023: Discover and Master Geo Ranking & Old School Mail Mastery

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the brand fortress HQ podcast. Today We've got another Amazon tactics Tuesday, and we're talking about kind of the combination of a couple of different things. So we're gonna be talking on this tactics Tuesday about not only geo ranking, which we had an amazing episode with Eddie Wheeler on. So if you, you know, haven't listened to that, I highly recommend that you go back and listen to that, because Eddie talks quite a bit about geo ranking. We're gonna talk about that in combination with actually old school male in order to essentially juice your Geo ranking. And, of course, one of the other things that I would encourage folks to take a look at and there's gonna be a link to it as well Is there after purchase funnel. If you're like, hey, where do I get these addresses from? You know we talk about that in our after purchase funnel course that we offer right now for free, along with some of our previous episodes, where we talk about, you know, how you build that funnel and how you build a list. So, with that said, mike, I'm gonna turn it over to you to talk about how you can use something like old school male in order to Geo ranking, maybe even just starting with what the heck is geo ranking for somebody that maybe didn't hear that interview with Eddie.

Speaker 2: 1:04

Sure, yeah. So To to just simplify it, you know, really to the bare bones, geo ranking really just refers to the fact that you know. A lot of sellers assume that you know If they go to Amazon and they do a search for a particular keyword and then they look to see where their product shows up, that's that is their ranking right, like it's a global ranking in some way, and that's just not true. The reality is you know if you search for your product and you and you can test this very easily if you just open a private window, pull up the Amazon you know marketplace and Then up in the upper left hand corner, if you're in a private window, so Amazon doesn't know if you are you would have to enter in what zip code you want any products that you might order. Ship to right, so choose zip codes from around the country, choose, you know, for quadrants. You know and pick, you know Four different zip codes right, put in the zip code and then search for any specific you know major key phrase for a particular product that you sell, and you will find that in all four of those zip codes and you can do this for 10, 20, 100 zip codes All of them will have different ranking for that very exact same keyword and that exact same product. And you would be surprised and as I was, when I first realized that this was a thing Just how to spare out those rankings can be. I mean, we have rankings that are like number two, number three in some regions and in another region were number 15 For the very same cat. You know, very same keyword, very same problem. So, and you can imagine, obviously, how much differential there is between the, the number of sales that are going to come in from a search and a region where you're ranked number three versus where you rank number 15. So geo ranking is an actual thing, it's something you should be paying attention to and, more importantly, it's not just a thing to be able to see and recognize that it happens. But you can actually change it, you can adjust it, you can utilize that to your advantage, and that's what this tactic is all about is basically Finding an old-school method to juice your rankings in those areas where you're not ranking so well At very low cost, and it's something that a lot of other sellers aren't going to be doing. So you have an advantage there.

Speaker 1: 3:25

Yeah, I think that that's a. We're starting to hear more and more about you know ranking, especially now that you can target. So you can target customers, and this is very new that's come out through Sponsored display. So if you've had access to DSP before, you have actually had an opportunity to geo target For the brands that maybe aren't big enough in order to, quite yet, you know, invest in sponsored or, excuse me, in DSP. Then sponsored display is really, at least on the Amazon platform, your first bud at the Apple. But then, of course, you know Google has geo rent or, at you know, geo targeting capability, and so does Facebook. So, with that said, before we dive into kind of you know this, what I think is a very smart method for targeting people, let's talk a little bit about you know, in our notes before the show, you talked about geo graphic demand for your product. You know where you see that demand at versus delivery time. So do you have any insights to how sellers should think about Areas that they should target?

Speaker 2: 4:30

Sure, so that there's a few kind of key things here that are relevant. So, when you're thinking about this idea of geo ranking, the reason for the discrepancy In my mind and and if you listen to Eddie talk, you know seems to be this way is most of the parameters that Amazon's algorithm pays attention to in order to determine where to rank you are Global. They're universal. So, in other words, you know your, you know your click-through rates and your conversion rates to a degree are global, although they will be different Geographically, and it's possible that that comes into play here. But also, you know, all of the other things that Amazon takes into account Are more global in nature, so they affect all of your keywords everywhere at once, right? The difference here is there's a couple of factors that come into play that are very geographically targeted and that affect that ranking, and one of them would be demand. So, if you think about it, especially if you're using FBA, right, amazon is going to pay very close attention to where is there actually demand for your specific product? And if they determine or if the algorithm I mean, more correctly determines that there isn't demand for your product in a particular region, then why, first of all, would Amazon rank you for that keyword in that region. If they don't feel there's demand right there, why would they put you there? They don't think anybody wants your product, so they're going to rank other products that they do think people want. But the second thing that comes into play there is if they don't believe that there's demand for your product in that region, why would they shift your inventory to that region? Right, because they're distributing your inventory, like they tell you where to ship it, but then from there. We all know they do a lot of FC Transfer from there to various different warehouses around the US why would they transfer your inventory to a region that they don't believe there's demand for your product? They're not going to, they don't send it there. So what happens is it's a, it's a, it's a double flywheel, right, amazon? If Amazon doesn't think there's demand, then they don't shift inventory there. Well, if there's no inventory there, then what happens to your delivery times? For anybody who's in that region? Your delivery times are longer, and they're longer than your competitors, and Amazon does take into account for ranking. I've been able to verify this. I've checked this for numerous keywords for numerous products that we have, and it is almost without fail. If we check from that geo ranking perspective, when we check the ones where we're ranked lower versus where we're ranked higher, our delivery times are extended out further in those places where we're not ranked as well, and most all of the products that rank better than us have a sooner delivery time than our product. So if Amazon doesn't think there's demand and so therefore they're not going to rank you, and because they don't think there's demand, they don't send your inventory there, so delivery times are longer. Now you have two distinct parameters that Amazon clearly uses in their algorithm for ranking, both of them working against you. So your ranking is lower. So how do you fix that? The simplest way is to directly tell Amazon that there actually is demand for your product in that zip code or in that region. Right, because as soon as you tell them there's demand, now, number one, they want to rank you and number two, they know if they're going to rank you, well then they better send inventory there, because if people want it and they click on it and they want to order it there, better be inventory to ship to them and they should get it there fast. So as soon as you tell Amazon there is actually demand in that region for your product, your ranking starts to improve. They send inventory to that region, which also begins to improve your ranking. And once that ranking improves, what happens? Not only do you start getting sales volume, so your global BSR is going to improve and your sales velocity is improving, which is another factor for ranking. In addition to that, your click-through rate and conversion rate in that region, which of course is also going to affect your global click-through and conversion rate, is going to go up, because, again, if your delivery times are better, then people are going to be more likely to click on your product and more likely to buy your product because they want to get the product sooner. So all of those parameters that affect your ranking are now getting juiced by that one single thing that you did, which was to simply tell Amazon we have demand for our product in that region. So the question then becomes what are the mechanisms that are available to you to actually juice that and tell Amazon people want our product there? How do you do that? And there's multiple ways that you can do it. One of them is the strategy that I want to teach now, but of course, you can use Facebook, or you can use Google or you can use any number of ways that you could potentially choose. That algorithm you could even use if you have a current list of customers and you happen to have their addresses. So the mechanism that we use for collecting customer data is warranties and they give us their address. 90% of our registers give us their address. So we could literally just use our list and segment it out by addresses and by zip codes and we could connect with those customers and point them to our product and get very high conversion rates on that for a specific zip code, so that we could juice that. It's not what I'm talking about today, but it is an option.

Speaker 1: 10:03

So, okay, there's a bunch of different you know mechanisms that you talked about for reaching out and again I think of what's really important to double click on there is that you may have areas in the country where your product isn't selling because the delivery time is so slow and therefore you rank a lot lower. So it's kind of a chicken and egg problem Right for sellers where you know. Let's say that you know they sell really well in California but they don't sell very well in Florida. It may just be that there wasn't enough momentum for ever reason in Florida to where because the fulfillment center is so far away that they don't fulfill that product doesn't actually reach the customer for three to four days. So the conversion rate is a lot lower and as a result, their ranking, like you said, they might be third in California but you know, 40th in Florida. When we look at that, Exactly what we've seen like.

Speaker 2: 10:56

I mean, we sell, we sell pool tools, right. So you know, it never occurred to me that there was actually a difference, you know, in terms of year ranking and you know this time of year, you know, I mean, we're talking, it's February, right? So nobody but Florida, southern California, southern Texas, like nobody else, has their pools open, basically. So we should be something out. All of Florida right now is essentially warm enough where people could have their pools open and likely, you know, they're using them, right. But all of Florida, we have worse rankings in Florida than we have in California. We just recently were going through those numbers and looking that and I was, quite frankly, shocked at just how much differential there was, you know, in our rankings. And so therefore, clearly we're not selling that much in Florida and I went back and check we're not. I mean, we should be selling gobs of product in Florida compared to anywhere else and we're not. So we have to choose that mechanism. The simplest way to do that is just telling Amazon hey, there's people here who want our product, and so you know, that's, that's what we're doing.

Speaker 1: 12:04

Okay, so then, one of the things we first started talking about this, we talked about a number of different ways that you can kind of geotarget. One of them that's fairly new, that is actually now you know part of anybody who has an Amazon ad account that they can use through sponsored display, and then you know Facebook. Well, let's take DSP first, if you have that available to you, and then Facebook in Google. Now, what's the what interests you in kind of using old school mailers in or as a, you know, marketing tool for geo ranking?

Speaker 2: 12:38

So now this might not work for every brand, alright. So that's the first thing. Now, it doesn't mean you couldn't use direct mail. I'm using a very specific type of direct mail. That's a very inexpensive option. Going a different route would be a little bit more pricey, but it doesn't mean you couldn't do it. You very likely could do it cost effectively, but it might take a little bit more iteration and a little bit more split testing to to get it to the point where at least you were breaking even on it. So this is at the front end of this conversation. The one thing that I want to mention is because, at the moment, the only thing that we're really talking about is juicing the algorithm, right? So we don't actually need a lot of sales to go through In order to juice the algorithm with Amazon and convince them that there's demand there, okay, so in terms of the cost on this, even if you were losing money on this direct mail option that I'm going to suggest, it might very well still be worth it, because you might not necessarily have to do it for very long To juice the algorithm and convince Amazon that there's demand there, because once they start ranking you better, then it's a flywheel that's self promoting, right, like if you already know. This is an area where your product should sell. Well, once Amazon is giving you placement enough, then that it's going to sell. You don't really have to do it again necessarily, right? So even if you lost money on it, you'd probably be okay, and certainly if you break even, then that's ideal and better than that, you know, make some money on it, right? So that's why I say you probably could use a lot of different direct mail options, even the more expensive ones, and this probably would still work for you. But what I'm specifically referring to is something called every door direct mail, so it's something that US Postal Office offers. I had no idea that it was a thing, just found out about this recently, and it's an extremely inexpensive way to send out postcards to customers in a particular zip code. Okay, so in effect, you can actually target a specific zip code or multiple zip codes. You can actually just target a city and all of the zip codes within that city, or you can actually target a specific street if you wanted to. But in addition to that, they allow you to demographically target. So let's say you choose Verily Hills, you know 90210. Within that you could then demographically target individuals in that zip code and restrict it a little bit further so that you can go by age, you can go by income level, you can go. There's a few other categories that you can utilize to specifically, you know, whittle that down a little bit right, so you could be very specific in your targeting. Now, you know, this doesn't allow you to specifically target a particular individual who has a specific interest, right, which you can do with, you know, say, facebook or Google, by keyword, you know, and all that sort of thing. But what's interesting is let's take pools. So for us, we sell specifically to a subset of customers who generally are in ground pool owners. They're generally luxury pool owners. That's kind of our market, because we sell a very premium price product. So we already know that, right. So what we can basically do is there's a number of lists online Basically tell you in every single state, like you can choose any individual state and say, hey, what are the top 10, you know, most prosperous zip codes in that state, right? So if I find out what that is, let's say, you know, when I'm talking about Florida, I know all of Florida is almost without question, all year round is warm enough for people to have their pools open. The households that are going to have in ground pools in Florida are those households that have the greatest income right. So I could essentially target all of the high income zip codes in Florida and I know almost without question most of the individuals in those zip codes are going to have in ground pools. It's too hot not to have it. You have the money to have it. You're going to have an in ground pool. So I can almost guarantee you really good response rate in those particular zip codes because I know they're pool owners, specifically in ground pool owners. So for me I don't have to buy a list that specifically targets pool owners. I can just use the EDDM service, select those zip codes that I already know are ones that are going to be too well for us. I can even, if I want, specify a particular income bracket or whatever, but I don't really need to and I can send these mailers out. So the way that it works, you pick these zip codes or these regions right, you narrow it down by demographics and you essentially can send mail to those locations while including the postcard mailer cost and the cost to mail it through the post office 25 cents per customer. You can put your message in their hands and you can essentially put I mean really the entire message that you have on your Amazon listing you can have on this postcard, right. So they already have all of the information that they really probably need to make a decision about whether they think your product is something they would be interested in ordering. It's all on the postcard. You can use an attribution link through a QR code, so you're gonna get your 10% referral bonus back, right. And you can use with direct mail and with this EDADM service you can send out only like 500 mailers 250 mailers if you want. You can go really small and still get a pretty good rate on it. It's really it's not gonna be 25 cents per customer, but it's probably gonna be less than 40 cents per customer, even in very small numbers. So you can split test really fast Like. You can send this many out with this message. You can send this many out with this message. Maybe it's 500 of each right. It's not a very expensive mailing at 40 cents a piece, right. You test it which one gets the better response rate. You're tracking it with an attribution link, so you have tracking on it, right? So now you know which one gets the best one. Reiterate that again and just keep split testing that until you get a response rate that's good enough that you wanna move forward with a mass mailing, right? So split testing is really easy. It's very inexpensive. And for R, just to give you an idea of numbers, I did a calculation and essentially because we would get back the 10% referral fee and whatever. We already know what our average ticket is for an order through Amazon. It's like 70 bucks. We would essentially make about 50 plus $75. We would make 50 bucks per order that comes in on average on Amazon, because we're not paying advertising costs on Amazon, right. And we get the 10% referral fee back. So all we're paying for is the FBA fee, the COGS of the item, you know, and that 5% that's left of the referral fee. So we make like 50 bucks on that order, maybe 45, right? Well, think about it. If I can send a mailing out for 25 cents, you know, if I get one in 200 of them buys, I'm breaking even on that. And again, I don't have to really do any more than break even on it, because all I'm trying to do is juice it If I do better than break even if I double or triple you know the money. Well now it's just a money machine. I just keep mailing these out as much as I want, which I'm juicing the algorithm with all of these zip codes that I'm trying to juice anyways, and it's a profitable campaign. So I mean I get the best of both worlds I can actually be profitable and make money and just keep sending out mailers while at the same time telling Amazon these specific zip codes where you don't think I have demand. I do have demand.

Speaker 3: 20:27

So I want to call out a couple of things that makes it easy for you as a person that has a list of consumers that have bought your products before. You could layer in your data from people that I've purchased before you have 90% of their addresses. You could take the geo-rank data of where you're not, where you want more inventory based on you think sales are gonna happen there, and I mean you remove one part of a brand that has to like run a Facebook ad to figure out, like, where do my consumers come from? How do I target them? You know where they are. You know where these pockets of people are with in-ground pools. So, like that takes the knowledge that because you have that customer info, you can be a lot more targeted with your postcards that you send out, because you know that within this five mile radius we have 15 customers that have already bought our stuff. You know what I mean. So you can. But that's one of the many, many advantages of having a consumer list that you can layer on top of things like geo-rank data.

Speaker 2: 21:24

Yeah, absolutely. You don't have to buy the list. I mean, you already have the list, right, you have the data. So not only does it give you information to figure out where you're selling and where you're not selling right, but also it gives you that whole list of people that you could potentially mail. So there's a number of ways that you could skin this cap, you know, but EDDM is an interesting option just because it's so inexpensive. You know that if you can find a way to get in the mind of the consumer and figure out what are the zip codes in which my product probably should sell well, right, like how can I figure that out? Then you could use EDDM and just target those specific zip codes if you know you're not ranking well there, and juice that algorithm. And, of course, even if you don't want to tie it to geo-ranking like, this is still a strategy that would potentially be useful, because if you can continue to iterate that until it's profitable and maybe extremely profitable, who cares about the geo-ranking Like? Just start broadcasting mailings anywhere that you think you can actually get sales and it's a money printing machine.

Speaker 1: 22:27

Yeah, and I think, matt, I want to go back to you know what you were saying there, because the other thing and I don't know if this is you know what you intended with this is that you can, if you start looking at what areas those customers are in and you start looking at like when they bought their product. Now, for you might this may not apply, but for other people that are listening, in the sense of, if you know, you know somebody buys that product every three months or six months, or maybe it's a you know a durable goods where they buy it every three years. Well, you know, if you've got that data, you have a well-built after purchase funnel. You can start sending them you know a mail or 18 months in when they're gonna start looking for that product. And I know that. You know you have to be careful with discounts on Amazon just because they credit your that sale differently. So if you offer you know a 70% discount, then you're not gonna get the same amount of credit as if it was, you know a 10 or 20% discount or no discount on that product being purchased. But the nice thing about this is being outside of Amazon. It gives you an opportunity, maybe an easier opportunity in order to add value, and there's a million different ways that you could say hey, when you buy this product, you also get you know X, y or Z, and that could be another product. It could be, you know, a value add education it could. There's a ton of different things that that could be.

Speaker 2: 23:44

And the beauty of this too, is that there's no restriction on what you can say in your ad, right, like I mean, if you're putting this postcard in their mailbox, you could say anything you want. Like I mean, obviously don't be unethical, you know. I mean, be truthful about you, know, but but Amazon is not standing between you and the customer in terms of what you can say. We all know that on our listing there's certain things we can say. There's other things we can't say. There's certain ways that we can do things, there's ways that we can't do things. Amazon is in control of that, you know. Like I mean, yeah, you can kind of manipulate that one way or another a little bit, but ultimately, if you're sending a postcard, you can say anything you want. Your message gets in the hand of that customer, you know, and I think that's really, it's really powerful. Also, you really should. If you're afraid that direct mailing would not get the kind of response rates that you think you should be able to get and you still think that email is less expensive or maybe any sort of digital marketing is less expensive, I would argue that you should research this a little bit more, because I kind of had that same impression and everything that I'm reading suggests that if it's crafted right like once, you do enough iterations of your message and you really do some good split testing on it, you should be able to get a 5% to 10% response rate on postcard mailings and I would argue. Well, I wouldn't argue. I know this is true because a lot of professionals in the space you know clarify this is that that's cold response rates, right Like, that's sending a mailer out to somebody who knows nothing about you If you're sending it to a customer list that you've already built and you have the physical addresses for, because you are running a warranty or a guarantee or whatever it is right, then you have the likelihood of a much better response rate because it's a customer who already bought from you. So as long as you're selling a good product, the majority of those individuals probably like the product that they bought from you. Maybe they forgot about you, maybe they didn't come back and buy again, but it doesn't mean they didn't like the product or like your brand. So you still have a much better chance at a better response rate from them. You know if they're a previous customer than if it's just a cold mail.

Speaker 1: 25:53

Yeah, and I think that's a good point. I mean, we're so used to. You know digital and e-commerce, but the reality of it is you know whether it's Google or Facebook or Amazon for certain categories. You know your cost per click has gone up dramatically and this is one of those areas where I think a lot of you know very few competitors are actually looking at this and are able to or willing to pull something like this off. So the fact that you know, think if you can think about it, getting it out of you know 25 cents cost per click and figuring out how to how to make that convert as external traffic, that's an amazing opportunity.

Speaker 2: 26:32

Yeah, absolutely. You know, something that just came to mind that I hadn't even occurred to me is that you potentially, like I haven't fleshed out in my mind exactly how this would function, but something in me tells me that you could pull this off. I don't know how you track it exactly, but here's the idea. So you send out this mailing right, and if advertising for your product, whatever a QR code, would take somebody directly to your listing right, you could have a second QR code, that's a referral QR code that allows them to share your message on social or something you like. You use this QR code and it takes them into a contest, you know, like a an up viral drawing or something like that, where they can share this and potentially earn the product for free if they refer a certain number of people. So you could have a dual message on this one postcard, where one QR code goes to the listing just to place in order to direct, and another one is like hey, if you, you know, if you don't want to spend that kind of money, you could earn it free or you could earn 50% off. You know, just share us on social or whatever. You know it might be a way to get some extra juice out of that postcard mailing. You get a little extra response rate out of it.

Speaker 1: 27:45

Yeah, and you got two sides of the postcard. So again, I think it goes back to that iteration. You know you got to find out what works. The other thing is I don't know if anybody does this. I'd be curious is I wonder if you'd be able to send postcards. So I mean, especially if you have that customer list and you have their addresses, can you send the? Could you send postcards to their neighbors? So you know that. You know the Smiths at this address bought one of your pool polls and then said something. You know that and I mean you want to make sure that you're protecting customer data, so you might not want to have. You know, hey, the Smiths next door, bob, but you could say hey, you know, one of your neighbors bought this product and really enjoyed it and that effect.

Speaker 2: 28:30

Yeah, you, you probably could pull something like that off at a minimum, like if you know that, you know you've got a fair number of orders that have come in from particular zip code or a particular city, right, like you could send that and it's a true statement. You know, like, hey, your, your neighbor, is in whatever town you know, or whatever you know our purchasing our product, you know, like that's certainly a message you could say you know truthfully, and I think it's one of those things where there's always kind of a fine line, right, especially if you're selling to particular demographics who have, let's say, more concern over privacy or things like that, like being careful how you tailor your message so it doesn't sound like your big brother and that you have more information Than you know.

Speaker 1: 29:10

Yeah, you know where the situation like Target had. You know what was it a few years back, where, like they were sending baby mail heirs to people, or like their family even knew that they were pregnant right, yeah, right yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2: 29:33

But I mean, you know, like I say, at the end of the day, I mean, really, you're just taking, you're just taking two very critical and and very, I think, productive Strategies and just putting them together. You know, like I honestly think that there's a lot of ways that Amazon sellers could be effectively using direct mail tactics to push more volume, more sales volume, that they're, again, their competitors are likely not doing. But then when you combine that with this strategy of trying to juice that algorithm in terms of you know, your, your geo ranking is like I just think it's such a powerful, you know opportunity that you know people should be paying attention to it.

Speaker 1: 30:16

So, with that said, I think a good place, you know, as we kind of wrap up here, is what Advice would you give to brands that are listening out there as far as kind of the first, maybe couple of steps to look into this?

Speaker 2: 30:30

So you know, I'll tell you one of the first things that I would do. In fact, let me grab my phone because this, if, first of all, if you are having doubts, let's say, about direct mail and the opportunity that I'm kind of promoting here, the first thing I would do is I'll point and I haven't gotten through this book yet, but but I'm reading through it and it's an interesting read and it's worth paying attention to, because one not only why does it say I have no internet Not only is it a useful book in the sense of helping you Recognize the opportunity that exists here, right with direct mail like he's gonna tell you a whole lot more than what I'm gonna tell you but also it's a very tactical book in terms of helping you understand Because you can send postcards you can send, you know, letter mailings you could. There's all different ways that you could direct mail a customer. It doesn't have to be a postcard, right? And this guy goes through a lot of a discussion of the strategy of direct mail what your messaging should look like, how you should present it, what the copywriting should be like, what the medium should be that you Send it. In all of those things, right, the book is the direct mail revolution, and I don't know if I have the author, robert Robert something, but anyways, the direct mail revolution. I think I will make sure to put it in the show notes, so anybody who's listening.

Speaker 1: 31:59

We'll put it the the full name, with the author's name in the show notes and then probably, you know, link it over to Directly to the books. That way you want to buy it or whatever you can do that. Yeah, that'd be great. I mean, you get the candle version, it's pretty inexpensive, but I highly recommend it.

Speaker 2: 32:12

It's been a great book so far and, like I say, I'm not through it, but I would. I would read that, you know. I think it would be very good from a from a strategic, you know, kind of tactical position in terms of making sure you get the mail in right and that you're walking through the process correctly. So that'd be thing. One Thing to, honestly, again, you know, and I've said this before Take the time to check your geo rankings, right. If you're thinking I don't think that's a thing, right, it's easy enough to read, I don't think that's a thing, right, it's easy enough to verify, right, just open up a private window, do a search on amazon and various different zip codes. I guarantee you you are going to see discrepancies in your rankings that you didn't know existed and you know. Just pay attention to that, you know, and then just start looking at. Then take a step back once you recognize Okay, geo ranking is a thing. So now I have to figure out what are the areas that I think my product should be selling best, right, like, let's take, let's say, you sold hiking gear, right, certainly you could sell that hiking gear all across the US, right. But realistically speaking, depending on the type of hiking gear, maybe you're going to sell more of it in places that have mountains and a lot of trails and things like that, right? So start thinking through, like, okay, what are the zip codes and what are the regions where I honestly should be selling really well? And then start looking at those zip codes specifically. You know, like am I ranking in those places where I should? I can almost guarantee you some of those places you're probably ranking really well, some of those places you are probably ranking miserably and you don't even know. And the other thing to pay attention to is If you can raise what's the best way for me to say this If there's an area where you know you should be selling well and you think likelihood is, if you are ranking well enough, you should have good click through and conversion rates in that area, right? If you can juice the algorithm to tell Amazon to rank you better and you start selling volume there, guess what? Your overall sales volume goes up, so your rankings globally go up. So you don't just improve rank in that geo targeted area. You improve all of your rankings because as your BSR goes up, all of your rankings go up, right, if your CTR and your CVR in that area are high? Because it's you know those are hikers in that area, so they're going to be very attuned to your product, right? If the CTR and CVR are higher there, guess what? The more sales you run through that area where you've got high CTR and CVR, the better your global CTR and CVR goes up, which means your rankings increase. So geo targeting and geo ranking is not just a focus on that area. It helps you in that area, which is good, but then it's going to help your global rankings as well, which means your overall search volume everywhere is going to improve as a result of targeting those areas where right now you're not ranking, but you should.

Speaker 3: 35:11

I just thought of a really good use case for this for someone in your category, mike, let's say, someone that sells a seasonal, like a warm weather, seasonal product like pool poles and things like that. You know that you do well in a part of the country that right now people aren't even thinking about their pool, like the Northeast, for example, there's a lot of high income people in the Northeast that have in-ground pools that are completely closed right now and aren't even thinking about it. So you know that in May that starts to pick up. So, like, similarly to like preparing for a tent pole event, you, your tent pole event is warmer weather, so you could start juicing up that algorithm up in the northeast in March and where it's a little bit cheaper and that nobody's doing very much volume, if you can get five or six sales in a place where people are a little bit forward thinking and start upping that algorithm, you'll be ahead of the rest of the category by the time the warm weather gets there, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 36:08

For sure.

Speaker 1: 36:09

Yeah, that's a good point, Matt. At the very least you could use that correlation with the Amazon data to say, okay, I'm starting to see you know moving, especially if you have a seasonal product, I'm moving into the season. Either I want to send those postcards or whatever external marketing I'm doing ahead of that to be prepared, or using that data to say, okay, now I know that the season has kind of quote unquote started and so that external traffic is even going to be more effective as people are kind of in that that buying phase.

Speaker 2: 36:40

And you know what Actually, I appreciate the fact that you mentioned that, because it's the one aspect that I didn't mention, and that is this is external traffic. Remember, amazon loves external traffic, so it doesn't matter, they don't care where you're bringing it from. You know, like, yeah, there might be certain you know variations of external traffic that maybe they get a little bit more weight to, but ultimately, if you're bringing them customers that they didn't bring in themselves, they are going to give you better ranking just because you're sending them external traffic. And another thing if, when you put these QR codes on your mailings right, send them straight to your store or state straight to your product page, I mean better yet better straight to your store, because what happens when they're in your store? There's no competition in it, it's only your product, right. So your conversion rate on those sales is going to be better than if you send them to your listing, where potentially you've got other you know competitors that are on that that potentially draw their eyeballs away. So if you send them straight into your store, your conversion rate is going to be, you know, sky high compared to the norm, because you've already pre sold them right. Remember, if the postcard mailing is done right. You've given them most of the important information that they need to have before they even get to Amazon, so your conversion rate should be sky high if you send them to your storefront?

Speaker 1: 37:55

Yeah, you can. I mean, the nice thing about your storefront, too, is that you could even set up essentially a special landing page absolutely specifically to that audience, almost like you would off of your own website. But, like you said, it's on Amazon store, which means that they're already on Amazon. There's no other competition until they click on that listing and click buy.

Speaker 3: 38:14

Yep, and we've definitively proven with some of our bigger partners that the average order, the average cart size, is a lot bigger on your storefront than it is on sending it to your listing too. So there's another reason for sending it to your storefront.

Speaker 2: 38:27

Absolutely. It is, for us, our average order value. If I remember correctly, last time I checked it, I think it was like 40% higher than than anything else. If they went to the store, we sold 40% more product.

Speaker 1: 38:44

All right. Well, I think we're going to wrap it for their rapid there for today, because I think that's a bunch of valuable advice for people you know, to give them another tool in the toolbox. And then, mike, of course, you know as you go through this process I know this is something you're working on. You know we'll come back when we've got some numbers. We'd love to hear an update as to how the process is working out and, more importantly, you know what you're learning from it, because I think that that you know, as brand builders, one of the things that's the most valuable is what we learn out of our process, whether you know it ends up working out or not.

Speaker 2: 39:19

Yeah, for sure. I mean, we're absolutely going to learn a lot out of the process, no question, you know. But I mean, if you follow logic through, there's, there's really no reason to assume that this won't accomplish exactly what we set out to do, because it's just the way Amazon's algorithm works. You know, we're juicing everything they want us to juice. I don't, I don't see how it doesn't, you know, materialize the way we expect.

Speaker 1: 39:40

All right. Well, that just means that the folks out there, they're gonna have to stay tuned, and we'll have an update on how that process goes in a future podcast episode.