What Is Enhanced Brand Content (Now A+) on Amazon?

For sellers and brands alike, Amazon’s marketplace has become more crowded than ever. In fact, according to MarketplacePulse, Amazon is home to more than 3 million active sellers. This is making it increasingly difficult for brands to stand out from competitors. To increase brand awareness and sales, businesses use killer copy, descriptive titles, striking images, and listing optimization.

Sometimes, however, that’s not quite enough. Luckily, Amazon has a number of features, like Enhanced Brand Content (EBC), that can help you convert those potential customers who are still sitting on the fence.

What is Enhanced Brand Content and how can I use it?

One of these features is Enhanced Brand Content, now known as A+ Content. This Seller Central feature introduced in 2016 allows you to modify the description area of your product listing with visually-rich content—including enhanced images and custom text placement—to tell your brand’s story. As long as you’re a registered brand approved in the Amazon Brand Registry, a professional seller, or an “emerging brand owner” working through Amazon Launchpad or Amazon Exclusives, you can benefit from the features of EBC Amazon.

The best part? Adding EBC to your products is currently free. Amazon has even stated they will make any announcement before adding fees to this program. Here are a few reasons why you may want to consider adding EBC to your Amazon listings.

Benefits of Enhanced Brand Content on Amazon

Customize your storefront

Enhanced Brand Content gives you more freedom than ever to craft an eye-catching storefront that captures your brand’s essence. Beautiful headings, high-quality photos, engaging copy—each element works together to create a storefront where customers feel comfortable and interested. Not only do attractive storefronts make your brand stand out, but they also optimize your listings, keeping customers on them longer and making it more likely they’ll convert.

If you need help managing and designing all of this content, you’re in the right place. Here at Pattern, we help brands design templates that customers can’t look away from. Below are two examples for brands Pure Encapsulations and Yogi Tea.

Reduce your bounce rate

Your potential customers know there are thousands of products on Amazon that fit their particular needs at any given moment. When they find a product they like, they’ll often use it as a reference point and click to competitor listings to compare features and pricing. Typically, it’s not necessarily the feature set that makes the difference between two products, but the product listing’s design and visual appeal.

The data reinforces this idea—Amazon claims that adding EBC to a product listing can increase sales by an average of 3to 10%. Enhanced Brand Content can help you reduce your bounce rate by increasing engagement with eye-catching pictures and compelling copy, both of which tell your brand’s story and help your potential customers see your product as something that will enhance their lives.

Reinforce brand equity

Enhanced Brand Content provides a way to reinforce the brand loyalty you’ve already developed with your customer base. Historically, a main challenge with Amazon has been the lack of branding opportunities available to more-established brands, which has leveled the merchandising playing field and allowed private-label sellers/products to flourish, which could be a disadvantage for well-established and trusted brands. EBC allows brands to bridge this gap and remind customers what sets them apart in a way that's not possible through text-only bullets and descriptions. Learn more about the importance of brand equity here.

Overcome objections and improve search

When customers are comparing products on Amazon, they’re looking for reasons not to buy. EBC gives you the chance to overcome the objections your prospects may have by providing more detail and imagery, making it more likely that they’ll convert. Amazon allows you to answer customer questions on each product listing, something I recommend all brands participate in.

One way to use EBC effectively is to look at the types of questions your customers are asking and address any recurring themes in your EBC. Since EBC generally includes pictures, and these pictures require you to include image keywords, the feature also helps your products appear more frequently in search, which is the leading traffic driver for Amazon product listings.

Attract Attention

As mentioned, Enhanced Brand Content is an excellent way to differentiate your product from similar, competing products. Consider the two lotion examples below.

‍With Enhanced Brand Content (Now A+ Content):

Without Enhanced Brand Content

Which lotion do you think customers are more likely to buy? Both brands give logistical details about their products, but Thymes’ use of A+ Content also tells its brand story, evokes an emotional response to convert the potential customer into a loyal one, and makes it easy for customers to envision its products in their lives.

Improve mobile optimization

Mobile optimization is arguably one of the best benefits of Enhanced Brand Content, and is available to all sellers who use the feature. When buyers are searching Amazon on a mobile device, they only see the first 200 words of each product’s description, not even your finely-crafted bullet points. They then have to click the section and open a new page to see more details.

If you’re using EBC, or A+ Content, potential customers can see all of your carefully-curated content, including the pictures, title, and description, without clicking or opening new pages. This is increasingly becoming a bigger deal, since 47% of Amazon customers are now using their mobile devices to shop, and more than half of all internet shopping occurs on a mobile device. Not only are customers increasingly using their mobile on Amazon, but they’re also driven by convenience. As with everything on the internet, the faster you can get your product in front of a potential customer (with the least amount of clicks), the better your performance will be.

Content Requirements for Enhanced Brand Content

Before you set out to create Enhanced Brand Content, make sure you're familiar with Amazon’s A+ guidelines. Here are the top EBC requirements to be aware of:

• Don’t refer to your brand as a seller or distributor or include company contact information.
• Don’t include any trademarked content in the text copy. Only small trademark and copyright symbols are allowed if they are already part of the logo or product packaging.
• Don’t include guarantees, bold claims, reviews, quotes, or time-sensitive information.
• Don’t link to external websites that direct away from Amazon, including your company website.
• Images must be at least 72 dpi in resolution, under 2 MB in size, and formatted as jpg, bpm, or png in the RGB colorspace.

Amazon has strict rules to keep their platform consistent and fair to all sellers. So long as you don’t mind their terms, you can take your product pages to the next level. Are you ready to start enjoying the benefits of EBC? If so, learn how to get started below.

Getting Started with Enhanced Brand Content

To create Enhanced Brand Content, first login to Amazon Seller Central or Vendor Central. On your account page, you will find an advertising tab, where you can select “A+ Content Manager” from the dropdown menu. Click “Start Creating A+ Content” to begin the process. You’ll have the choice of creating Enhanced Product Descriptions or Brand Content. Enhanced Product Descriptions allow you to elaborate on product details and proactively answer customer questions, while Brand Content lets you tell your brand’s history, story, and values.

After choosing which type of EBC to start with, you’ll see prompts to name your content and choose from 5 module templates. Alternatively, you can create a custom module from scratch. Choose a design that suits your product and brand. Any module can include pictures, infographics, keywords, and comparison charts. Keep following the onscreen prompts until your EBC module is complete. Make sure to proofread and check for any spelling, grammar, or punctuation mistakes as these will impact your chances of approval.

Once you submit, you can expect approval to take up to 7 days, though usually Amazon responds within 2. If not approved, your submission will be returned with rejection reasons and suggestions on needed changes. Once approved, it can take up to 24 hours for your EBC to finally be published on Amazon.

How to use Enhanced Brand Content

Include high-quality images

Using high-quality images is a basic best-practice to improve your product’s SEO on Amazon, and EBC makes it easy. Make sure that your images are large enough that potential customers can zoom in and out to see product features. Pixelated or limited images make it more difficult for customers to trust your brand. Simply put, customers associate high-quality images with a high-quality brand. Consider combining detailed product images with lifestyle photography, like Hydro Flask.

The product images answer common customer questions while the lifestyle photography tells the brand’s story and communicates its unique feel. With any product photography, focus on good lighting, clean lines, minimal clutter, and embracing your brand’s image. Use real humans in lifestyle photos when it makes sense, highlight key features of your product, and emphasize your product’s versatility.

Enhanced Brand Content allows you to format your photos in 12 different modules, including comparison charts, image highlights, and image and text overlay. Taking advantage of these modules—and following our product photography tips—can help you make the best of EBC.

Focus on succinct, interesting text

As we’ve mentioned, one of the biggest draws of Enhanced Brand Content is its visual appeal. Instead of presenting your potential customers with product descriptions, bullet points, and walls of text, you can integrate text with photography, graphics, and comparison charts. It’s important to make sure you’re keeping your text succinct and interesting, or you’re defeating the purpose of EBC.

Make sure every word in your listing page serves a purpose. Using bullet points and less text makes your product information easy to skim and keeps it from being overwhelming for customers. Capitalizing keywords may be helpful. Keep it simple, professional, and optimized for Amazon. Above all, take care to ensure your product description is accurate. 40% of customers have returned online purchases solely because of poor product content, and poor product descriptions are to blame for 30% of shopping cart abandonment.

Try the new A/B Testing Feature

Finally, Amazon rolled out an A/B testing feature for EBC in November, 2019. The “Manage Your Experiments” (MYE) tool allows sellers to test different versions of an EBC page to see which one performs best. For example, you can test different images, text, and structures to see what drives the most traffic and sales. EBC experiments can go for anywhere between 4 to 10 weeks.

The longer the experiment, the more reliable the data. So try to run the A/B test as long as you can. But know that you can also cancel the experiment or change its duration at any time. To give this useful A/B testing feature a try, find “Manage Your Experiments” on Seller or Vendor Central under the A+ Content Manager. This is the perfect way to make sure your Enhanced Brand Content design is data-driven and optimized for generating sales.

Enhanced Brand Content is worth exploring

As you can see, Enhanced Brand Content, now known as A+ Content, is an excellent way to make your products stand out regardless of category. Amazon makes it an easy feature to implement, especially considering that sellers can now upload new EBC by ASIN. Since it’s currently free, there are no downsides to giving it a try, but I’m confident these benefits will make it well worth your time.

If you want to take your Amazon listings one step further, Premium A+ Content, or A++ content, is an invite-only option available to some brands. It carries a hefty price tag—between $250-$500k—but also offers more space, 16 interactive models in addition to the 12 basic modules available for EBC, video, testimonials and more. If you’d like to learn more about improving your product listings with Enhanced Brand Content or Premium A+ Content, we’d love to help. Get a demo today and see how Enhanced Brand Content can upgrade your Amazon listings.