How Can My Brand Generate More Sales on Amazon?
We have all been there one way or another when we signed up for an Amazon seller central account. We have the right motivation. We want to sell products on Amazon. We want people to buy it. And in the long run, hopefully, our earnings will be enough to expand to our other life endeavors.
It should be that simple, right?
Unfortunately, like all other things in life, simplicity packs complexity. One of the oh so simple things can be selling on Amazon. But you don’t just get a space to sell your products. It can also involve taking all the will out of you just to sell one product.
Let’s face it. We once expected to sell a product the minute we put the listing out. But we didn’t and now, we try to scramble through the tips and tricks on how we could make our product the next bestseller on Amazon.
But first, let’s take a breath. Let’s understand that selling products is a journey. Top-selling products aren’t born overnight. They are made, tested, and reviewed thoroughly.
The thing about our product listing is, it can always get some love. There is always room for improvements and sometimes, these tweaks make all the difference that reflects with our sales.
Below are some helpful tips and tricks you can adjust when selling your product on Amazon. You can apply these changes and see what happens to your sales and customer feedback. We will definitely start with something simple, so you can always take this advice with a grain of salt.
Your Listing Needs Some Serious Copywriting
No matter what you believe, you need some good copywriting. It’s not just because you are dealing with words, or you know the ingredients of the product but because your customers need to know what’s in it for them.
They don’t need to completely hear why the coffee was coarse ground or fine ground. They need to know what’s in it for them whether it’s coarse, medium, or fine. Does it have something to do with their coffee brewer? Imagine that your customers own one of these things. What coffee grind is best for pour-over, coffee maker, or french press?
When you are writing copy, always think of your customers and what they are like. Write as if you are talking to them. And most importantly, if you still can’t get the point of good copywriting, you must highlight the product’s benefits.
If you cannot write copy for yourself, you can always hire somebody else to do it for you. In fact, a copywriter will not have to come up with a lot of material to form a product listing. They can always refer to the products’ descriptions.
Write it like your customer can’t live without it.
Rank with keywords, especially long-tail keywords
Now that we accept the importance of copywriting, it’s time to reintroduce ourselves to keyword research. You can say that keyword research is the other side of the copywriting coin. We need keyword research as much as writing a copywriting that persuades our customers into buying.
How to properly do keyword research, you might ask? A simple and quick way to do it is to go to Amazon.com itself and type in what your customers will normally use to search for your product. As you may know, the Amazon search bar already gives us several keyword suggestions.
It is no accident that these keywords are showing. This only means that these keywords are what customers normally search for. If you are not using these keywords for your product listing, then you are seriously missing out!
On the other hand, if you are not also using long-tail keywords, then read further as it can be a gold mine of customer traffic.
Long-tail keywords are very specific keywords. Instead of leaning on very generalized keywords, digital marketers use a long-tail keywords approach to target customers with specific needs. You can read more about this on the link above.
So how do long-tail keywords affect Amazon searches? As you know customers nowadays do not just use the search bar, to say, look for coffee. They often type in ‘coffee bean medium grind’ or ‘3-in-1 coffee latte.” Sure, there are customers who will mindlessly search for ‘coffee’ but how much are you losing if you are not targeting the customers who know what they want?
To look for long-tail keywords, you can simply repeat the method above or utilize some Amazon-specialized apps like Helium10 or Jungle Scout.
The pricing of your product must be competitive
Here’s where dirty tactics are going on. If you can afford to be a lousy competitor who wants to take down other sellers, then by all means, you should stop right now. However, if you want to know how to utilize pricing to be competitive instead of just doing black hat tips that’ll get you banned, stick around.
We all know that pricing is everything. It is one of the main decision factors why a customer decides to check out your product. It is also why Amazon often puts sellers who have low prices on the buy box.
So where do you stand when it comes to lowering your price? This is the tricky part. Lower your price to the bottom and you lose in revenue even if customers want to buy all your products. On the other hand, try and make it higher and you’ll watch your competitors rack up the sales all on their own.
If you are selling a product that stands out (more reviews, special attributes, etc) a premium price may be warranted. However, most of the time we will need to adjust the price and then track your sales rank as we look to be competitive with other sellers.
Run PPC campaigns and beat them at their game
Here we are in the ads game where all is fair if you have a budget and good search terms. Advertising can be a strategy to be used to get in front of more buyers, get more sales and therefore, improve your rank, which gets even more sales.
Similar to Google, Amazon wants you to check for products that were paid to be promoted. Because of this, many new product listings are in the sponsored area pushing above organic searches to get more clicks and eventually, sales.
Amazon sellers think that when you have money to burn, it’s easy to run PPC campaigns. This is definitely wrong on so many levels.
Sure, having an ample amount of PPC budget gets you ahead. However, mismanaging your money for PPC campaigns is equally devastating and will put you at a disadvantage.
This is where tracking needs to be emphasized. Simply running PPC will not do you any good. You have to see what search terms you should put your budget more on and what search terms you should discard.
Getting the Advertising Cost of Sale (ACOS) gives you a clearer picture of how you are doing when it comes to sales and advertising.
Give your customers offers they can’t resist
Deals are a few motivations here on the Amazon jungle!
This is not just because your competitors are doing it but because it is a common human instinct to go for something that presents an opportunity to save a couple of dollars. It is also why customers would rather go for FBA sellers that offer free shipping than merchant-fulfilled shipping that could add extra costs.
Get that product for a lightning deal for your product, set up a buy one get one free discount, or offer a social media promo code to let your customers feel more ‘exclusive’ than the rest of the buyers!
These deals can become shiny promotions on your products without even trying so hard. Promotions are always used to get high velocity on your sales. Do it right and you might not believe what happens next when you log in to your seller central and see your sales trend.
You can check a complete list of Amazon promotions and how you can do them here.
CONCLUSION
In retrospect, the most common mistake rookie Amazon sellers make is believing there is a shortcut for your product to sell. We are inevitably selling products that demand marketing ideas. And the peak marketing advice from us who have been doing this for quite some time, is it is all about testing.
Product copy and listing are changed every now and then, split testing when it comes to title variations and bullet point changes, photos are taken to reflect customers’ needs or a routine in different promotions. All of these are trials and errors we take to get to where we are now.
One final piece of advice is not to give up. There may be tips and tricks, but there is no shortcut.