019: Five Quick Wins on Amazon You Can Use Right Now

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to the Brand Fortress HQ podcast for another Tactics Tuesday episode, and today we're going to be talking about five quick wins. You know, a lot of the conversations we have are kind of long term strategies for building a brand, fortifying a brand. Today we're going to do something a little bit different, where we're going to talk about some quick wins that we see right now on Amazon that a lot of people may not be aware of. So with that, I'm going to actually start off with the first quick win that, mike, you actually brought to our group and kind of some of our conversations that we had, which is around product life cycle support. So this is a service from Amazon that has been around for about a year now, and there's been some other kind of third parties that have offered this in the past, but really what they've done is Amazon has opened this up to pretty much any brand registered seller where you can provide documentation to your product. So, especially if you know, it's kind of a product where people need to read the owner's manual in order to understand how to use the product or how to get the best out of the product, or that has a high return percentage. This is a great way that not only can you provide that documentation, but you can also provide an email and a phone number to where customers can contact you directly and that information is right by where they click on in order to return the product. So the idea here is kind of twofold as far as when. The first is that you know anything you can do to prevent returns is a big win when we're talking about Amazon. And the second is is that when these customers reach out to you, you're able to build that connection and have a relationship with those customers. You know when they send you an email looking for support, or you know if you have a phone number reaching out to you via phone in order to solve a problem for them. It just really helps kind of build that brand rapport and that connection with a customer well, at the same time preventing return. So we do have a playbook for this that I'll link to in the show notes, but this is something that is completely free to use if you're brand registered and it's pretty simple where you just essentially send Amazon an email. They send you kind of a template in order to fill out and there's a couple of different levels for this and you can be up and running fairly quickly. I will say that Amazon did close down new registrants to this for the Q4 holidays, but now they're opening it back up after pretty much starting in February. So just be aware that if you're, you know, listening to this in Q4, this program might be on pause because of kind of the manning and capabilities that Amazon has, but this is an amazing program to take advantage of. Anything else that you want to kind of mention about this program, matt or Mike?

Speaker 2: 2:47

I would just say, like we have taken advantage of this. It does seem to be reducing our return rate, and it was very easy, like the process was really as simple as you described it. So we dropped an email to Amazon and that email is in the playbook. So, and then they responded back. I will say that, of any of any department that I've ever dealt with at Amazon, this department was by far the best you know in terms of you know, feeling like they knew what they were talking about. They were actually paying attention to us. You know, like they were actually working on our behalf, trying to solve the problem. So they basically tell you, you know, what information that you can, you know, provide, and there's, as you said, john, there's multiple levels to that. So you can either just provide documentation, you can provide videos, you can link to your website, you can provide an email address and a phone number, so all of those direct contact options and they're walked through that process. So you actually, when you provide them with documentation, some of the documentation that you provide is actually documentation that they can view right on Amazon, and it's just like a chatbot flow, essentially, where they choose. Okay, I'm having trouble with this product, I don't know how to assemble it or I don't know how to this or I don't know how to that. You basically tell them what are the things that customers typically ask about the product and then what is the answer, and they implement that in a chatbot flow and then if it becomes something where they still have questions, then it just, you know, forwards them on to your support information. It took us, I think, two to maybe three weeks in completion, you know, to have this actually live on Amazon for all of our products. So I really didn't take that long and I think maybe it took a week back and forth, maybe a little less, between us and that department, and then it was just a two week window once we completed our stuff before it went live?

Speaker 1: 4:47

Yeah, and I would. The other thing I would add here is I would encourage people to look at their voice of the customer for your returns, because in there it'll actually, in a number of cases, actually give you the reason why the customer is returning it. So if you're looking at, hey, what do I put in that FAQs, or do I have everything covered in my FAQs, that's a great place to go in order to see those things that maybe you didn't think of, that are causing returns for your customers that can be addressed with this additional support.

Speaker 2: 5:17

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 5:20

Matt, anything you want to add on that before we move on to brand healer promotions.

Speaker 3: 5:25

No, I mean, it's such a cool program that has has the potential to negate negative reviews before they happen. So definitely, definitely something to sign up for right away if it's available to you.

Speaker 1: 5:39

All right. So number 200 list, like I mentioned, is brand tailored promotions. Now, this is something that we've used with the number of clients and seen good results out of it. Are you guys, are either of you guys using brand tailored promotions and if so, what are you guys seeing from it?

Speaker 2: 5:56

Yeah, we've. We've seen actually very good results. Now they offer a lot of different categories of potential customers. You know that you can advertise to. We're getting the most bang from our buck out of basically two of them. I think I'm trying to remember what they categorize them, as I can't remember the categories. But essentially out of I mean there's like 10 different categories that you can advertise to. You know, like, for you know people who visited your listing and in order, or you know customers who are high ticket customers of yours so they bought your products and they typically buy large amounts. You know you can advertise to them. You know there's all different ways that you can skin that cat with, with grand tailored promotions, but the two that have the largest, let's say, potential audience size for the for the category, those are the two that are working best for us. So we're getting you know, like we're only offering a 10% discount. We're going to test it a little bit higher than that, but we're getting pretty good response out of those. I think we added I don't know maybe 20,000 in sales. You know, in a month, you know, maybe actually maybe less than that. I think we ran it for like two weeks and we picked up like 20 grand, so it was. It was pretty significant.

Speaker 3: 7:13

So what does that look like on the side of the consumer? Is it, is it like a coupon that only shows up to the people that fit, whatever the the bucket is that you decided to advertise for? So it shows up in the search results.

Speaker 1: 7:26

Yep, exactly so. Only customers that kind of Amazon identifies in those different buckets. And I mean just giving idea of what those different buckets are. I mean, mike, you touched on some of them, which the first one that's probably most interesting of folks, is the abating cart. So someone that has put the product in their cart but, for whatever reason, didn't buy, and the minimum is a 10% coupon. Obviously you can offer you know, amazon, let you offer more than that, but let's say that somebody abandoned that cart. Well, now, the next time they go in and they, you know, see your product either in the search results or look at your listing, they're going to see the option in order to clip that 10% coupon.

Speaker 3: 8:07

And now this is something that you have to have a minimum number of people in an audience before you can utilize it, right, like there has to be a thousand people that have, in a certain amount of time, put, put something in your cart and not purchased, is that right?

Speaker 1: 8:22

Yeah, that's correct. So that is something that has changed, I think, in the last couple of months. So it used to be that up until a couple of months ago and this program is fairly new you get it no matter what. You didn't need a minimum audience size, but Amazon did change that. And I think a thousand per kind of category is the minimum that you need. But there's a number of different categories. So there's, you know we talked about a band and cart. There's also brand followers. So if you have a thousand or more brand followers, you could, you know, theoretically, run this to your brand followers, pretty much evergreen at all times. And then you know you've got high spenders, you've got potential new customers promising, you know kind of based on Amazon data. It doesn't give you a whole lot of you know kind of fine tune controls, but it is a pretty good process of I would think you know, kind of like what you mentioned, mike, of incremental sales, of hey, let's put you know a 10% coupon out there and we can see incremental sales based on these different audiences and really based on your brand goals of maybe you don't want to target you know band and carts, but you do want to target, you know, your at risk customers or your high spend customers.

Speaker 2: 9:35

I also like the fact that it's just super easy, quite frankly, like, yeah, there's not a lot of granularity to it, but I mean literally like a minute and a half, you know or less, and you've got a campaign started and you can just keep running them. You know, I mean, if it's successful, you can just run another one right on the backside of the first one. So it does make things very easy. It's a couple of clicks, man, you know, and maybe you're generating, you know, thousands of dollars in sales and that's a good one.

Speaker 3: 10:02

Do they have to be searching? Do they have to be searching in a particular category to even see the coupon, though? Like, do they have to be searching for keywords that drive sales for your product in order to see your listing and the search results and then end up seeing that coupon?

Speaker 1: 10:18

I don't think it's really keyword triggered. I think it's more of activity triggered. So just to give you an idea of the different categories and these aren't all of them, but the ones that I can see right now is at risk customers who have purchased or haven't purchased recently, nor frequently with varied spend. At risk customers can be engaged through discounts, promotions and incentives. Bayon and Cart were pretty familiar with brand followers, high spend customers. So those are your top 5% potential new customers. And then promising Are the categories I can see right now. I think that there's four or five more in addition to that. So I think it's really more based on activity of the Amazon chopper as opposed to keywords.

Speaker 2: 11:02

I think maybe what Matt is asking, though, is like in terms of visibility, like I don't think it's meaning in terms of who is potentially in the category, but how do they see it Like? Are they only going to see it if they search for something where your product would show up in the list, or is there some other way that Amazon might be displaying that offer to them that doesn't require them to be searching within your category or for one of your keywords, or something. Yeah exactly.

Speaker 3: 11:32

So if I was searching let's say I'm trying to think of an example, of a good example, but let's say I was searching for some sort of an eye cream, but I was only searching for that eye cream once. I ended up putting it in my cart but haven't, and then I've never searched for eye cream again does that mean that I'll never see that coupon, or will it show up the next time I'm searching for a pull rake or something like that? Like I can't imagine that being the case, because I've never seen something that out of the ordinary and search results while I'm searching. So yeah, like if I never search for anything in the eye cream category ever again, that means I'll just never see that coupon.

Speaker 1: 12:11

The short answer is I don't know, because I don't think it's fully clear kind of how and why Amazon, or where Amazon shows based on this discount code. My best guess is that your product is gonna show up where it normally would show up. So some of that to keep in mind is let's take, for example, if it's a sponsored product ad that you came in and you added to your cart but for whatever reason, you decided to abandon that product in your cart. Well, sponsored product ads actually have some retargeting capability built into them where you might see that same ad a couple of days later because Amazon saw that you clicked on it so you could search again. Let's say that you're searching for bicycle tires but you added that eye cream in. That eye cream might show up again in a number of different places showing that coupon code, even if you search for something completely differently. But it's probably not gonna be as prominent as if you were putting in a keyword that was related to the product that you abandoned the cart.

Speaker 3: 13:18

Got it okay.

Speaker 1: 13:23

All right, so I just wanna put some that's another one that I feel like gets missed a lot. That is fairly new, that there's a lot of benefit to Amazon's product. And then the next item on here is, I think, probably one of our favorite things to talk about because I think it's been around for a long time. Amazon has actually recently made some big improvements to it and there's a lot of benefits from it that I think a lot of sellers aren't aware of, and that is virtual bundles. Mike or Matt, do you wanna start out with kind of why we love virtual bundles so much for Amazon listing pages. Yeah, I'd say, I think, one of the, obviously one of the great things is real estate.

Speaker 3: 14:11

Yeah, I was gonna say the exact same thing that you're saying.

Speaker 2: 14:14

Yeah, it's just real estate. You know I mean like it. Just it takes up space. You know, like I mean, we can't harp in this enough. You know Any mechanism that you can use to grab more real estate on Amazon. Especially if it's a free way to grab that real estate, which were virtual bundles are, then you should take advantage of it, and they take up a significant portion of the page. So if you're not doing it, you need to, and I'll also say this like I was actually looking through my reports Just the other day and of course you're out. You're allowed now Correct me if I. I know you can run sponsored display ads to To virtual bundles. I'm not sure Can you run sponsored brands or anything like that.

Speaker 1: 14:55

I know you can't get a sponsored product around so you could run sponsored brands 100%. I have to display, really okay, that one I was.

Speaker 2: 15:04

I have just play ads that are going to virtue, that are going to bundles.

Speaker 1: 15:08

Yeah, so I know so you can run sponsored brand.

Speaker 2: 15:11

That's kind of where the origin of virtual bundles came from, and then, Really well like our row, as on on the ads that are on those sponsored display, ads that are going to our virtual bundles, our Sky-high compared to our row, as for most other products and most other advertisements that we do on Amazon.

Speaker 3: 15:31

Hmm, I've heard recently that you can also. You can also target them a sponsored product ads, but only if you only buy with using bulk upload. That was just on helium 10 podcast not too long ago, where this the, the guest, had actually found that out by accident but was able to duplicate it. So when you're creating campaigns in the with a bulk upload, you can target them with sponsored product ads.

Speaker 1: 15:56

Yeah, and I think the other new thing that's been rolled out that I want to make sure that People are aware of is is that you can now have a unique title, a unique main image and unique Secondary images for virtual bundles. So if you're looking at, maybe you've got multiple audiences that your product speaks to. You know different target customer segments. You can create a virtual bundles that speaks specifically to that customer segment as far as the main image, the title, the whole you know kind of package to really niche down To that particular target segment. So they may not be a huge portion, maybe they're only 10%, but you can create a bundle, you know, for that kind of small portion of your segment and serve you know that portion of your customers without having to, you know completely re-champ, you know kind of Mix up your, your main listing. So that's a great way to speak specifically to maybe what's maybe a smaller portion of your audience. But you know, I see that all the time where you know there's maybe a small portion that you know they're they're very loyal and you convert a lot of them. They just don't have a lot of scale to them. So this is a great way to speak directly to kind of those smaller customer segments.

Speaker 2: 17:09

Well, and those virtual bundles do show up as listings in search, you know like. So Oftentimes it's more difficult to get them to get prominent placement in search, but they do get placement. I like we have some virtual bundles that now that we've generated, because they get their own review profile. So for anybody who doesn't understand this little like virtual bundles like you're just taking Most people know this, but you're just taking any two or more products that you sell currently separately, they're at Amazon warehouses in separate packages and you just simply create this bundle out of those packages but it becomes its own asin. So it has, you know like, it has its own review profile. It has, you know, it's own. You know it is a listing that will show up in search. It can be advertised, you know, using, you know, display or sponsored brands. So now that some of those products of ours, those virtual bundles have, have gotten a fairly significant review profile behind them, they are actually starting to show up in the search results in a more prominent location. So, again, more real estate, you know you have more products available to sell for the similar, for similar keywords, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 18:16

I think for anybody who's listening, if you're brand registered and you're not running virtual bundles right now, this is definitely one of those things. Again, you don't have to spend a lot of time on it. It probably take you less than 10 minutes to set up, to get a rocking rolling and at bare minimum, you're gonna grab more real estate on your listings. And if you spend a little bit more time with it, you can really tailor them to you know some of your smaller audiences and see a lot of incremental sales Come from using virtual bundles.

Speaker 2: 18:42

Yeah, and just to clarify on that, when you do create that virtual bundle, Whatever products you put into that bundle, amazon automatically gives you in the process of creating that listing. It shows you all of the images that you're using. For all of those independent you know Products and you can just use those to build out a virtual bundle listing. You don't have to create new images. You know we do to some degree, but not to the degree that we could like. We haven't completely tailored any of them like John suggesting. So if you're looking to create one, the reason it's so fast is because you can just basically select images you know from your other products. You probably want to create a new main image because it has multiple products in it, but all the secondary images can just come from the other listings.

Speaker 1: 19:32

Yeah, I think it pulls in all the bullets as well. So, I mean, creating them is super easy. You can always, like you said, you can always come back, you know, in a couple of weeks or whatever, and really optimize that for a certain audience, or however you want to do it For sure, all right. So let's move on to the next one, which is Amazon growth opportunities. This is one that I really like in the sense of, if you're thinking about, you know, you're like hey, I've done everything on, you know, this listing or my account. You know what are those things that you know. What else can I do in order to, you know, squeeze a little bit more juice out of my listings, my Amazon account? I feel like this is one of those areas where it's good to just check. I mean, anytime I get a recommendation from Amazon directly, I always take it with a grain of salt, because some of them are fantastic and some of them, quite frankly, suck. So, you know, this tool, I would take that same thing. You know, take them with a grain of salt. But there's a lot of things in here where it'll tell you like hey, make sure you have, you know, this doesn't have a plus content or you know this has a you know, some sort of other issue that, especially if you have a lot of listings to keep track of, this is a great way to see kind of where the holes are in some of your listings that you know maybe aren't your hero, your sidekick listings, but still could benefit from just some quick tweaks.

Speaker 2: 20:52

And the nice thing, I think, is that when you go through that list, number one, it obviously doesn't take that long. You know you're just looking at what Amazon's already recommending to you and you throw this one out, take a look at this one, you know whatever, but but it's, you know. Some of the things that it's recommending don't necessarily take that much time and again, like you said, if you've got a long skew list or something you know, maybe you're not checking all those listings regularly or you've forgotten that you never did this. Or you know, maybe it's a new attribute that shows up in that category that you haven't put anything into and Amazon says, hey, you should fill that attribute category. So some of those changes are very quick changes that won't take you hardly any time at all and you never know what kind of effect that might have on your listings prominence in search. You know maybe there's a particular attribute that if you don't have it there you're not getting as good search profile as you would otherwise.

Speaker 1: 21:39

So yeah, absolutely All right. So we're going to move on to our last one, which is personally my favorite, which is Amazon experiments. And the reason why this is my favorite is because, well, two reasons. One is because it's so low risk in order to A B test with your product of. You know, even if you write the world's worst title in the Amazon experiment, you can see within a week or two that, first of all, only 50% of your traffic is going to version A or version B, so it's not hurting your sales a ton. And then the other thing kind of the flip side of that is is that you know, even if you're able to increase your conversion rate by two or 3%, that can mean thousands of dollars in additional sales without spending anything additional on ads. So you know, people are looking at how do I grow, you know kind of the bottom line in my profit margins and keyword ranking and that type of stuff. Amazon experiments is really a great way to do that and they've expanded this tool. You know, I really think that the still the best bang for your buck. If you're like, hey, I've got limited time and what do I optimize Is still title and main image. But if you're curious about, like, hey, what's that impact going to have, for you know secondary images. You can test secondary images now in men or in that Amazon experiments, um, and you can also test you know your A plus content as well, so you can do you know a good portion of your listing, test different aspects of it in a way that is actually valid Um. In addition to that, what I like about this is when we start looking at main images is when you submit a main image to A V test, amazon's going to approve it before this test starts. So if there's any sort of issue with that main image, you kind of avoid that issue where you feel like, hey, I think this might be kind of a gray area and I don't want to get my listing suspended and lose a bunch of sales. Amazon experiments can be a good way to kind of put that. Through that filter to know, hey, is Amazon going to have a problem with this main image or is you know this change that maybe is a little ambiguous of as far as the Amazon rules Um, going to be okay with Amazon? Anything else that uh experiences that matter, mike, you guys want to add to this?

Speaker 2: 23:54

I think, a couple of things that I would add. One is I'm nearly positive that I saw the other day in that interface that you can now do. I believe it would be called multivariate testing, so you can test multiple aspects of your listing at the same time. Um, now, I would argue that probably most brands probably don't want to do that. I would generally separate that out. But if you have a product that's getting high volume, like it's really high volume product, you might be able to do that testing and move a little quicker through your iterations. If there's multiple things about that listing that you want to test, or there's ways that you want to test where I want to change the main image and the title, because there's a certain aspect of the listing that I want to test and I want to highlight it in both, you know, and so you would be able to test in that way. Um, so that's the one thing that I would mention. We haven't tried it yet, but something to pay attention to. Um. the the other thing that I guess I was going to say is that when you're running those tests, the re one of the reasons I think that John mentioned that you know you really like main image and title testing Is because and we've talked about this previously and that is there's more of a flywheel present there in terms of the effect that it can have on your listing. So, like when you do a test uh, let's see you test your image right and you were saying, okay, maybe you get a 2% conversion rate increase, right. Well, if you look at that as just you know, flat in other words. Um, so, however many people came to my listing this this week, right, if that same number of people came to my listing next week at this new conversion rate, I would get two to 3% more. You know, I'd get that many more sales right, which is true and that's valuable. That's money. But what it doesn't take into account is chances are, if that image affected your conversion rate, there's a decent chance it might have also increased your click-through rate. And those two things because they affect your search ranking, because they're part of the algorithm. That means there's a good chance that you might actually have better search placement now than you had before. That very small increase in conversion rate, which means now more people are actually seeing your listing because more people are seeing it in search results. So there can be a much, much greater compounding effect, you know, than what you see in the actual Amazon numbers, because that experiment isn't telling you what changes you might have in terms of your search placement or anything else. It's only testing, you know. It's only showing you what you tested essentially. So don't forget that there's other compounding effects that may happen downstream and the combination of those things could be way more than just that 2% conversion rate increase.

Speaker 1: 26:44

Yeah, that's a great point and that's why this is one of my favorite tools. So I think this is a great place to wrap for this episode. I do just want to, you know, recap. So, if we're looking at those five quick wins for folks that are listening, the first is that product lifecycle support and, like I said, we'll have a PDF that has the email address talks a little bit about the program. The second one is the brand Taylor promotions easy coupons to set up for specific portions, the audience to drive some additional incremental sales, virtual bundles one of the things that we love talking about because there are so many benefits of it. Number four is Amazon growth opportunities. So you can see, you know kind of, where the holes are according to Amazon and some of your listings, and find some easy fixes there. And then you know we just talked about number five, which is those Amazon experiments. So everybody's listening. I just really encourage you to take a look at those and pick some of those quick wins. There are things that you can implement, you know, usually in less than 10 minutes, and have an impact on your business. So pick one and I think you'll be impressed with the results you see out of it and thanks for listening.