How to Take Advantage of Amazon Giveaways #BrandBuilderPodcast

This is a strategy that if it works once, once you figure out and crack the code, you can run it week after week after week and run it on all your product. Start running on competitors products. Right. Complimentary products. There's so many different ways to use this strategy. We run it with all of our clients here at Turnkey.

Hey capitalists. We've got a special edition episode of the Brand Builder Podcast to share with you from Jeff Lieber of Turnkey Product Management, the best team we know of and recommend for entrepreneurs to outsource their Amazon management to. Hey, if you like this stuff, go subscribe to the Brand Builder podcast wherever you listen to podcasts for exclusive content on e commerce, branding and growth strategy. Again, these are new episodes that you won't find on the capitalism.com feed from Ryan Daniel Moran, Max Kerwick and our capitalism.com live events and contributors. So go subscribe to the Brand Builder podcast and if you'd like to take the next step with your Amazon sales, visit capitalism.comamazonclass to register for Jeff Lieber's next class on growth strategies. That's capitalism.comamazonclass onto the show.

Welcome to the Turnkey Playbook for Amazon Podcast. I'm your host Jeff Lieber and the goal of this podcast is to share what's working today that's helping my company, Turnkey Product Management, sell over eight figures per year on Amazon for our clients. We will share with you the actionable steps, systems and playbook that you can plug into your business to boost your sales on Amazon. Let's go.

In this episode, we're talking about a strategy that you must try if you sell on Amazon. It's called Profitable Amazon Giveaways. I'm not talking about the strategy you've probably heard of for the past couple years where you're doing an Amazon giveaway to give away a thousand units for a dollar or 99 cents or for free, and you're losing thousands of dollars in the hopes that you'll rank on page one. That's not what we're talking about. This is called a profitable Amazon Giveaway and it's a core strategy that we pretty much run for all of our full service clients. Well, as most of our coaching clients here at Turnkey Product Management are using with great success. And so we're going to talk about that strategy first and then I'm going to cover another way to put it on steroids where you can actually build an audience off of Amazon at the same time while doing this, just to give you some quick Numbers of how powerful this is for one of our top performing clients. We did this over a two month period. For this client we ran eight giveaways. Okay, eight different giveaways for 24 products. That was what we were trying to give away. Amazon actually only gave away six products out of the 24, so we actually only had to pay for six. And the average retail price of those were about $130 each. And then the cost of goods, you add that in. And so in total, it cost us about $1,000 over a two month period. And we got $9,500 in trackable direct revenue from this giveaway. And as the bonus, we also got 176,000 YouTube views that we can now re pixel and retarget all of those people with ads. So we built 176,000 person audience and then we also got 23,000 webpage visits as well. So for the cost of $1,000, we got over $9,500 in revenue and over 100,000 people into our audience. And as an update now, supplements are now allowed to use this as well. They used to not be available. That's the exciting strategy. I'm going to cover it in detail, give you the step by step. Really, really excited about this. So let's jump in.

Okay, so let's jump into the Amazon profitable giveaw. So again, best case study, we spent $1,000, got over $9,500 in revenue, as well as over 176,000 YouTube views. And there's also a variety of ways that you can use these giveaways. Okay, so if you sell your own products, you can give away your own products, right? You can give away complimentary products of your own brand, right? And get some cross branding out there. And let's say that you sell one product or let's say you sell a toothbrush, right? And you're not a super big name brand, but you can go give away say a related complimentary product like Crest Toothpaste, right? Super, you know, billion dollar brand, right? You can give away a tube of Crest Toothpaste, but you can actually be getting free advertising or incredibly cheap advertising for your toothbrush. Okay, so there's a lot of different ways you can do this. You can also give away books if they're related to your product. Right? So there's so many different ways and we'll jump into all that. So first people ask, where are these giveaways? Where do they show up? Okay, because this is a completely Terms of Service compliant strategy. This is actually on Amazon.com this is, you know, they are letting us do this. They're telling us to do this. So if you go to Amazon.com and then in the search bar at the top, just type into the search bar the word giveaways, okay? Type that in. And then you'll see, you'll see it come up. The giveaways page will just automatically come up and you will see tons of products. I'll actually just go to it right now and when I search for it, I see some compression kites are being given away, some hemp oil, a posture corrector belt. There's some really cool stuff on here. So if you want to just purely use it just to go get free products, you can do that as well. But I'm looking at it from a marketing perspective and I'm going to give you guys that insight. So there's tons of free traffic on here that it's becoming more and more popular where people are going to the Amazon giveaways page, right? Customers, and they're just searching for products that they're interested in and trying to enter these giveaways, right? So why not take advantage of all of that beautiful free traffic, right? So how do you do that? So let's jump in. The best place to start, let's just assume that you're doing your own product, okay? But you can apply it to a complementary product just the same. But let's say you have your own product, right? Let's say you sell a toothbrush. So go, just simply go to your product page on Amazon. Go find your product page for your toothbrush. And if you scroll down, there's a section more near the bottom and it's called Set up an Amazon Giveaway. So just go to that section and literally click on, click on the link right there. So I'm going to go ahead and do this. I'm going to try to walk you through this best I can, just verbally. But it is, you know, there are a lot of steps to it and there's a few really important, critical steps that you want to do to maximize your profit. And so I'll do my best here verbally. But we actually have a really detailed, probably four or five page standard operating procedure with every single step broken down so that you can hand it off to your team. So we'll give you that completely for free. So you can, we'll link to that. It'll be above or below here and we'll make sure that that's in there so that you can just hand that off to your team. And then you guys set it up following those step by step instructions. So don't worry about taking super detailed notes because we will just give you the step by step. Okay, so next, if you go to.

Your product page, click set up an Amazon giveaway and then it'll go over to this page here. You'll see it just says enter details and then there's the product listed there. And then it says how many prizes do you want to give away? It says recommends two or more. So let's just do two. Okay, so let's say we want to give away two of your product and then for your seller name, just you could put your brand name or we usually put the brand name. So let's just say that we were pressed. Toothbrush. All right. And then you see the add a customer image. So you can put your brand logo or whatever you want to put there. I'll just put placeholder image. Next we're going to select your giveaway type. What we do is we recommend selecting the option lucky number instant win. Not first come, first serve. So do lucky number instant win. And then when you go down from there, what's beautiful is that they'll give you some options for how many entrants are required before giving away. So we always choose the maximum number that they allow. So right now it's telling me the lucky number that will win is either number 200, 300 or 400. So I'm going to choose, I always choose the max, right? 400. We give away less product and less cost. Next, you can have no additional steps to enter for the entrance or you can have them follow an author or watch a video short or watch a YouTube video. So let's do almost always do YouTube video. And if you don't know how to do that, we have resources as well for how to upload a video to YouTube or how to cheaply make a video that you can upload to YouTube. One quick suggestion is if you don't have video, a lot of sellers come to us and say we don't have video. You can literally just put together like a slideshow, like a, of a couple images of your product, right? And then literally like narrate that video.

Narrate the PowerPoint presentation and then save it as a video file, right? Like a screen share presentation. So screen share, you know, of a couple of your photos and you can actually give a little sales pitch for promoting your product. Boom. You have a very basic video there. So that's better than nothing. You can put a YouTube video in there and then you'll click validate. And then the other really cool thing under that is offer a discount to entrance. So this is really cool. So we always do this especially with your own product. So you can give away a coupon code to all of the losers or I guess shouldn't go on. Losers, all the people who did not win the contest. Right. Because you know, we might have 400 people enter this contest and 399 of them are not going to win. But you can give them a 10% or 40% or coupon code and give that to the people who didn't win. So now you have 399 people that just watched a YouTube video about your product or whatever you want them to watch. And, and it should pre sell whatever you're trying to do. And then it says, sorry you didn't win, but here's 10% off or here's 30% off your product here. And that's where we got all those sales from when I mentioned those numbers earlier, it's largely from the non winners. And then for discoverability it says public or private. So what we're talking about today is public. That's how you get listed on that public Amazon giveaways page. Okay, so I'm gonna click public. All right, cool. And then you'll go to the next page and then you can see how it will look to the customers. And then you check out and you're just basically purchasing your own products. Right. So you're actually getting that money back. I think you just lose the, you know, the Amazon 15% fee. And so it's really, you know, not, not as costly as the numbers that I said before. And that's pretty much it. So that's like the most basic way to set up the giveaway. We do this over and over again. We, we run as many as we can. And I would just recommend at a minimum you just test one. Right. Just go, go make one and see how it goes. Right. And measure the results. And we have in the standard operating procedure even it shows you how to go check your stats on it and how to, how to see if it was profitable. Cool. So that's that part of the strategy. Now I want to talk a little bit about how to put it on steroids. And this is what I have not heard anyone else talking about. So with the power of YouTube, right. YouTube is linked to Google, right. Google owns YouTube. And what you can do is you can set up like retargeting ads for all the people who watch your video, Right. And if you're not familiar how to do that, we even have instructions for how to do that. But at a high level, it's the same thing as a Facebook remarketing pixel or Google remarketing Pixel, right? And so it's going to be linked to your ads account within Google. And even if you've never run ads before, like Google Ads or retargeting ads, it's worth setting up, okay? And you can, we have instructions for how to do it yourself. You can hire someone off of, you know, a website like Fiverr or Upwork or something like that for probably under 50 bucks and just have them set up your YouTube pixel and Google Pixel account. And it's worth doing anyways. You should do that as a business. If you're not doing that, you can have that on your website. Even if you're not ready to run ads, you can still put the Pixel down so that anyone that watches that video or anyone that goes to a webpage, they will be added to your pixeled audience. And then whenever you're ready down the road, like say it takes you a month or two to figure out how to set up some ads, some Google Ads, or retargeting ads, then you'll have that audience from the past month. But if you never set up the Pixel, you're losing all of those customers. You can't go back in time and add them into the Pixel audience. So just as another side tip, on your website, make sure you have a Facebook retargeting pixel and a Google AdWords and Analytics pixel that can also be used for YouTube.

All right, so I want to give you guys a few bonus tips that will take the strategy to the next level. So number one, in order for people to enter this giveaway, they only have to watch 15 seconds of the video. So even if you upload a two minute video, they only have to watch 15 seconds. So tip number one is make the first 15 seconds of that video killer, right? Make it absolutely pop, get your message across, sell your product and make them want to watch past the 15 minute or 15 second mark if possible. Number two, on YouTube videos, when you upload your video there to YouTube, there's something called annotations and that's where you can add. Probably seen it if you've ever been on YouTube where little pop ups will come up like a little button that says like subscribe or click here to go to our website or click this link, right, There's a number of ways to do that. And so what we recommend is that you put one of those annotations somewhere in that video in the first 15 seconds, usually at the 5 or 10 second mark, so that you'll actually get a decent amount of customers. It won't be all of them, but it'll be a percentage of customers will click on that because they're, if they're interested in your product, that might click on your annotation. And then you can send them wherever you want. You could send them to Amazon, you can send them to your storefront page, you can also send them to your website. And that's the other beautiful part is if you send them to your website, then you can put a Facebook pixel on your website, right? And so now you've now added this, you know what was just an Amazon customer who was on the Amazon giveaways page. They are now in your YouTube pixel audience and they are also now on your Facebook pixel audience, right? And if you send them to a landing page or a squeeze page on your website, you can then make them an offer. You could try to sell them something, you could try to collect their email address, you could try to get them into Facebook manychat, you know, you can make them an offer. Anything that you want to do, you can get creative there. You know, that's just another tip that if you can do that and get them over to a squeeze page, you can actually collect their, their info. And again, don't worry about all these technical steps because in we even have how to make an annotation for a YouTube video in our standard operating procedure SOP document. We also have as another piece of it, you got to set up an Amazon promotion. If you want to give that, you know, 10% off coupon code to all the losers of the giveaway. We have the steps in there as well. If you're unfamiliar how to conduct that. Alright, so I know I just covered a lot of info, there's a lot of steps in there. And so I just want to bring it back to the basics and give you a quick recap and summary of what to do. So back to the basics. This is an Amazon profitable giveaway strategy. This is actually on Amazon.com so that this is something that they're okay with us doing as a seller. And number two, you actually want to take advantage of that free traffic. You want to either there's a few different ways you can use it. You can give away your own product, right? You can give away a complimentary product under your same brand. You can cross sell and link them. You can take advantage of other name brands that sell complimentary products like say if you sell a toothbrush, you can give away Crest toothpaste, right? Or Crest Floss or you know, a complimentary product that people will go, but they can watch a video about your related product, right? And that video pre sells your product and allows you to get them into a pixeled audience. That's the really, the key is that you can get those thousands of people to get into your pixel retargeting audience so that you can run both, you know, YouTube and AdWords ads, right? And then we also talked about that bonus strategy, how you can actually run Facebook retargeting ads to them as well if you use a landing page to recap the numbers. Our best performance that we have seen to date is we spent about $1,000 to give away six products and in return we got just under $10,000 in direct trackable revenue. So it was profitable from the get go. And the big bonus is that we got 176,000 YouTube views of one of our best product sales videos, right. Our client had really, really great videos for us to run on on YouTube. And as a result they're able to kind of get, get a lot of those people over to their website by putting an annotation and they can build that audience there. They can also track them on Facebook and then retarget them with ads. So it is one of the cheapest ways to get traffic on the Internet that I've seen in the past couple of years. And the beautiful part is that it's on Amazon which has an incredible amount of traffic. And so we have a full written out, step by step standard operating procedure. So you don't need to worry about all these details or take notes. You can just go in the show notes or wherever we have it, download the steps, hand it off to one of your team members or do it yourself. Just, just try it on one and see what happens. Check the stats. We even show you how to check your stats, see how it goes and just test it on a basic video. If you don't have a video, don't let that stop you. Go make a basic video like I talked about earlier in the episode. There's a very cheap, fast way to do that. And from there this is a strategy that if it works once, once you figure out and crack the code, you can run it week after week after week and run it on all your product. Start running on competitors products, right? Complimentary products. There's so many different ways to use this strategy. We run it with all of our clients here at Turnkey. So I really hope that this was helpful for you guys and I would love to hear, you know, if you guys put it into action and see some success with it. We always love to hear success stories. So thank you so much for listening and good luck out there.

All right, thank you for listening to the this episode on profitable Amazon giveaway strategy. Please go put it into action. This is one of our best strategies where we've seen incredible ROIs. It's one of the cheapest ways to get traffic out there and it's actually on Amazon.com we have like a video embedded within our standard operating procedure that we're going to give you that has the step by step for how to do all everything I talked about today. It is very simple. At the end of the day, go try it on one product and see how it goes. Let us know if you have any success with it. We love hearing those success stories. So thank you for listening and good luck.

Hey capitalists. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you'd like to take the next step with your Amazon Sales, visit capitalism.comamazonclass to register for Jeff Lieber's next class on growth strategies. That's capitalism.com AmazonClass thanks for listening.