Amazon announces a Tailored Audiences tool, coming to all US sellers in early 2023, which will let brands and merchants send marketing emails to shoppers
Amazon.com Inc. will let brands and merchants send marketing emails to shoppers, a risky bid to boost sales that could inundate inboxes with spam.
Context & Ripple Effects
Tailored Audiences turns what was a gated experiment into a default channel: Amazon began with a Brand Registry pilot letting brands email customers who follow them in 2021, and now every US seller gets audience-based marketing email in early 2023. It extends a decade-long pattern of Amazon handing merchants branded surface area — from the Adobe-built Branded Stores program to off-site display ads tested back in 2018.
The move matters because Amazon has historically kept the customer relationship close, monetizing reach through its own ad products rather than giving brands direct lines to shoppers. Opening the inbox is a different bargain, and Bloomberg flags the obvious cost: a flood of merchant mail that risks training customers to ignore it.
First-order effects
- US brands and merchants gain a direct email channel to shopper audiences without buying Amazon ad placements, changing how they allocate marketing spend on the platform.
- Shoppers face a sharp increase in commercial email from Amazon sellers, putting deliverability and engagement pressure on the tool from day one.
Second-order effects
- Rival marketplaces and retail media networks face pressure to match the offering or watch sellers shift budget toward owned-audience email over paid placement.
- The same opening logic later shows up in Amazon's ad stack itself — by 2025 the company launched Amazon Retail Ad Service to put ads on other companies' own sites, suggesting each seller-facing channel becomes a template for the next.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, marketplaces progressively rent out their first-party customer data as a product, eroding the information asymmetry that made platform ads indispensable to brands.
- Widespread merchant emailing invites regulatory and consumer-trust scrutiny of how platforms govern consent and spam at scale — an area where Amazon would be setting de facto norms for e-commerce.
The trend: Marketplaces are shifting from gatekeeping customer relationships to selling access to them, turning first-party shopper data into a brand-facing product line.