As a global leader in eCommerce, it’s almost as easy to get lost on Amazon as it is in the Amazonian rainforest. With their range of own brand products constantly increasing, it’s becoming harder for outside names to bring their best cards to the table and win.
With the help of Amazon expert and founder of Online Seller UK, Prabhat Shah, we’ve put together our top 5 seller optimisation tips aimed at increasing traffic and conversion rates of your products. Fortunately Amazon doesn’t change its algorithm as often as other platforms, so these tips are worth remembering.
5 Tips and Tricks to Promote Listings and Drive Sales
As a general rule, the more effort you put into your Amazon listings; the more you’ll get out of them. People rarely do product research on Amazon, instead they’re usually close to the point of purchase. Therefore our top 5 tips are centred around increasing visibility and encouraging customers to purchase from you rather than a competitor.
1) Creating Products That Sell
After clicking on your product, customers usually make a decision within seconds whether they want to continue with their purchase or return to search results. Ensuring your product images are up-to-scratch will entice customers to stay on your page. Here are our top tips:
- Include multiple product images – Amazon allows up to 9 but we generally recommend between 5-6. This is dependent on what you’re selling, however.
- Get professional photos.
- Use a white background – it looks clean and the contrast allows your products to stand out.
- Include lifestyle shots – images of products being used can be very persuasive as they give viewers more confidence in what they’re purchasing.
- Take photos of how the package will arrive.
- Make sure all images comply with Amazon’s requirements.
Product titles and descriptions are equally as important. To optimise these you should:
- Research the A9 algorithm, which is what Amazon uses for product search. It operates on a keyword search method and how closely a product matches the query.
- Make use of the generous 500 character limit by creating long descriptive titles that follow the ‘brand + model number + product type + colour’ structure.
- Include technical details such as manufacturing parts numbers to allow well-informed purchases.
- Pay close attention to spelling and grammar.
2) Getting Initial Sales
Once you’ve listed your products, the next step is generating initial sales. The ‘loss leader’ approach dictates that initially selling your products at a low price will encourage sales. Once a customer base has been built the price can be raised. It’s also important to:
- Monitor and reprice items according to market demand.
- Run competitor analysis’s to educate you on best practices and promotional opportunities for certain items.
- Ensure your product isn’t priced lower on other platforms – this is against your Pricing Parity Clause with Amazon.
- Consider offering free shipping in order to encourage sales.
- Consider Fulfilment by Amazon – these products tend to rank higher in search results so they have better visibility.
3) Getting Product Reviews
Product reviews are also an integral component of Amazon success, since they coincide with trust and credibility. Research by Podium shows that 93% of people say online reviews impact their purchasing decisions, suggesting that customers are concerned with having positive experiences. Therefore, the ideal situation is to have lots of 4/5 star reviews that confirm and corroborate your greatness.
One way to encourage this is by sending follow up emails to customers. This could be done automatically after each purchase or following a certain number of repeat purchases. The first method will generate more reviews, but in the case of the latter the reviews are more likely to be positive. It’s up to you to determine which approach is more appropriate for your business. Furthermore, Amazon guidelines dictate that follow up emails must not contain marketing or promotional messages, contain external links, directly ask for or incentivise positive reviews. It’s also important to remember that Amazon automatically send out product review and seller feedback emails. Sending your own follow ups in a similar time frame may therefore make the emails seem spammy, leading to negative reviews or buyers rejecting the process altogether.
4) Utilising External Marketing
Our fourth tip is centred around using external marketing in order to drive people to your Amazon products. The first logical step is to decide which marketing channels to use by analysing your target market and determining where you’re most likely to reach them. There’s no point creating a Snapchat campaign if your primary audience are over the age of 40, simply because this age group don’t have a strong presence on Snapchat. Some effective ways to market your Amazon products are:
- Holding social media competitions – they are a good way of capturing email data and increasing brand awareness.
- Sending out discount offers to your mailing list.
- Engaging with Facebook groups.
- Testing paid ads.
- Sending your products to micro-influencers.
- Blogging about how to use your products, or answering FAQ.
- Holding giveaways
5) Making Sponsored Ads
Finally, do some research into sponsored Amazon ads. Amazon operate a pay-per-click model that allows sellers to promote their products within search results. Due to this enhanced visibility, sponsored ads will generate more conversions than organic listings. Amazon allow sponsored ads for specific products and sponsored brand ads for registered brand owners to promote their brand and product portfolios. Within this there are two types of sponsored ad: automated and manual.
Automatic ads let Amazon do all the hard work. Sellers simple need to select the product they want to promote and allocate a budget. Amazon will then find keywords based on the product details. This is great for PPC beginners and those who don’t have time to play around. In most cases the higher your bid; the higher your sales. However, failing to tailor your keywords and allowing Amazon to do it is risky. Your ads probably won’t be running at their maximum efficiency because bids will be the same for high converting, low converting and no converting keywords.
Manual ads, wherever, require a lot more effort from the seller. They are set up within Seller Central and allow sellers to specifically control what keywords they’re bidding on. If you’re unsure on where to start, consider running automatic ads until you have a brief idea of which keywords are working for you. Following this you’ll be able to add negative keywords that are wasting money, as well as increasing your spend on high-performing keywords.
Check out Our Latest Webinar
And that’s all there is too it, now it’s over to you! We hope you found this useful, if you want to learn more about optimising your Amazon listings be sure to check out our latest webinar with Prabhat Shah. Alternatively, you can sign up for our other webinars here.
