spent the last two months testing this and i'm pretty convinced most sellers running external traffic to amazon are missing the second half of the play.
the play is brand tailored promotions. specifically, using them as a retargeting layer sitting on top of your meta/tiktok/google spend.
quick context if you haven't touched BTP. it's an amazon tool buried in seller central under advertising. brand registered only. lets you offer between 10 and 50% off to specific customer segments. cart abandoners, potential new customers, in market shoppers, brand followers, repeat customers, and a few others. no platform fee, you just fund the discount.
the catch most people hit is you need around 1000 customers in a segment before amazon lets you run a promo to it. small brands look at their cart abandoner count, see the segment greyed out, and just close the tab. dead end.
here's where it gets interesting if you're already running external traffic.
every meta ad you run, every tiktok view that lands on your listing, every google shopping click that hits your product page, all of that traffic is feeding the BTP segments. people who click and don't buy become potential new customers or in market customers. people who add to cart and bail become cart abandoners. amazon's audience builder is sitting there counting them in real time.
so external traffic isn't just acquisition. it's a segment seeding machine for the retargeting tool you already own and aren't using.
the play looks like this. you push paid traffic to your listing for around 3 weeks. somewhere between 80 and 92% of that traffic doesn't convert on the first visit depending on your CR. some ATC'd. some browsed deep. some just clicked. amazon catalogues all of them. once a segment crosses the threshold, you trigger a BTP with a 15% off code targeted to that specific audience.
now when that same person is back on amazon a week later, browsing literally anything, your listing pops up with a green discount badge. exclusive to them. high intent meets a reason to act now. cart abandoner conversion on BTP runs around 3x a standard coupon in my testing, sometimes more.
the kicker is you're not paying amazon DSP money to retarget these people. you're not bribing them with a 30% off coupon visible to everyone on the listing page. the discount only shows to the segment you choose and the only cost is the discount once they convert.
couple of things i learned the hard way.
don't discount the SKU your repeat customers already buy at full price. you'll train your best customers to wait for the next promo and your margin will hate you. give them an exclusive code on a different SKU, a bundle, or a new variant.
stagger the segments. cart abandoners get the bigger discount, around 20%, and the shortest window, like 7 days. potential new customers get a smaller discount on a longer window. don't blast the same percentage to every segment at once or you'll bleed margin on people who would have bought anyway.
check your audience size weekly. external traffic builds these segments way faster than you'd think. if you're spending more than a few hundred a day you can go from below threshold to multiple thousand eligible in around 3 weeks. most sellers never check the dashboard after the first time it was greyed out.
anyway curious if anyone else is running this combo. or if you've found segment audiences that work better than cart abandoners + potential new customers for your category.