Marketing Strategy
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The following is a guest post from Michelle Custodio from SupplySpy.com.

Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you already know the massive power of Amazon. After all, over 50% of eCommerce transactions happen on Amazon! It’s no wonder so many first time eCommerce entrepreneurs start selling on this platform. If you are reading this article, you are probably already an Amazon Seller.

However, it takes creativity and persistence to be successful. Gone are the days where you can just set it and forget it. To be successful you need a professional selling plan, coupon strategies, FBA set up, Buy Box ready and much more.  Below are a few tactics to boost your Amazon Sales.

Go with the Professional Selling Plan

If you are serious about selling on Amazon, the Professional Selling Plan is the way to go. It gives you the freedom to scale your business and comes with additional benefits like selling to CA and Mexico, customized shipping rates, premium placements on product detail pages, bulk upload, better reporting and more.

Offer a 2 for 1 deal

This is a sales velocity “hack” that will signal to Amazon that your products are popular. Here is how to set this up.

  1. Select the product you want to rank for
  2. Identify the ASIN and the Keyword you would like to rank for
  3. Search for KEYWORD+ASIN in the Amazon Search Box. So if you were selling these headphones you would want something like this “Bluetooth headphones B018APC50Y” without the quotes
  4. Note that your product already needs to rank for the specific keywords to qualify for this. Your URL in this case would look like this https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Bluetooth+headphones+B018APC50Y
  5. Drive traffic to this URL from outside sources (social, search etc)
  6. Raise your price a bit so that you don’t lose money but can offer customers a BOGO deal
  7. Create a BOGO coupon either on Amazon or from a third party vendor

This tells Amazon that people are buying more of your product per session than others. I would not recommend using this for driving huge volumes of traffic. Amazon may or may not consider this ranking manipulation. However it is generally thought that, at low levels its ok.

Make sure you are taking advantage of Fulfillment By Amazon

Yes you can list your products on Amazon and ship them yourself, but unless it’s a made to order product, why would you? Amazon does such an amazing job of fulfillment, they have really changed the face of eCommerce. You can literally ship inventory to Amazon and let them do all the work. Yes there is a fee for this but, it’s worth it.

Amazon SEO

Just like with Google, Amazon SEO is incredibly important. Amazon decides when and where to show your product, based on the information you give them when you build your listing, combined with many other selling signals. Make sure to set yourself up with strong keyword choices, descriptive page text and great quality, clear images.

Automated pricing

If you sell a product that is sold by other sellers, your main goal is to Win The Buy Box! One way to do this is with Automated Pricing. There are many third party SAAS companies that will do this for you, for a monthly fee. Amazon also offers this type of automated pricing service. In Seller Central go to  Pricing > Automate Pricing and follow the prompts to set up automation. Basically you let Amazon know what ASIN to manage, and then set your parameters and let the machines do the work.

Win the buy box

This is related to automated pricing. If you are selling a competitive product that others are already selling, winning the buy box is the name of the game. Note, only Professional Sellers are eligible to Win The Buy Box. Winning the buy box is more than just price. Amazon also considers things like, relevancy, sales volume, account health, defect rate, customer feedback score, and number of positive or negative reviews. Also considered is how often you run out of stock (Amazon does not like you to run out of inventory if your product is selling well).

Get more reviews!

Once you are done getting reviews, get more! You can never have enough reviews, especially good reviews. It’s human nature to gravitate towards the Amazon products on a search results page with the most reviews. As humans we can’t help it, we want to “join the party”. Its just like the restaurant with a line out the door. There must be something good in there!

Advertise

There are countless ways to advertise your Amazon listings these days. Off Amazon, there are the big ones (Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest). But Amazon itself has very powerful and generally ROI positive internal advertising opportunities. In Seller Central, go to Advertising > Campaign Manager and start by clicking “Create Campaign”. Just follow the prompts from there. It is recommended to start with an Amazon Targeted Campaign for a few days. Once you have had a fair amount of impressions, run a report to show you which keywords Amazon used to trigger your ad and which ones resulted in sales.  You can then hand pick those keywords and bid on them manually.

Get a following!

Every brand needs fans, so make sure to build out brand pages on all of your social channels. Depending on what you are selling you might do better on one vs another. For example, Facebook tends to skew older and Instagram tends to skew younger.  Pinterest is a great place for creative products. Test them all and figure out what works. Share content and encourage users to “follow you”. As you build up your following you can push out coupons and specials.

Selling on Amazon is a process of continuous improvement. If you set it and forget it, chances are someone will leapfrog you and your sales will drop.  It takes creativity and persistence. To be successful as a seller on Amazon you need a multi-pronged approach. Check out each of these suggestions above and find the right balance for your business.