Amazon opens its email marketing to boost sales

Bloomberg

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.
The company announced the initiative at the Amazon Accelerate conference in Seattle, where it demonstrates new features to the independent businesses that sell more
than half of the products on Amazon.com.
Merchants will be able to send free emails to recent shoppers, repeat customers and their biggest spenders through a “Tailored Audiences” tool, which will also let sellers monitor the results. The tool has been in testing this year and will be available to all US sellers in early 2023.
The move marks a break with Amazon’s historic reluctance to let independent merchants connect directly with customers for fear of alienating them. But online sales have slowed from their pandemic highs, and antitrust investigators are probing the power Amazon holds over millions of third-party vendors. Some merchants also say Amazon makes it hard to create a relationship with even their most loyal buyers.
Customers will have to unsubscribe if they don’t wish to receive the marketing emails.
“The downside is this could lead to a lot of spam, and I wonder how they’re going to manage that,” said Kirthi Kalyanam, director of the Retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University.
“Retailers send so many emails, and shopper in-boxes get absolutely inundated.”