How to launch a product on Amazon
It’s important to start getting sales for your product as soon as your listing is live on Amazon (as this will help your best seller rank, or BSR), so make sure you have a launch strategy to start strong.
Three factors that affect your ranking include:
1.Sales velocity: the rate at which your product is selling (i.e. 10 units per day)
2.Sales history: how many sales you get over a period of time
3.Conversion rate: how many consumers who click on your listing make a purchase
Of these, you as a seller have the least influence over sales history, but you can influence your conversion rate (which should affect your sales velocity), so let’s start here.
How to improve your Amazon conversion rate
- First, ensure your listing is optimized with keywords, images, etc. (We discussed this in the last chapter.)
- Second, price your product low enough to earn sales. We’ll explain how to find the right balance to keep you profitable.
- Third, get as many reviews as possible.
How to price your Amazon products
Here are two pricing methods to consider when first launching your product on Amazon:
1.Offer a lower price than your competitors. Of course, you don’t want to price your product so low that you start to lose money! Use the Jungle Scout profit calculator to check for this.
2.Offer a discount. This is a temporarily adjusted price that will be shown on your Amazon listing as a bright orange coupon under the price, helping get new customers’ attention.
How to get reviews for your Amazon products
Just think how often you’ve bought something on Amazon and not looked at the rating or reviews! Reviews have a major impact on your conversion rate — so how do you get (good) reviews?
1.Use the “Request a Review” feature inside of Amazon’s order detail screen. Amazon will send an email to your customer, asking them to leave a review within a 30-day window of purchasing. This is an incredibly valuable and effective method of getting more reviews because customers (who would often opt out of emails from individual sellers) trust the Amazon brand and are more likely to leave reviews after receiving an email from Amazon.
Kevin Kunz’s Tip
“Jungle Scout offers a built-in button that will automatically send Amazon’s review request email to eligible customers, eliminating the manual work for sellers.”
2.Run email campaigns. You may also want to send a more personalized email to request a product review from a customer. As long as you abide by Amazon’s rules, this is a great way to connect with a customer and request a product review.
3.Participate in the Early Reviewer Program, in which you pay a one-time fee to have Amazon find (and incentivize) customers to review your products. This is a great way to earn up to 5 reviews, which are otherwise very difficult to earn on a brand new product.
4.Participate in Amazon’s Vine Program, which is made up of a group of Amazon-verified reviewers who post their unbiased, honest opinions about products.
Many sellers have used a card inserted into their product packaging as a means of communicating with a customer to request a review. These product inserts are not expressly prohibited by Amazon, but be very careful about what you say on the inserts so you don’t violate Amazon’s terms of service.
We recommend two strategies to use at launch to get initial sales: promoting your product through a deal site, and using Amazon PPC.
Promote your product through a deal site
You offer a steep discount for your product on a deal site, and people then use that code to purchase your product on Amazon, giving you those tough-to-get initial sales.
Kevin Kunz’s Tip
“Jungle Scout has an easy-to-use deal site called Jumpsend where you can promote your products at a discount and earn quick sales.”
The other main strategy we recommend for getting initial sales is by using pay-per-click, or PPC, advertising. PPC is a big topic, and something we recommend always running (not just at product launch).
We’ll explain how PPC works here. For step-by-step tips for different campaigns and strategies, check out the Selling on Amazon guide.
PPC
“Pay Per Click” or PPC is a method of internet marketing in which you pay for consumers to click to your product listing. This advertising is a way of driving traffic to your product (in addition to the organic clicks, which you don’t pay for and are based on algorithms that help a consumer find the most relevant product for their search).
PPC is a more effective method of paid advertising on Amazon than other advertising like Google or Facebook because you’re targeting shoppers who are already on Amazon for the purpose of buying.
There are three different types of PPC on Amazon:
1.Sponsored Products
These appear at the top and bottom of Amazon’s search results page, as well as in the product carousel on a competitor’s product listing. They appear on desktop, mobile, and the app. A consumer can click on your ad and be taken to your product’s listing. As with all types of PPC, you are charged everytime someone clicks on your ad (not when your ad is displayed or if someone buys your product).
In the search results
On a product listing
https://www.youtube.com/embed/XDv6u7Pw3m4?start=4484&end=4729;
In this clip, The jungle Scout show you how to create a Sponsored Product PPC campaign based on your Keyword Scout research.
2.Sponsored Brands
You have to be brand registered to use Sponsored Brand PPC ads. These ads appear on the top and bottom of Amazon’s search results, and will show for both Amazon’s desktop and mobile site. Sponsored Brand ads display your logo, a headline, and up to three of your products. When a customer clicks on your logo, they are taken to your Amazon Store or a dedicated landing page that only shows your brand’s products. When they click on a product, they are taken to the product listing.
3.Sponsored Display
You also have to be brand registered to use Sponsored Display PPC ads. Sponsored Display ads help expose consumers to your product outside of Amazon.com and help bring more people to the site. Amazon displays an ad for your product on external websites and target customers who have looked at either your listing (to bring them back) or a similar product within the last 30 days.
How to create a PPC ad
1.Be prepared with keywords. Reminder! PPC ads are based on either the keywords that Amazon thinks are relevant, or keywords lists that you have come up with, so before you run these campaigns, make sure you have done proper keyword research.
2.Choose the campaign type — automatic or manual. An automatic campaign means you allow Amazon to decide which keywords to display your ad for (based on your listing’s title, bullet points, description, back-end keywords, etc.). With a manual campaign, you choose the keywords you want your ad to appear for.
3.Name your campaign — we recommend keeping it simple, like “[Your product] – Manual targeting”)
4.Set a daily budget — if you can afford it, we recommend $50 to $100 per day
PPC Best Practices
- Start running PPC campaigns as soon as you can, beginning with an automatic campaign as soon as you’ve optimized your listing.
- Once you’ve set up an automatic campaign, also set up a manual campaign, and create an ad group for the three targeting types: broad, phrase, and exact
- Broad: Keywords targeted can be in any order, and additional words may be included (ie. if your product is a set of marshmallow sticks, your ad will also be shown for “marshmallows and hot dogs sticks” and “roasting stick for marshmallow”).
- Phrase: Include your keyword phrase exactly as it’s entered, but feel free to include other words before or after (ie. “campfire marshmallow sticks” and “marshmallow sticks for roasting” are okay).
- Exact: Keywords need to be entered exactly as you want people to search for them. So for marshmallow sticks, only “marshmallow sticks” will be targeted, with no words before, after, or in between.
- Sponsored product ads are the most effective for most sellers, but once you’ve set these up, feel free to try out sponsored brand and sponsored display ads as well.
- Remember: don’t jump into your campaigns every day and make changes! You want to give them some time, and maybe make changes once a week.
Chapter 5
Summary
In this chapter, we discussed the important steps for a successful product launch, including pricing your product, creating promotions, and getting reviews to help your product listing rank and earn sales.
We learned:
- Amazon’s Best Seller Rank
- Product reviews
- Promotion strategies
Tools mentioned:
Extension
Keyword Scout
Promotions & Email Campaigns