As Amazon continues to grow market share and more new sellers try their hand at running an online store, strategies to stand out in the cut-throat eCommerce space are increasingly crucial. Fortunately, most store owners aren’t implementing the kind of savvy techniques that increase their visibility and more importantly, techniques that boost average order value and conversion rates. Here are the solutions we implemented that tripled our sales in less than three months.
Prime Your Paid Search
Unless you are a manufacturer and also the sole distributor of your products, there’s a strong likelihood that the brands you sell are on Amazon are often offered for less than MSRP. What’s worse is that Amazon runs pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns at the brand and product levels for anything with decent sales volume, always punctuated with “Free 2-Day Shipping w/ Amazon Prime.” In a market where buyers expect their goods delivered quickly, this is tough competition.
Fortunately, we also live in a world where it may only take 2-3 days to ship something halfway across the country no matter who you are, and unless you’re shipping from China, it’s no great feat to leverage your own logistics to compete with Amazon and offer two day shipping. If shipping (or dropshipping) with UPS or FedEx, those carriers provide estimated delivery times in map format based on shipping origin (USPS is trickier, but still works on a smaller scale).
The key is to create and limit geo-targeted PPC campaigns based on shipping data for your 1, 2, and 3 day zones. Make sure your ad copy conveys the message (2 day shipping, 3 day shipping, etc.), and begin testing your messaging and geo-targets. We tested multiple variations of ad copy, but none yielded significant increases in conversion rates unless we eliminated the shipping time frame (for which we saw drops, of course). I covered this in detail last year over at Search Engine Journal and we have yet to see anyone else implement this technique in highly-competitive spaces. You would be surprised how many people don’t want to buy everything from Amazon. Setup an ad similar to the one below and just test the results it produces for your niche or store.
Note: We let these ads run on the weekend and have only had one person think we deliver on Sunday.
Claim Extra Real Estate in the SERPs
Online business is competitive, which means taking advantage of every opportunity. We see legions of stores that aren’t leveraging the search engines’ willingness to display Schema’s product review markup in the organic results. Just as the Google Checkout badge increased click-through-rates for AdWords customers, maximizing your store’s real estate opportunities drives more clicks and puts more eyes on your product pages. Amazon’s review markup has been showing in the organic results for years. With over 250 million buyers, it’s a safe bet most of those people look for the review markup in SERPs (search engine result pages), even if only at a subconscious level.
Unfortunately, for those using SaaS-delivered shopping carts, there is no standard method of implementing the script due to the way different carts generate product pages, and many don’t have the feature built into their framework. Depending on your platform, there may or may not be tutorials on how to hard-code this for your own store. If you are not code-savvy, hiring a contractor from websites like eLance or oDesk to implement the snippet on your website is an excellent investment.
Increases in clicks can vary depending on your SEO strategy. For example, we have one store that ranks well for brand pages and one that ranks for a litany of exact match product names. The store ranking for brand pages (where Schema does not display) saw a 4% increase in total clicks, whereas the product-oriented website saw a 7% increase in clicks. Regardless of strategy, adding Schema’s review markup to your framework should be a no-brainer.
Newegg implemented it, have you?
Implement Behavior-Triggered Offers
One of the biggest revenue drivers for our eCommerce business is entry and behavior-specific offers. If you’re unfamiliar with and/or not taking advantage of this, you’re missing out on substantial increases in revenue from new and existing customers. Out of everything we implemented last year, this strategy made the most substantial impact on our bottom line and nearly doubled our monthly revenues. Presently, we’re converting a whopping 22.5% of new visitors who browse our store for five minutes or longer, with an average order value of $87.14. We also serve an offer to “lurkers” who’ve been to our store before but never ordered anything. They presently convert at 5.26%, with an average order value of $93.38.
As much as it pains me to share the tech we use to serve up these tasty offers, I would be a jerk if I didn’t. My partner suggested we test out Spring Metrics on a whim (they still have a 14 day free trial and consulting) for smart offers and conversion tracking; it worked incredibly well and paid for itself in two days. I am unfamiliar with their competitors (who offer the full package), but their service and back-end worked so well, I didn’t bother to check. The results were superb and I did a post for them over at their blog, which you can scope for the full details.
Learn to Navigate the River
The SEO community in general spends so much time focusing on Google that they neglect the largest buyer search engine on the planet–Amazon. If you are in the business of selling physical products, ignoring the world’s eCommerce Goliath means missing out on additional revenue and branding opportunities. While Amazon is not going to share much of their buyers’ contact information with you–especially their email addresses–a strong brand that serves customers well on the platform will surely receive some cross-over business. Even if you want to avoid the potential perils of selling on Amazon, their two advertising options work very well and are generally under-utilized across the eCommerce vertical as a whole.
Amazon Product Ads
It’s important to distinguish the difference between the two different PPC options available on the A9 river of buyers. Amazon Product Ads are specific advertisements that send searchers away from Amazon and to your website. For competitive spaces with numerous sellers competing for the buy box, I wholeheartedly prefer this method (unless you’re winning the buy box). Additionally, creating an Amazon product ad creates an entirely separate page that will get crawled and indexed.
If you are sending A9 searchers from Amazon to a well-optimized and high-converting product page, this method will keep your margins higher than selling on Amazon directly and the traffic converts a bit higher (2.1% in the health space) compared to the eCommerce industry standard, although the traffic is lower than what you’ll see if you’re the choice merchant seller in Amazon’s marketplace for the same product.
Big tip: Prominently display a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) or what differentiates you from the other Amazon sellers for better success.
Amazon Sponsored Product Ads
Sponsored product ads appear at the bottom of Amazon’s search results and send buyers directly to your Amazon product page, as opposed to your own website. This is a relatively new method of advertising on Amazon and is highly neglected by the majority of the market, despite low CPC (Cost Per Click) and good conversion rates. If you’re promoting your own line/brand of products, this is an ideal way to snag sessions (visitors) and drive sales–the main ranking factor in the A9 algorithm–even if you don’t have a dominant search placement in the market. The best part? It’s incredibly simple to setup, and since it’s Amazon, the conversion tracking is nearly flawless. Despite a lower-than average CTR (Click Through Rate), which may be attributed to the ads showing at the bottom of the results, sponsored product ads convert quite well.
Below is a snapshot of a campaign we’re running for natural products that increase metabolism.
Big Tip: Set a fixed budget ($100) for your advertising spend and wait at least four days before making a decision on whether or not it’s profitable. Ad spend will show right away, but conversion rates presently take four days to propagate.
On A9 Optimization
To make a hasty generalization: most eCommerce players on Amazon are lazy.
By lazy, I don’t mean that they aren’t great Amazon merchants. Amazon sternly enforces fulfillment and customer satisfaction metrics in order to maintain an active seller account. Specifically, most eCommerce firms (and product entrepreneurs) trying to navigate the river ignore Amazon optimization best practices and either copy/paste duplicate manufacturer descriptions–with no regard for buyer experience–or write a two sentence description and expect Earth-shattering results.
Fortunately (or unfortunately, if you’re a lazy bum), creating an excellent Amazon product ad (which sends them to your website) also creates an incredibly placement-friendly page (independent from others selling the existing product) that piggy-backs on the biggest eCommerce website in history.
Required workload? Great product descriptions, robust Seller Central data, and unique images.
In advance: please refer to the White Board Friday on the topic before asking how unique the product descriptions need to be. Amazon’s ranking factors may be different for obvious reasons, but the concept and importance of truly unique content remains the same. ‘You Get What You Give’ holds very true in the Amazon marketplace, especially regarding how well said Amazon pages rank within Google.
Do Something with Your Confirmation Page
Confirmation pages are incredibly boring. Over the years I have hit hundreds of confirmation pages that do little more than say ‘Thank you for your order.’ One of the more engaging things I’ve seen was a post-purchase popup that asked me to rate my experience for Shopzilla. Sure, it’s a potential citation that gets aggregated into your AdWords Seller Ratings, but it’s also an instant departure from your website and a missed opportunity for brand reinforcement, upsells or affiliate offers, contests, giveaways, social engagement, etc.
If you are determined to only say ‘Thanks,’ give them something for free, like an eBook. It doesn’t need to be 300 pages of literary excellence, but great content that will be useful to most of your customers is ideal. If you sell vitamins, it’s safe to assume that your customers are health conscious; giving away something like “10 Energy-boosting Smoothies You Can Make with Any Blender” should be of interest to most people shopping at your store. At minimum, use this as an additional opportunity to bolster social engagement.
Big Tip: The importance of giving or sending your customers to incredibly useful, high-quality content cannot be overstated. At one of the last points of communication in the buying process, the last thing you want to do is send customers to a lackluster affiliate product you found on Click Bank.
Implementing the above tactics takes less time than you would imagine and yields excellent results. In a data-centric industry, it is increasingly important to inject creativity into what is becoming largely standardized product marketing, especially if you want to stand out.
Are you using creative methods to drive traffic and conversions to your store? If so, share with the community in the comments below.
