10 Ways to Increase Amazon Sales, Traffic, and Rankings!
10 Ways to Increase Amazon Sales:
- Tip 1: Focus on Amazon’s Advertising Tools
- Tip 2: Utilize Chatbots
- Tip 3: Optimize Listings For Mobile Sales
- Tip 4: No Spammy Titles Ever
- Tip 5: Avoid Sponsored Display Ads (For Now)
- Tip 6: Utilize Amazon Business Seller Program
- Tip 7: Register Your Brand & Access All The Benefits
- Tip 8: Add a Video To Your Listing
- Tip 9: Extract Keywords From Top Products, Run Manual Sponsored Ads Campaign
- Tip 10: Never Stop Experimenting
Today we’re going to talk about ten ways you can increase Amazon sales, traffic, and rankings. The really cool thing about these is that all these tactics are tactics that are working right now. They’re not old tactics that worked at one point and are no longer working. Some of these have been around for a while but I don’t think anyone’s really looked at them again. I looked at them in a different way, but you can take these tactics knowing that they’re working right now, and use them for your business, and they’re good for anyone. They can be used by someone who’s just starting off this business.
Right now you launch your first product, you could be a million dollar seller and use these, or some of these you could be a brand new person who doesn’t have a product yet. You can start planning and implementing these starting right now. In addition to that you can go back to your hotel room just like Matt was talking about and start working on these right away. That’s actually rich Henderson’s feet right there.
I’d recognize those anywhere. I’ve seen him far too many times. He is either working on his Amazon business or he’s binging Game of Thrones. He has a thing for the Dragon Queen or at least he did, spoiler alert. Sorry about that but yeah these are all things that you can actually go there and start implementing, at least most them, and I’ll kind of point out which ones you can. Now it’s hard to think back to like 14 months ago. We’re in a room just like this in Orlando, Florida and we were talking about the latest traffic strategies.
You know for what’s working, and launching, and ranking your products. We’re also talking about Gmail ads, we’re talking about electronic billboards, we’re talking about Outbrain, and other strategies like that as well. One thing I realize is that during that time, that was I believe April of 2018, there was a huge huge rumor going around inside the Amazon community and that rumor was that Amazon launches are dead completely. Dead you know, so Amazon just went through some kind of algorithm change, like they do you know, at least twice a year.
Some people were getting really bad results with their launches. Some people getting no results at all, so they thought Amazon launches were officially dead. There’s no longer any way you can go out there and start a business and get product ranking because it just doesn’t work anymore. So people started shipping their products back to China, gave up their business, but you know what’s interesting is that just about a month ago we also learned something else, new launches are dead again.
Product Launches Aren’t Dead
Right you know and I use a little bit of sarcasm in my voice here because launches really aren’t dead. They will never be dead as long as there’s e-commerce. As long as there’s products out there to sell people are always gonna be launching products, but what we have to do is, we do need to learn how to adapt. I never tried a fancy graphic. Like damn, glad it actually worked this time, it’s kind of cool. We need to adapt how we launch our products because Amazon’s gonna keep changing the business. It’s gonna keep changing.
Other models come out that want to take advantage and it doesn’t mean that we can do the exact same thing every day. Ryan talked about that. You can’t just assume that you’re gonna launch a product, sit back, and it’s gonna do the same sales every single day for the rest of your e-commerce and business career. That doesn’t happen, but when things like this do happen, when strategies change, what we need to do is give Amazon what Amazon wants.
Playing By Amazon’s Rules
That’s how you adapt. If we’re starting off selling on Amazon let’s face it, it is the best platform right now for all of us to get selling on. It’s the easiest. It’s the fastest way to scale your business, and well we’re playing by Amazon’s rules. So more and more we need to make sure that we give them what they want, and what Amazon wants right now, they want to grow their advertising business. Now I originally was not even gonna talk about launching anymore, but I’m gonna share still ten other tactics that are great for getting sales. I’ve seen and heard so many people struggling with launching that I want to make sure I included it in this presentation, because when you have thousands of people watching or attending it’s a great way to get this message across.
So that someone can’t say, oh my god I didn’t know how to do this. I totally forgot. I’m giving up this business. The worst thing for me right now is to hear someone struggling and saying that they’re just gonna give this business up, because I’ve seen in my own personal life, I’ve seen my friends and family, and the mentors, some other people, I’ve seen what this business can do for you.
Amazon Wants To Grow Their Advertising Business
So I want to make sure everyone knows exactly what is working right now, and right now Amazon wants to grow their advertising business so we’re gonna help feed that machine for them and Amazon is willing to reward us for that. I mean they’ve seen exactly what Google can do as far as advertising goes, what Facebook can do. Advertising revenue for Google and Facebook still Dwarfs Amazon but last year Amazon did 10 billion dollars just using their advertising platform. That’s pretty insane if you think about it because Amazon really started off with a book company. They got into you know a fulfillment company and now they’re getting into advertising.
I tell you what Amazon is set up to rock the advertising world. They own the advertising platform, they have the fulfillment network. They have more, better, bigger, faster warehouses all over the world than anyone else. So if they can tie those two things together for us they’re going to just completely crush it even more than they’re already doing. So what we’re gonna do, we’re gonna take advantage of Amazon’s advertising, and now what I want to do is kind of say how do we do that. Let’s get down to some tactics because we’re gonna talk about a lot of big strategies.
Tip 1: Focus on Amazon’s Advertising Tools
I took a lot of inspiration to say OK, this one is exactly what’s working today. So first you want to focus on Amazon’s advertising tools, and some of this may not be you know new to all of you guys, but I want to be sure to reinforce this. You simply launch your product using Amazon’s sponsored Product Ads and now the cool thing about that, we talked you know, learn from Ryan about how you need to figure out who are your audiences. It is awesome to go out there and build an Instagram audience, and build a Facebook audience, build a YouTube audience, those strategies absolutely work, but another way to also find your audience is to connect to the people that are searching for products on Amazon.
Amazon Sponsored Product Ads
Who’s your better audience? Someone going to a product you know to Amazon like this and searching for a Bluetooth speaker? If someone’s on Amazon searching for Bluetooth speakers chances are they’re a part of your audience as well. So we’re gonna go out there and use Amazon Sponsored Product Ads to do that. Then we’re also gonna target the keywords that you want to rank for, then you need to incentivize those people like Ryan was talking about as well.
Launch With a Discount
You need to give them a reason to buy now, to buy early. So early you know we’re gonna give them a big discount. Now we’re not gonna go crazy, we’re not gonna go like 90% off anymore. I never do that and I go to 70% or 60%, I just feel like 50% maybe a little lower. Give them a nice incentive, use a coupon, and then once you started getting some sales there we are also gonna kick in your auto campaigns. Set up some sponsored product ad campaigns using broad match, and when I talk about broad match, if I were to go out there and sell these Bluetooth speakers the main keyword I’ve got that.
Our broad match would just be bluetooth speaker and then you will find all other kinds of keywords that people are searching for. Every couple weeks I’m going to mine that, I’m gonna keep figuring out exactly what people are searching for and keep adding them, adding to our campaign. This process can just be repeated you know but there’s only one thing you have to have, there’s one constant in this business, you have to have a good product and you have to have a great listing as well. If you don’t have that I think pretty much everything you’ll be learning here is gonna be a struggle for you. So make sure that you can actually focus on product quality. Focus on customer service, and focus on having a really good listing that converts the best it possibly can.
Everyone talked about that as well. So you know when it comes to launching in 2019, there’s more than just Amazon sponsored ads and like I said we’re gonna talk about strategies that people who only have access to sponsored ads can use, but I’m gonna talk about a few pro tips here too because there’s a lot of people here. If you look around here, chances are you’re on the road that you’re at, there’s someone selling a million dollars plus a year, maybe ten million dollars. So I want to try to reach some of those people as well.
So who has ever used Amazon marketing services? You guys remember that from a long time ago? See that? Yep. Now Amazon has updated their Seller Central marketing now, where you get a lot of those tools inside of your seller central account. We can use headline search ads, and product display ads. Pretty soon you can build your stores now inside of Seller Central. All things that used to only be available to the larger vendors, that were out there but there was a loophole for about a year, and some of us here may have accessed that loophole.
Two-Step URLS
You can still use what are called 2-step URLs. Now we may have heard recently that these URLs are becoming a little bit risky, especially for newer sellers, but if you are an Amazon marketing services member you can go out there and use your headline search ads or sponsor brands to go out there and use a two-step URL. You create a sponsored ads campaign and then here’s one thing you will not see inside of your seller central account, only here, it’s that custom URL.
No one is using that, no one hardly was using that custom URL. It’s very you know, seems pretty innocuous what they’re calling it. What it is though, you can use a two-step URL for your brand search. So if you still have access, and you still want to go out there and safely get started ranking for your keywords. Create a headline search ad or the sponsored brands now and then use that right there to rank for any keyword. Whether you want to, it’s one of those little tricks you have access to.
Tip 2: Utilize Chatbots
Now you can use another thing, and I’m not going to talk a lot about this today, but chat bots are now quickly becoming the new ranking and launching platform out there. Now again you don’t have to use these but everyone has access to them. ManyChat is pretty much the gold standard as far as chat bots go. Seller ChatBots, another one I think actually created by some people that might be in this room right here. These chat bots can be great because not only do they help you really drive targeted sales when you launch your product, but they also help you build a list.
So if you want to build an audience of your raving customer fans that you can launch more products towards in the future, ManyChat works like nothing else out there. We’ve seen open rates on ManyChat go above 80% and to operate it is simple. If you send out a hundred messages, how many people actually open it? An email you’re lucky to get you know 5, 10, 15, 20% ManyChat and other bots are insane because people are always connected. I see a lot of people connected right now to the phones. I mean you get a message right now from someone, chances are you’re going to check it at some point very quickly that day.
So this is something that anyone can start getting set up right now. You don’t need a product. You can actually you know just build your brand page and get a list created right now. We’ll talk about how to do that in a little bit. I just want to mention the different launching strategies that people are really getting people the best results right now, because I see too many people failing. I know for a fact that we have great launching discussions in one of the breakout rooms today. I also know that someone else at the same time will be talking about going out there and using sponsored ads as well, to go even a level above what we just talked about.
Tip 3: Optimize Listings For Mobile Sales
One of the tactics I did want to talk about is getting ready for mobile sales, because mobile is here. It’s been growing by leaps and bounds every single year and as of right now up to 40% of everyone buying on Amazon is doing that on mobile. When you get up to the holiday season that number can get even bigger and we expect that number to continue to grow. Now the reason why this is important to us, and I did not think about this probably like two or three months ago is that the Amazon desktop search anyone buying on Amazon it does not look the same nor does it behave the same as on mobile.
This doesn’t mean we need to go out there and recreate and redo everything but we need to be aware of it so we can adapt and adjust. Take a look at the screen right here, this is you know, it’s a typical search on Amazon using a desktop. We’ve all seen this a thousand times. There’s those really cool Bluetooth headphones. You’ll notice that the picture is still front and center. One of the most important things to have out there. That’s a great looking picture. They’ve added a little lightning bolt to it, they have a pretty good title that’s still very prominent. Then you also see the bullet points or we call the features and benefits, those are all still right there on the desktop version.
Some Features Less Prominent on Mobile
Now if we pull up the mobile version you can go to this product right now, you’ll see this is exactly as shown right here. You still see the picture is very prominent, it’s probably even more prominent, takes up about half the real estate on there. Then you have the title, maybe a little bit more important because it’s now pushed to the very top. It’s the first thing someone sees, but what you don’t see on the phone when you’re searching products on the Amazon mobile app you don’t see those bullet points at all anymore.
So we’ve all been taught, and we’re one of the ones teaching it, that bullet points are one of the most important features of a listing and they still are. I’m not gonna just you know disagree with that, however when it comes to being mobile people don’t even see those bullet points too much until later down the shopping process, and if anything the price is more prominent as well. It’s bigger than it is over on the desktop version so most people now are gonna be brought in by the image, maybe by the title, and more price sensitive. So speaking of where those bullet points are, here’s that first screen on the mobile search for that product. You need to scroll down a little bit and then you would see the product description. Then after that the very last thing those are those features and details are the points and if you’re paying attention it’s completely switched around.
On Mobile Bullet Points Matter Least
So on the desktop version bullet points are front and center. On the mobile it’s the last thing. Most people do not even get to them and this is true for enhanced brand content as well. Your product details they’re gonna be up near the top making that more important than ever. Mike how the heck do I actually take action on this?
Make Your Primary Image The Best Possible
It’s pretty basic so the first thing you want to do is make sure your primary image is the best it can possibly be. I know this is not an advanced tactic but we need to refocus on it because on desktop everyone sees all the other images lined up. Your first ones still the most important but they all know they can go see other ones. On mobile it’s even more important it’s taking up half your screen and people don’t intuitively know they need to swipe to go to the other ones. So your image is more important than ever.
Tip 4: No Spammy Titles Ever
Also you don’t want to have a spammy title. As a matter of fact you don’t want to have one anytime after July 22nd because if anyone was paying attention to their seller central account this week, they just made this announcement a few days ago, starting July 22nd Amazon is going to be suppressing any product listings that do not have titles that meet their requirements. This is a really big deal. I hopped into the forums one time, don’t ever go there, the seller forums on Amazon. It is a scary scary place. People were really scared to death about this this one article. All it says is this, it says that Amazon is going to enforce a rule that’s been in place forever.
Title Specifications
Amazon, they have certain title lengths, they have certain formats they want you to follow. They want to make sure you don’t make any huge claims on your product that aren’t substantiated or shouldn’t be in the title. They’re just saying they’re going to enforce this. There were maybe a hundred up votes of this and almost a thousand people down voting this because they thought it was such a terrible thing to do, for Amazon to enforce their own rule.
All we need to know is that, just make sure your titles are in place because come July 22nd I guarantee that’s what’s gonna happen. I’m gonna wake up that morning, I’m gonna go into Facebook, and I’m gonna see hundreds of people saying my product is no longer listed. Hopefully everyone here won’t have that issue because you’ll know that your product is not going to be de-indexed or suppressed. As a matter of fact what will probably happen if you think about all the people that aren’t here. All the people that aren’t paying attention, they’re gonna have their products take a hit. I bet you a lot of people here receive increases in sales because of that.
By default we’re all gonna start moving up past all those other products that are in gaming the system, using spammy titles, and violating rules. This is a good reason to give Amazon what they want.
Product Description on Mobile
Now the last point to make for mobile, is don’t focus primarily on the product description in this case. Now that doesn’t mean neglect it completely. You know we’ve always said focus on your pictures, focus on your title, focus on your bullet points, then go focus on your back end search terms, and in this case then if you have time, let’s get to your product description.
Product Description Bullet Points
Make sure that you take your one, two, or three best bullet points. The ones that really on desktop sell your product. People read the title and they read that first bullet point, make sure it’s gonna solve every single problem they have. Make sure you include it at the top of your description and then people who are on mobile they’re gonna see that right away too. That will make sure you help increase more sales and conversions when you make these changes and people start shopping more on mobile. Now also keeping in mind they said enhanced brand content is fully applicable to that too. You need to make sure those all have maybe a good picture, even of your features and benefit at the top.
Now who remembers Cambridge analytical? Not a lot of people. If you didn’t know they’re the Antichrist. You didn’t know that? Now they are. They are really really really evil people. They are horrible people ,but do we know why? Is it because they worked with the Russians to help throw an election? Some people think that I’m not gonna take a side here. I’m here to make money. Is it because they may have sold all of our data on Facebook to people just looking to mine all of our personal details? They may have done stuff like that, but the real reason why I don’t like them is because they shut down chat BOTS for a while.
So we just got done talking about how chat bots are becoming one of the new platforms for launching your products. But last year when we were speaking in Orlando anyone who didn’t already have an account set up with a chat bot, you could not get it, Facebook shut it down. There was a terrible scandal in the news. Cambridge was out there, they were closing their business down, they’re no longer around anymore and Facebook couldn’t take any more bad press. So they said this new platform we’re launching that people already feel a little scary about because it kind of intrudes on your privacy we’re gonna take it offline.
Chatbots Still Alive and Well
However today chat bots are alive and the really great thing about that is there’s so many things that these things can do for you. They can get you targeted sales during launches. Think about what Ryan was talking about. You build a mini chat list and you launch a product. It is easy to get people to want to buy that product especially if you give them a discount or some kind of incentive.
You don’t got to go crazy. Also you can build that list of people that you continue to launch to, and that you’re launching to more and more as you get your second, third, fifth product. You have a built in raving fan base that you can easily access so much more easier than using a customer email list and also they can help drive reviews.
Genuine Product Reviews
Now everyone here wants more reviews. It’s one of the bigger struggles we’re facing. It’s not something that is terrible, a catastrophe if you’re trying to sell on Amazon. They can no longer get reviews as easily. For me it’s more they’re finally cleaning it up. I would rather have it be a little harder to get an authentic genuine review than have fake competitors where I wake up the next day and see they have 500 reviews with two different words in the reviews because it has nothing to do with the product.
This is one way that you can go out there and actually reach people. If we all try to email customers using our Amazon seller central account, we all get these messages every single day. This message could not be delivered because that customer no longer wants to receive any emails from Amazon, totally fine, chat bots can do that.
Why Chat Bots Are The Best
We’re not going out there and mining for anyone’s email addresses. You’re going out there and building your customer and audience base. First you’re creating a Facebook page. You’re asking them to reach out to you, you’re asking them if it’s okay that they message you in the future or you message them in the future and share new products. Make them the first in line by doing this.
Dead Simple Chat Bot Strategy – Discounts
Now you can do about a million or a thousand things with chatbots. What i want to teach you today is what you can do with them right now. So here’s the dead simple strategy. You simply go out after you’ve created your first facebook page and you create a very simple post, and just ask people who wants to save 20% right now on a product? It can be 20%, it can be 15%, it can be 50%, whatever you want. I don’t like to go crazy. I like to make it authentic, and sometimes too big of discounts make people think your product is cheap. Just ask them who wants that and ask them to comment below.
Then once they comment you want to create a simple auto response. All it does is reply to them saying thank you for being one of our fans and customers here’s your coupon, and ask them are you okay if we send you future coupons and deals as well? Almost everyone is gonna say yes. Some won’t, those people don’t want to get messages from you and that’s okay you don’t want them anyway. They get their coupon that’s awesome, they’re good.
Boosting a Facebook Post For Even More Leads
Then you simply create a Facebook post, and boost that post because let’s face it just making a post into your Facebook page anymore doesn’t really get the attention it used to, but you can spend ten dollars for a few days to boost this and you will get 50, maybe a couple hundred people wanting that coupon and joining your list. It really is as easy as that. There’s a whole other slew of options out there where we can go and create really complicated chat bot routines, but if you do this simple one right here it’s gonna help you launch your product. Keep in mind you also wanna make sure you follow any kind of chatbot rules. Again Facebook is still kind of gun-shy, they want to make sure you’re not going out there and spamming people with offers all the time make so sure you read up on what to do. Especially using mini chat, it’ll guide you down the right path. Pretty much they just want to make sure that you are not violating the customers trust, you’re not intruding on them and sending the messages they don’t want. If you follow the basic rules then you’ll be just fine.
Tip 5: Avoid Sponsored Display Ads (For Now)
Now this strategy I love because this strategy is guaranteed to save you $3421.84, what you don’t believe me? Okay maybe I should phrase that. It WOULD have saved me $3,421.84 if I had followed it myself. You know one of the reasons why I love this business is I love sharing things all the time and today I’m gonna share with you something called learning from Mike’s mistakes. Yep that little duck. So every day I wake up and I check my Amazon account still. Even though I have people helping me now, I still get very much into the details of this business. I love it. I’ll never get away from it as much as I’d like to say that at some point only sitting in the chair just investing businesses and just letting someone else run them.
I still am actively involved in every single Amazon business that I have and I remember around Christmas time I woke up and I saw this show up inside my seller central account. Inside my Amazon advertising menu you know we have the normal sponsored products, we have the sponsored brands because I’m brand registered. Then I saw this it’s called sponsored display and a really cool thing that got my attention was the word beta next to it. Beta is very very special, it makes you feel special, so I had to click on it right away and then I realized very quickly the definition of beta. Definition is let Mike spend all of his money testing out crap while Amazon gets it right. You know what? It actually works for Amazon not for me, but it does work.
So I immediately went and said okay I’m gonna create this campaign. When that happens, when you find that one success, I also want to ask you to do one thing. Share that. If you go look on Amazon right now, and then you hop on over to Facebook, you hop on to a new site, you’ll see the product you were just looking at on Amazon because Amazon does all kinds of retargeting for you. Now they’re giving you the benefit of paying for yourself and so I went in there and I decided, I ain’t gonna go out there, I’m gonna test this out. I’m gonna teach this awesome strategy at the next SellerCon because I want people to really learn how to run their own display ads. I know that works and trust me it really really does.
So I went in there, I created this one to help my products, and I didn’t really know how to do it at first. I created my first little group called, definitely gonna sell these products this time, and then I kicked off this you know sponsored display beta test and then here’s what happened. Yeah horrible, spent over three thousand dollars and I made about twenty five hundred dollars in sales, terrible. So if I know that I’m targeting Bluetooth speaker or Bluetooth headphones and I’m paying a little bit more, I might be able to swallow that amount, but for product display ads there’s no keyword targeting here at all it’s just people looking at your products on other websites, clicking on it, and then in my case not buying.
Avoid Sponsored Display Ads For Now
So this didn’t work, so here is my $3,000 plus advice – you know the best way to use sponsored display ads? Don’t. Do not use them, at least until Amazon improves them or until you’re here in this group and a safe place with other people where we can actually test these out and figure how to work it. I did try a lot of things, right now Amazon just does not give you a lot of control over this, you can’t control what websites your ads do or don’t show up on because that means that I’m just going out there and showing and paying for these ads all over the internet. Without any kind of visibility into who my customer, who my audience might be, so until that happens I would stay away from them. Don’t get excited about that little beta thing popping up.
Right now it’s time for a little hacking tip. I always love sharing these and I am going to give a shout out to the mentors right here. I love you guys you guys, they were totally awesome because they helped validate a lot of these things that we test out. They also helped share a lot of things that I get to share with people as well, and this is one that we all talked about in the group. So we’ve all seen this before, this is one of my products right there and the list price is $49.99. The price right now is $44.97 I have that strike through price, I also have Amazon’s choice badge for Rich Henderson’s favorite product. I don’t know how I got there maybe a little photoshopping but if you want to do this here’s the one strategy, and I’ve seen a lot of strategies out there, none of the other ones have worked for us consistently.
Get Rid of Your Sales Price
This is what actually seems to work most of the time. First, get rid of your sales price. Let’s face it we all do that, we all have our MSRP, we all have our offer price, and then we all keep our sales prices running like their debt forever. So definitely get rid of the sales price for a while then actually make your price, your offer price, the same as your MSRP and if you need to lower your MSRP to do that go ahead. You don’t got to raise your product up to $100 just make sure that your MSRP inside your listing and your offer price are the exact same thing.
Strike-Through Pricing
Now this parts a little bit harder. You got to drive some sales, then you got to get some sales over a week or two in order to make this work. A little cool thing that can help is that you can still use discounts and coupons, so even though I’ve raised the price I can still use a 50% off coupon and that counts for this tactic as a full price sale at my price that I’m selling it at. Then what happens after 1 or 2 weeks, you can go ahead and create that sales price again and there’s a very good possibility that you will get that strikethrough price. Now I know that of the seven or eight people that we’ve been talking about it, five of us have seen this work, a couple of them will ask things like how often does it work? It actually works sixty percent of the time, all the time.
So I love to use that one, like two years ago, and it’s one of my favorite ones of all times. So try it out, if it doesn’t work for you I’m really sorry it is kind of category-specific but this is the only known way that I’ve ever seen the strikethrough pricing to come back pretty consistently a little over half the time.
Tip 6: Utilize Amazon Business Seller Program
All right now we’re gonna talk about an easy win, and of all the things that I’m talking about, this is one that I’m actually most excited about even though it’s pretty boring. It’s the Amazon Business Seller Program, this is the b2b central and if you go in there and look at it if you’ve been invited to the business program, if you haven’t been you can sign up for it voluntarily you don’t have to be invited, but we can invite. They’ll tell you all these reasons why you want to sign up as a business first to see it free and easy. You can offer business pricing and quantity discounts, you can also give business only offers to other buyers out there that are registered as businesses. You get access to some enhanced content, like think about uploading instruction manuals, uploading MSDS material, safety data sheets to your listings. You can also claim business credentials like if you’re a small business owner, if you are a minority business owner, female business owner, or a veteran business owner you can put those on your seller profile.
You can also go out there and create this seller profile that has a lot more on it, like a big logo, and it has some information about when your business started off, how many employees you have, all kinds of things that all of you know is a really cool feature of people looking at your business profile. Then you get all kinds of reporting as well and I’ll show you some of the reporting that’s just boring itself those are not the real reasons you want to do this.
The real reason you want to sign up for the Amazon Business program, although it’s free and easy to do, it’s because if you do that things like this can happen. Look at the date, one week ago June 13th I made a sale using the business program. This is a verified business customer and that sale on one order was 250 units for almost $9,000 in sales and had I not went through the five minutes to set up my business profile I would have missed out on this sale. It literally took me five minutes to set up and make sure that everything was in there. Now granted, I do not get sales like this every single day, every single week, I’m not trying to make that claim but I do get business sales every single month. It’s a great program to be in and if you’re not doing it you’re missing out on free sales.
This does not take much time at all. You want to go out there you want to fill out everything possible so here’s how you do that. You want to go out there and you want to register as an Amazon business. If you don’t know how to do that or haven’t already I’ll give you a link in a second. You also want to fill out every single detail possible. Just go through the list, they’re gonna show you all the five categories to fill it out. Fill in everything that you have then you also want apply for any certifications. If you are a female and you’re owning your business you are a female in business, if you’re minority if you are of that trend, if you’re a small business area go out there and apply for those certifications put them on to your business profile because there are companies out there that are adamant about only supporting certain businesses and you don’t want to miss an opportunity. If that’s the case then you also want to set up your business discount pricing and I’m pretty sure that’s what got me this sale, and I’ll show you exactly how to do it as well.
Setting Up Business Pricing
Now when it comes to setting up your business pricing, you’ll see a screen like this that just lets you go through every single product, and set up your business pricing. This is different from quantity discounts that we all have access to. This is just for your business but this is a simple way to do it. I like offering 5% when they buy between 2 and 5 products, then up to 10% when they get 5 to 10, 15% for 10 to 15 and then 20% off if they buy more than twenty-five products. That seems to work. You don’t have to do the same thing that’s just what works for me.
Another really cool thing about Amazon business, look at this graph right here, this tells me who’s buying my products. Governments are buying my products, commercial, regular businesses who are you know official businesses in education who I sold those products to. It was a county government bought 50 units of my products. Now I know with this information, I’m gonna go out there and find more counties, it’s just the natural thing to do. You may find something different but this tells you who your audience already is.
Built-in Amazon Influencers
Now I also want to talk about some Amazon influencers and I call these built-in Amazon influencers. There are other people that are going into way more detail during this time here, but I want to talk about a real dead simple easy way to do it. Now if you’re wondering who these influencers are they make you think it’s these people. Mark Cuban, make sense you know? A very attractive woman in the studio, and those people, they’re helping support the Amazon influencer program, but in reality this is who they are. That’s a listing of Facebook groups trying to sell coupons and giveaway coupons. I’m a member of the top one, Salesaholics, the person who runs that may be here I don’t even know. There’s like three or four other groups too, there are dozens of Facebook groups out there that all they focus on is sharing discounts that are set up by you know, set up and share with Amazon influencers.
Basically the influencer program is a part of the Amazon Associates Program. It helps you share your products with other people and get commission. So what they do is, they go out there, they find the best deals and every day they’re posting about them. Now another situation might be a review site, like best reviews is very very popular. There are thousands of these out there. If you ever go out there and you find a site that let’s say talks about the 10 best lanterns out there, chances are it’s someone who’s making a commission off those sales and that’s totally fine because do I really care who it is? No, I just want to make sure that they’re hawking my wares for me as much as they possibly can.
Now how you do this and maybe you’ve seen this before is you want to go in and create a social media promo code. Then when you get to this screen where we are actually going to be setting up the discount make sure you have this box checked. If you want to read what that box means it’s right there all it says is Amazon is saying we’re gonna share this with our influencers are you okay with that? If I’m offering a discount on a product that I really want a lot of people to get I say yes because this is what shows up. This is a list of all of the discounts that are going on that very day.
There’s actually thousands, I just took a little screenshot of this. This is inside of Amazon associates how they’re seen and the reason that I like doing this is for two reasons. One if I want to share a specific discount with people, think 23 percent off, I create this, give them a link, and that’s an easy way to do it. More importantly if I want to liquidate inventory, think 70% or higher, this is a great way to get your sales viral in order to clear it. Now one quick tip if you actually want to go out there and liquidate inventory, not lose your money, raise your price then create a 70% social media coupon to share with people. You’ll get a lot of people to share it and they think they’re getting 70% off which they are but you’ll just build a cleaner inventory and hopefully not lose money.
Setting Up Prime Day Deals
Now quick little bonus thing. People always ask, how do I get invited to Prime Day Lightning Deals or deals of the day? If you missed out on that it’s totally fine because you can create Prime exclusive discounts. Now inside of your seller central account, if you saw this message come up, go to your advertising menu, go to the prime exclusive discounts menu, and you can set these up yourself. It’s pretty simple. You you go through and you create which products you’re going to actually offer as a discount. You’ll go through and you’ll actually upload a spreadsheet of what those products are. Don’t be afraid of it it’s not that complicated. They give you a template so I’m gonna put all of our products under this. I haven’t had a chance to do that been a little busy last 24 hours, put all your products in here by SKU, what the percentage discount is, with the lowest price you’re willing to sell it at and then you upload it and then you’re done.
If you need instructions they actually have that in the template there and that will help you go out there and figure out how to do this. You have to do this by July 5th so we’re like two weeks away, be sure everyone here who’s selling on Amazon does this before July 5th you will make a lot more sales on Amazon’s Prime Day coming up.
People Love Amazon
All right a quick little pause here because everything that I share with you right now, it’s pretty much applicable to anyone in this room. So I want to talk a little bit more about some more advanced strategies, and so these things may have some requirements and I’ll talk about those. So if anyone’s actually shopping on or are selling on Shopify right now I can almost guarantee that you are losing money, and I’ll tell you why. I did a test, for the past three months I ran a radio ad campaign in Missouri because I want to see how these work for me. I’m always testing out new things and to be honest I love sharing these things with you, that’s part of the reason why I do this. It’s also a business write-off I’m not gonna deny, but I love testing out new things. So I ran a campaign for three months using local radio each week. I gave people the option of getting a discount either on my website or on Amazon, so I gave them a discount code or I gave them a link, or if they went there it took them straight to a social media promo code and then at the end of that test here were those results. I made $8,725 in sales. So when I gave people the complete option where they wanted to shop, on the radio three-fourths of them wanted to go to Amazon. Right now just keep in mind people love Amazon and that’s not gonna change.
Retargeting Strategy
So I created the strategy with some some really good advertisers, getting this information, let’s figure out what can I do to help my own sales and I call this the sweep em up with my own retargeting so that I know it works. So for my own e-commerce site, I drive paid traffic to it like everyone who’s selling on their web site does. Then I also retarget those people back to my own website like everyone else should be doing, and then after a certain amount of time, like 7 to 10 days, I’m gonna retarget those people again.
If they haven’t bought on my website chances are they’re not going to this time, so I retarget them later back to Amazon because I know 3/4 of people would rather buy on Amazon. So let’s give them that chance. Then finally afterwards about two to three weeks, if they haven’t bought yet, then I turn it off. After a month I want to make sure I’m not retargeting people if they ended up buying. If you want to know the details of how I set up my campaign this is what I did right there. I actually tried going for the lowest cost per click and I was able to get thirty three cents per click for very targeted Facebook advertising for all the people just retargeting people back to my Amazon listing who had visited my products on my website had not bought and I definitely noticed an increase in sales on my Amazon site as I was running these. This is something you can do if you have our own e-commerce site. Now I know if you heard this, I threw this in this morning, I was up early and if you heard that Shopify news I just want to pull this out.
Shopify introduced their own fulfillment network. Huge news, their stock is jumping, skyrocketing high, this means that at some point in time we may have another fulfillment service other than Amazon we can use and this is just incredible news. I just want to make sure you guys are aware of this keeping in mind, I would say probably sometime next year is really when it’s going to be in full force.
Tip 7: Register Your Brand & Access All The Benefits
All right now everything else that I’m gonna talk about requires one thing and that is brand registry. So hopefully a lot of people here are in brand registry, if not then you can go out there and start thinking about that right now because there are a ton of benefits that you get with brand registry. It gives you more control over your listings, of your products, it also helps protect you from counterfeiters and people trying to destroy your brand image and they give you some behind the scenes monitoring that you may not even know it’s happening keeping counterfeiters off of your listings and such. They give you something called brand analytics. Now I believe someone here at SellerCon is gonna be going doing a deep dive into brand analytics. I’m gonna show you what I use for them because I think it’s a really powerful easy strategy you can use. So I want to cover everything, but I am just gonna cover what I can.
Tip 8: Add a Video To Your Listing, Buyers are 3.6x More Likely To Buy
So first if you have brand registry you can add videos to your listings. They’ve just done this recently, made it a lot easier. So for people who watch a video on your listing, they’re 3.6x more likely to buy. That is almost a 400% increase in conversions for those people who add videos. It doesn’t have to be anything complicated either. Here’s a product right here, just a stud finder, and these videos go right there at the very bottom of your images. They’re very simple to make and they’re usually about a minute or two. If you want to create these don’t do anything crazy. What I like to do is keep them short. Have a catchy animated opening, have a little bit of sound in there, and keep in mind that it’s an instructional video you’re not selling something, but behind the scenes you really are. You just want to go out there and talk about sales. Show them unboxing your products from, how they use your product, to showing them how responsive as a manufacturer you are. Since you are the manufacturer when you’re doing this, you’re not the seller, fine distinction, but it’s something to keep in mind.
Using Project Zero
Also you can’t talk about prices or sales because again you are the manufacturer, but you can talk about a warranty if you are a manufacturer that’s a great way to put a video up there. Also if you’re a member of Amazon Brand Registry there’s Project Zero. I’m a member of this. Now it is awesome, it helps take people off your listing almost immediately when we have a counterfeiter on there. If you want to join the wait list simply go to Project Zero and join the wait list it took me about 30 days to get approved to it. Once you’re approved for that you get access to this tool. Incredibly powerful but also dangerous, you don’t want to be use this tool loosely it will take a seller off of your listing immediately. Amazon keeps track of this, if you just don’t like a seller on there, if you think that they’re selling counterfeit but they’re not, if they’re really selling your products they got on a discount there’s nothing wrong with that. You don’t want to take them off you want to focus on people that are selling counterfeit. Use this it will take them down.
Transparency By Amazon
The next step after that is actually transparency by Amazon. This is the next level that instead of being able to remove people immediately this will keep them from getting on there completely and what this program does for you is it allow you to put on a trackable barcode every single one of your products.
So when they get to Amazon if it doesn’t have a barcode that you helped create through the transparency program it will not go inside of Amazon and customers can actually go and scan that when they get a product and know that it’s your product. Those are all great protections. You’ll increase conversions with project zero and transparency, both great things that you want to get at some point when you are brand registered. But what I love are the brand name analytics tools you’ll get and I can go through this pretty quickly. Here’s Amazon search terms which allow you to go through and see all the searches out there that people are looking for all over Amazon every day. There’s also item comparison, we’re gonna know the products people are buying and this will tell you their demographics which is for your entire brand which is pretty crazy.
Access to Demographics
Look at this demographic chart right here. There’s five of them. There’s the age, income, marital status, education level, it’s kind of crazy to give this kind of information. You will get this for your products when you join here we when you’re able to sign for brand registry and what I like to do is go right into Facebook and imagine that they have those exact same demographic settings inside your ads. If you know that you’re primarily selling to men between 40 and 55 years old, and making a certain income level, education level, you can target those exact same people. Now demographics are great it’s awesome when used for targeting, but you really want to focus in on the search terms.
Look at this report right here, if you have not seen this this is the best thing that Amazon’s come out with in years. This is a search term report showing every single search performed on Amazon from the top one to the bottom million searched. You go out there you can actually sort them any way that you want to. You can do a search by search term like Bluetooth speaker or you can search by ASIN. If you know your competitors ASIN put it in here it’s gonna show you every single search term that they showed up for. It’s gonna tell you all kinds of data about that in addition for every search term it’s gonna show you who was the number one product clicked on, and then bought, number two, number three, and so forth. Unbelievable the credible information. Now of course again, what do you do with this?
Tip 9: Extract Keywords From Top Products, Run Manual Sponsored Ads Campaign
Mike that’s huge, a lot of formation we need to plan for this, here’s the plan. How to take this really dead simple strategy, first thing you want to do is you want to go out there and use your top seller in your niche, whatever it is, find the top seller and put them into the brand registry analytics and then pull up every keyword that they actually show up for. Here’s one where they show up for 258 key terms regarding Bluetooth speakers.
Use Those Keywords For a Manual Sponsored Ads Campaign
Then you want to take those and you want to use those keywords and make sure that your listing is completely optimized. Your title, your bullets, your search terms, and descriptions. Not the keywords you think work, the ones that ACTUALLY work. Make sure you’re optimized for that, then you want to create a manual sponsored ads campaign, and put all those keywords in there. I also use Amazon suggested bid, easy way to start out, then follow up with that. Use all those keywords, put them into a negative search campaign, your automatic campaign, and make sure they’re your negatives, phasing those out because you don’t want to pay for those in two different campaigns
Put them into a manual campaign, have an automatic campaign that you include them as a negative search term so that you’re ignoring those in your automatic campaign. Then you want to go ahead and monitor and optimize every one to two weeks, and then you should see sales like this. This is one just running for what looks to be about a week for me here, getting a great ad cost because of this.
Repeat Process For Additional Products
Then part two just repeat this process for other products as well. When you do that also be sure to look at other ASIN’s that are showing up for search terms and don’t ignore them because you can also repeat this process for other products. The number two product, and number three product, now you know there are so many endless possibilities with this business so many of them that really means that if there’s that many possibilities there is no one single formula that’s gonna be a surefire success for everyone.
There’s a thousand things you can do. You know I’ve tried a lot of things in this business, like that duck right there, that didn’t work. But if I wouldn’t be experimenting all the time, then I wouldn’t have found these things and shared what actually get me out of the water to make me successful.
Tip 10: Never Stop Experimenting
I know that there are a lot of people right now that are in this room that are either successful or going to be successful very very soon, and for those people who are are going to be successful, and that should be pretty much everyone, I want you to keep trying. Never ever stop experimenting. I love this picture, this girl right there, because all it takes is one success out of a hundred to set you apart from everyone. When that happens, when you find that one success, I also want to ask you do one thing. Share that with someone. It doesn’t have to be a room full of 2,000 people, doesn’t have to be a room full of hundred people, it could be one person. If you find something that works for you, share with one person.
I guarantee you it’s happened in my life and it’ll happen in your life. You will get that success back 100 times over. Alright everyone I’m Mike McClary thank you very much! So there you have it, my top ten ways for increase amazon sales, getting more traffic, and rankings products on Amazon. If you want to hear more like this then be sure to like or subscribe to our YouTube channel!
