Effective Ways to Increase Sales on Amazon

Today we will talk about some ways that you can increase your traffic, your rankings and your sales on Amazon. And the really great thing about these tactics is that they are working for people right now.

They’re not old tactics that were working at one point in time and are no longer useful. Some of these have been around for a while, but we will look at them in a different way. These tactics can be used by anyone, no matter if you are just starting out or have been going for a long time. You could be launching your first product, or you could be a million-dollar seller and still benefit from using them. Even if you haven’t sold a single product yet, you can use these to plan how best to do it.

We need to adapt how we launch our products, because Amazon is going to keep changing. The world of business is going to keep changing.

Other models come out that want to take advantage of, and we can’t do the exact same thing every day. You can’t just assume you’re going to launch a product, sit back and it’s going to do the same sales every single day for the rest of your e-commerce and business career. That just doesn’t happen.

When strategies change, what we need to do is give Amazon what Amazon wants.

That’s how you adapt. And 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 something going. It’s the easiest and the fastest way to sell your products. Well, we’re playing by Amazon’s rules. And so, we need to make sure that we give them what they want and what Amazon wants right now is to grow their advertising business.

The worst thing for me right now is hearing about someone struggling and saying that they’re just going to give the business up. Because I’ve seen my own personal life. I’ve seen what my friends and family and the mentors and other people go through. I’ve seen what this business can do for you.

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 can help feed that machine for them. Amazon is willing to reward us for that. I mean, they’ve seen exactly what Google can do as far as advertising goes. Facebook still dwarfs Amazon. But last year, Amazon made 10 billion dollars just through their advertising platform.

That’s pretty insane to think about because Amazon really started off as a book company that turned into a fulfillment company, and now they are getting into advertising. Amazon is set to rock the advertising world.

They have a fulfillment network. They have more warehouses than anyone else, all over the world.

So, if they can tie those two things together for us, they’re going to completely crush the competition, even more than they already are doing. So, we’re going to take advantage of Amazon’s advertising.

Now, how do we do that? Let’s get down to some tactics, because we’re talking about a lot of big strategies.

First, I want to focus on Amazon’s advertising tools. Simply launch your product using Amazon’s sponsor product, and you will see results. Other strategies involve building an Instagram audience, a Facebook audience, or even a YouTube audience.

Those strategies absolutely work. But another way to find your audience is to connect to the people that are already searching for products on Amazon.

Then you need to convert them. Give them a reason to buy your product now. So, early on, we’re going to give them a big discount. Now, we’re not going to go crazy. We’re not going to give them 90 percent off. We can just offer around 50 percent, maybe a little lower, giving them a good incentive to buy. And then, once you have started getting some sales, we’re also going to start up your auto campaigns, set up some sponsor product ad campaigns using broad match. Broad match essentially allows you to match for more general keywords that are still related to your main keyword, allowing for more traffic to be diverted to your product than if you were to use a narrower match approach. Every couple of weeks I keep figuring out exactly what people are searching for and keep adding them to our campaign.

This process can just be repeated, but there’s one thing you must have: you need to have a good product and you need to have a great listing as well.

Make sure that you focus on product quality, focus on customer service and focus on having a really good listing that yields results. When it comes to launching in 2020, there’s more than just Amazon sponsored ads. And like I said, we’re going to talk about strategies that people who only have access to sponsored ads can use. But I’ll mention a few pro tips here, too.

Amazon has updated their seller Central Market where you get a lot of those tools inside your seller central account. We can use headline search ads to create product display ads. You can build your stores now inside of Seller Central. All of the things that used to only be available to the larger vendors that were out there are now available to everyone.

If you want to build an audience of quality fans that you can launch more products to in the future, Manychat works like nothing else out there. We’ve seen open rates, and Manychat’s go above 80 percent and operate just as easily if you send out 100 messages or 10. How many people will actually open your email? You’re lucky if you get 5%, even luckier if you get more. Manychat is great because people are always connected. This is something that anyone can start setting up right now. You don’t need a product. You can actually just build your brand page and get a listing creator right now.

Now, if you want to know some really great tactics for launching, check your phone. I’ll be talking on it at a boot camp tech style about how to revisit the launching process and get ready for mobile sales because mobile is well and truly here. It’s been growing by leaps and bounds every single year. And as of right now, up to 40 percent of everyone buying on Amazon is doing so on mobile. When it gets into the holiday season that number increases further, and we expect that number to continue to grow. Now, the reason why this is important to us is that the Amazon desktop search looks different to the mobile search, and it also behaves differently as well. This doesn’t mean you need to go out and change everything, but we need to be aware of it so we can adapt and adjust.

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 draw attention to it because on desktop everyone sees all the other images lined up. Your first one is still the most important, but they all appear. On mobile it’s even more important. It takes up half your screen and people don’t always know that they need to swipe to go the other images. So, your primary image is more important than ever.

Also, you don’t want to have a spammy title. As matter of fact, Amazon has been suppressing any product listings that do not have titles that meet their requirements. This is a really big deal. They have certain title lengths, and they have certain formats, that you must adhere to if you want to be successful on the platform.

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. Just make sure your titles are in place and adhere to their requirements.

Now, the last thing I want to do is want to take make sure that your product description is suitable. It’s probably the part of your listing that you need to focus on the least.

Especially on mobile, people are just going to read your title and the first bullet point, so you want to make sure that it answers all of their immediate questions.

Make sure you include that at the top of your description. Both people on desktop and people on mobile will see it right away. An effective first bullet point will go a long way towards increasing your sales.

Now, also keep in mind that I said enhanced brand content is fully applicable, too. You need to make sure they all have a good picture and have the main features and benefits at the top.

If you already have a strong fanbase you will find it easier to make sales than if you are trying to create a customer email list. And also, importantly, they can help drive reviews. Now, everyone wants more reviews. It’s one of biggest struggles you will face. It’s not a complete disaster if you don’t have any, but if you’re trying to sell on Amazon, you will want as many (good) reviews as possible.

Although you can reach out to customers via email, a lot of them will have their email notifications turned off, and many will unsubscribe from the mailing list as well.

So, you’re going to have to go out there and build your customer and audience base first. You need to create a Facebook page. You’re asking them to reach out to you. You’re asking them if it’s okay to message them in the future to share new products, and you will make them the first in line by doing this.

Today, this is extremely easy to do. Here’s the simple strategy. You just go out after you create your first Facebook page and you create a very basic post.

You just ask people who want to save one percent right now on a product. Can be 20, can be 15, it can be 50. Whatever you want. I don’t like to go crazy, and it needs to be authentic. Make people think your products are cheap but still of high quality. Just ask them, “Who wants high-quality products, cheaper than ever?”, and ask them to comment below. Then, once they comment, you want to create a simple auto response. All it does reply to them, “Thank you for being one of our fans and customers. Here’s your coupon!”, and ask them, “Is it OK if we send you future coupons and deals as well?” Almost everyone will say yes. It’s okay if people say no to this, as they still get their coupon, which can still lead to sales. Then, you simply boost that post because, let’s face it, just making a post on the Facebook page doesn’t really get the attention it used to. You can spend $10 every few days boosting this post and you will get 50 or even a couple of hundred people wanting that coupon and joining your list. It really is as easy as that.

Keep in mind you also want to make sure you follow any kind of chat bot rules. If you follow the basic rules, you’ll be just fine.

This is what seems to work most of the time. First, get rid of the sales price. Let’s face it, we all do that. We all have our offer price. And then we all keep our sales prices running like our debt, forever. And definitely get rid of the sale price for a while, then actually choose your price. Your offer price can’t be the same as your MSRP. And if you need to lower your MSRP to do that, go ahead. You can’t just raise your product up to $100 overnight.

Now, this part’s a bit more difficult. Raising prices doesn’t mean you can’t still offer discount codes and coupons, and so it can help to keep sending them out while you experiment with the real price of the product.

After 1 or 2 weeks of consistent sales, you can go ahead and raise the price back to normal again. And there’s a very high probability that you will get that strike price that you want. So, try it out. If it doesn’t work for you, just keep experimenting. It is kind of category specific, but this is the only known way that I’ve ever seen the strike.

This is the one that I’m actually most excited about, even though it may sound boring. It’s the Amazon Business Seller program. This is the B2B Central. If you’ve been invited to the business program that’s great. If you haven’t, you can sign up for it voluntarily. You don’t have to be invited. It’s free and easy to set up, and it means you can offer business pricing and bulk quantity discounts. You can also give business-only offers to other buyers that are registered as businesses.

You will gain access to some exclusive content, like the ability to upload your instruction manuals, and you can add MSDS material safety data sheets to your listings. You can also add business credentials 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 these things on your seller profile, and you can create a seller profile that has a lot more on it than before.

You can include some information about when your business started off, how many employees you have and all kinds of things like that. This can help people learn more about your business and make them more likely to buy you products.

If you’re not already doing it, you’re missing out on free sales. This does not take much time at all. You want to get out there, and you want to do everything you possibly can as an Amazon Business Seller.

If you are a female and you’re running your business, you are a female in business. If you’re a minority, if you are a veteran, if you’re in a small business area, go out there and apply for a certification. Put them onto 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. This is different from quantity discounts that we all have access to. This is just for your business, and there is a simple way to do it. I like offering 5% off for between 2 and 5 products. Then up to 10% when they buy between 5 and 10, and then 20% thereafter. You don’t have to do the exact same thing, but that’s just what works for me personally.

I also want to talk about some Amazon influencers, and I call these built in Amazon influencers.

There are dozens of Facebook groups out there focusing on sharing discounts that are set up and shared with Amazon influencers.

Basically, the influencer program is a part of the Amazon Associates Program. It’s their referral program that helps you share your products with other people and get a commission. So, what they do is they go out there and they find the best deals and every day they post about them.

There are thousands of these out there. If you ever go out there and you find a site that talks about the 10 best backpacks out there, or the 10 best running shoes, chances are there is someone earning a commission from the sales made by people buying through their website. You can take advantage of this as well as a seller.

Now, you can do this by creating a social media promo code. And then when you get to this screen, we are actually going to be setting up the discount. Make sure you have this box checked. And if you want to read what that box means you can. It is basically Amazon saying that they are going to share this product with their influencers. It asks, “Are you okay with that?” and if I’m offering a discount on a product that I really want a lot of people to buy, I say yes.

This is a list of all of the discounts that are available on that very day. There are thousands. I just took a screenshot of this. This is inside Amazon Associates. And I like doing this for 2 reasons. Firstly, if I want to share a specific discount with people and I want to give them a direct link, it’s an easy way to do it.

But more importantly, if I want to liquidate inventory, about 70 percent or higher, this is a great way to get your sales viral in order to clear it out.

People always ask how to get invited to prime day lightning deals or deals of the day. It could be due to your settings. You can now create prime exclusive discounts inside of your Seller Central Account. Go to your advertising menu. Then go to the prime exclusive discounts menu and you can set these up yourself. It’s pretty simple.

You go through and choose which products you’re going to actually offer that discount for. You go through and actually upload a spreadsheet of what those products are. Don’t worry, it’s not that complicated. They even give you a template. So, I’m going to put all of our products into this. Put all your products in here by SKU with the percentage discount at the lowest price you’re willing to sell the products for. And then you upload it and you’re done!

You have to do this by July 5th, so we’re only two weeks away. If you do this, you will make a lot more sales on Amazon’s Prime Day that is coming up.

I now want to talk a little bit about some more advanced strategies. These ones may have some prerequisites. If anyone’s actually shopping or selling on Shopify right now, I can almost guarantee that you are losing money. I’ll tell you why.

People love shopping on Amazon. You can still create your own website to sell your products, but for just now, remember that people love Amazon and that’s not going to change.

I call this next strategy the “sweep them up with my own re-targeting” strategy. And it works. So, for my own e-commerce site, I drive paid traffic to it like everyone who’s selling on their own website does. Then, I re-targeted those people back to my own website. And then after around 7 to 10 days, I reach out to those people again. If they haven’t bought on my website by now, they probably never will, so I re-target them back to Amazon because I know 75% of people would rather buy on Amazon. Let’s give them that chance now.

Now, everything else that I’m going to talk about requires one thing, and that is brand registry. So hopefully a lot of people here are in brand registry already, but if not, then you need to start thinking about that right now, because there are a ton of benefits that you can gain from being registered. It gives you more control over your listings of your products, and it also helps to protect you from counterfeiters and people trying to destroy your brand image.

They also give you some behind the scenes monitoring that you may not even know is happening, keeping attackers away. And they give you something called brand analytics. They’re really powerful, and there are some really easy strategies you can use with them.

First, if you have brand registry, you can add videos to your listings, and they have recently made this a lot easier. People who watch a video on your listing are 3.6 times more likely to buy your products.

It’s almost a 400% increase in conversions for those people who added videos to their listings.

They’re usually about a minute or two in length if you want to create these, so don’t do anything too crazy. What I like to do is keep them short, have a catchy, animated opening, and have a little bit of sound in there. Keep in mind that it’s an instructional video. You’re not promoting it directly, but behind the scenes, you really are. You want to show them an un-boxing of your product and how to use it. You want to show them that you are a good manufacturer, and not just a seller.

Keep in mind that 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, and that’s a great thing to include here. Also, if you’re a member of Amazon Brand Registry, there’s something called Project Zero. This helps take people off your listing almost immediately when they show signs that they are a fraudster. If you want to join the waiting list, simply go to Project Zero and join it. It took me about 30 days to get approved. Once you’re approved for that, you can access this incredibly powerful tool very easily. It can also be used incorrectly however, and you only want to focus on people that are selling counterfeits, and nobody else. The next step after that is actually transparency. This is the next level that instead of removing people immediately, it will keep them from getting on there in the first place. And what this program does for you is it allows you to put a trackable barcode on 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 appear on Amazon. Customers can actually go and scan that when they get a product and know that it’s your product. Those are all great tools that will result in more conversions.

Project Zero and transparency are great things that you want to get at some point when you are part of the brand registry. What I love are the branding analytics tools you’ll get as well. I’ll go through them pretty quickly here.

There’s Amazon search terms which allow you to go through and see all the searches out there that people are making all over Amazon every day. There’s also item comparison. We want to know which products people are buying, and this will tell us. Then there’s the demographics tool, which is for your entire brand, and is very powerful. There is Lula’s demographic chart right here, and there are 4 of them. There’s the age, income, marital status and education level. It’s kind of crazy to have access to this kind of information. If you know that you’re primarily selling to men between 40 and 55 years old and making a certain income level and education level, you can target those exact same people with your Facebook ads.

Now, demographics are great. They are extremely useful for targeting, but we really want to focus on the search terms. Look at this report right here if you have not seen this already. I think this is the best thing that Amazon has come out with in years. This is a searcher report showing every single search performed on Amazon from the top one to the very bottom.

You can do a search-by-search term like Bluetooth speaker or you can search by ASIN if you know your competitor is on there. It’s going to show you every single search term that they showed up for as long as they are in the top million. And it can tell you all kinds of data about that.

In addition, for every search term it shows you it tells you the number one product that people clicked on and then bought, as well as number two, number three and so on. Unbelievably credible affirmation. First thing you want to do is you want to go out there and find the top seller in your niche, whatever it may be, and put them into the brand registry. Go into your brand analytics, and then pull up every keyword that they show up for. Then you want to take those and you want to use those keywords and make sure that you’re listing is completely optimized for your title, your bullet points, your search terms, descriptions, and not just the keywords you think will work but the ones that actually do. Make sure you’re optimized for these.

Then you want to create a manual sponsored ad campaign. Put all those keywords in there. I also use the ones that Amazon suggests, as it’s an easy way to get started.

Put them into a negative search campaign. Your automatic campaign. And make sure that your negative phrasing goes out because you don’t want to pay for those in two different campaigns. Put them into your campaign. Have an automatic campaign and include your competitor as a negative search term so that you’re ignoring those in your automatic campaign. When you do that, also be sure to look at other ASINs that are showing up for these search terms. And don’t ignore them because you can also repeat this process for other products. The number two product, the number three product and so on.

Don’t have time to practice? The good news is we can do it for you. Give us a call at 909-347-7798 and we will work on an effective plan with unbelievably low rates.

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