choosing which ad type to invest in, base your decision off shoppers’ position in the funnel.
3. Create must-win campaigns
Keep ACoS under control by creating separate must-win campaigns for the keywords that are your top priority. These keywords will have higher bids and a higher ACoS. This lets you optimize the non-must-win keywords for lower bids without the risk of losing placement for those high-priority keywords.
Key Takeaways For Brands in 2020
To succeed in the Amazon Health & Personal Care category:
- Work to understand the category’s current and future shoppers and trends. These shoppers represent a large and growing opportunity for brands.
- Make sure your message flows across channels both on and off Amazon.
- Remember: you don’t have to utilize every Ad Type right away! Once you have your Sponsored Products set up, look at growing the upper funnel.
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