Amazon Prime Day has traditionally been a summertime affair. However, the postponed event’s date has now been announced! With the event taking place on the 13th and 14th of October, it’s important to optimize your Amazon account beforehand. To maximize your profits and make the most of your resources, your Amazon strategy should be multifaceted and intentional. Below, our resident Amazon expert Devyn Bauman gives away some free advice on how to optimize your Amazon strategy.
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On Amazon, reviews are worth their weight in gold. They communicate social trust to your audience — if someone else has tried the product out and liked it, that means they might too. People always trust other people over corporations. Furthermore, reviews are a vital component to optimize your Amazon account for Prime Day 2020 as they determine organic product rankings within their algorithm. Reviews carry almost equal weight to your product sales.
One of our clients, TopIt!, was a new product in the dog food market. Launching a new product on Amazon within a competitive industry is, traditionally, difficult to find success. In the first three weeks, however, TopIt!’s Amazon sales surpassed their brick and mortar sales by 929%, due in part to their average 5-star review. The influx of reviews came from the review management strategy involving marketing campaigns alongside support from a strong social media strategy.
A review management strategy can involve the following steps:
Your customers are talking to (and about) you here. You want to treat your Q&A section like you treat community management on social media. It’s an opportunity to facilitate conversation, correct any misinformation, and collect data. What are people asking about or for? Are there repeat requests? If so, you may uncover unseen opportunities to either expand or optimize your product offerings.
Amazon Vine is a program designed to gain new sellers or new product offerings reviews. The reviews do, however, come at a cost. Amazon Vine charges a submission fee and limits the amount of products you can add.
We love email marketing strategies because they work. HubSpot states that 99% of consumers check their email every day and it is by far the preferred way to receive updates from brands.
To make it easier on you, there is third-party software (like JungleScout) that can sink into your Amazon account to create automated email campaigns that encourage additional reviews on top of the standard email that Amazon sends out. This is a perfect way to generate reviews in time for Prime Day 2020.
You can manually ‘request a review’ for each order that comes through your sellers’ account, increasing the likelihood that a customer will leave one. Again, there is third-party software that will automate this process too, saving you time. By ‘requesting a review’ sellers report a large uptick in the number of reviews left.
Finding an effective way to position or market your products can come from conducting an analysis of your competitors’ product listings. Looking at what others are doing can lead you to a market niche and give you a competitive edge for Prime Day 2020.
Having a variety of keywords in your product listing is vital in Amazon’s algorithm to knowing where to place your product in search results. Analyzing your competitor’s product listings has the added benefit of creating inspiration for this.
Start by looking at which competitors are ranking above you in organic search results in your product category. Take a close, analytical look at their listings and answer the following questions:
The right keywords will lead the right customers to your product. Investing the resources to research and then optimize keywords related to your product can maximize your revenue. Tools like Jungle Scout can help you to find those high-converting keywords and give you insight into what your competitors are doing.
Try to use different ways to describe your product with broad and narrow descriptors, short and long-tail keywords, and variations based on size, or type, or flavors.
A positive customer experience comes from more than the product itself. When someone is able to buy the same thing from different vendors, they’ll make a purchasing decision based on their emotions. You can appeal to them by including inserts in your packaging. Prior to assembling your boxes for shipment, create inserts to include. These can simply be your brand’s logo and contact information, your brand’s story, or even useful information on product use. Make sure your inserts reflect your brand identity.
These inserts have the added bonus of encouraging customers to review your product.
What’s the number one goal for sellers on Amazon? To sell, obviously. With this in mind consider that 82% of Amazon sales go through the Buy Box. You need excellent seller metrics to rank for this valuable piece of real estate. To get you one step closer to winning the Buy Box, you should invest in a repricing and inventory management tool. For repricing software, we trust Sellersnap and for inventory management, consider RestockPro.
The third-party software integrates into your Amazon platform. Then, they tell you exactly when to ship and how much, taking the guesswork out of your FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) management and making sure you are always in stock without being overstocked. Your repricing tools will automatically adjust the price of your products to ensure you win the Buy Box, which can be helpful in pricing wars between sellers.
Having out-of-stock inventory is the easiest way to tank your organic product rankings. If there’s nothing for consumers to buy, Amazon can’t place you first. When your products are back in stock, you’ll have to work harder to climb back to the ranking you obtained prior to going out of stock.
Your Amazon strategy should be multifaceted and frequently optimized. If you’re looking for more ways to improve your profits, maximize your revenue, and be prepared for Prime Day 2020, check out our TL;DW video of the Refresh your Amazon Strategy webinar and discover how you can watch the full webinar and get the bonus downloads.
Additionally, if you want to learn more Amazon strategies or to make sure you are on the right track? Learn more about Amazon Consulting.
What I have is a malevolent curiosity - I do tend to take a different perspective.
