Episode #16 - How to boost your Amazon sales in 3 easy steps

To sell again. You know, a lot of competition might come in. It could happen. So the more products you're selling, the more you're spreading the risk or your capital over several products. You don't just want to be like a one trick pony Amazon seller who's got one product who obsesses over for years and then, you know, if that product fails, the whole business goes down. You want to be selling, you know, a range of products so you've got loads and loads of eggs and loads of different baskets, so to speak. So this is the aim if you really want to build a sustainable business. This is why I'm such a big believer in building a brand.

Welcome to the E Commerce Freedom Podcast with your host, Oliver Denier. Learn the practical steps you need to take to build a business you can run on your own terms. Escape the 9 to 5 and work from anywhere in the world.

Hey, how's it going? It's Olly here. Very, very warm welcome to the Ecommerce Freedom Podcast. So on today's episode, we're going to discuss something that keeps cropping up in my inbox. I'm always getting emails from sellers saying, ollie, what can I do? My sales have really slowed down. Things are going really slow. In fact, sometimes they'll be specific. Somebody the other day said they had 20 sales a day with one of their products and. And all of a sudden it had been reduced to three. Not a good situation to be in. So I want to walk you through what I do in this situation. I've had products go dead in the past couple months and there's things you can do to ramp everything up again and get them selling consistently. So there's a few steps to this strategy. I'm going to walk you through this and at the end of the episode, I've got an actual resource for you to use. Free resource. Anytime your slows down, you can have that for free. So the end. I'll give you the link to that. So there's kind of three steps to this. First of all, we want to check your product's potential to see what slow actually means compared to the potential sales your product could be getting. Right. Because sometimes it's relative. Next, we want to optimize absolutely everything. And then finally we want to consider outside marketing to boost the sales of your product. Okay, so those are kind of the three steps. I'm going to walk through each one of them with you now. And anytime you've got a product selling slow, you can come back to this episode and you can Use the free resource I'm going to give you at the end as well. So first of all we want to check what the potential is for your product to really sell. What's the maximum profit you could be making, the maximum number of sales you can be generating on Amazon right now. So the way we do this is actually you want to go and have a look at the top three performing products in the marketplace that competing with you. So let's say you're selling frying pans. You'll go and have a look at the frying pans niche. So type frying pans into the search bar and have a look at the top three performing products. You want to get an average of what their profit is and what their sales are. So let's say, you know, one of them is doing 5k, one of them is doing 10k, the other one's doing 15k monthly sales. You could say the average is around 10k. I would say that's a fair estimate of how much your product could be doing each month. Right. You'd be wanting to aim to generate about 10k in sales per month with your product. So that's kind of a starting point. So now you'll actually have an idea of how fast or how slow your product is selling compared to its potential. If you have a potential of doing 10K and you're only doing, you know, 1500amonth, then obviously you can really ramp up the sales of your product and get a lot more out of it. If you think your products going really slow and it only has a potential to do, you know, 500amonth, then maybe it's going really fast compared to its potential. These are obviously all estimates. We don't know your product could take off and do 50k a month, but we're being realistic, we're being conservative and we're using data to guess how well your product will perform. So that's kind of the first step. Next you want to, and this is kind of in the same category to that is check whether your product is seasonal. It might have actually stopped selling because customers only really want to buy it in the winter. So go over to Google Trends, type in whatever it is you're selling, so frying pans or whatever it is, and have a look at the graph. If your product has a downwards curve in January and it's January right now, well, that's obviously why your product has slowed down. Google Trends gives you a graph of search volume on Google for any search term. So it can give you a really Good indication of how seasonal a product is. If it peaks in the summer, then you know you're going to make more sales in the summer. If it peaks in the winter, it's going to sell more in the winter, etc. So use that to get an idea of whether your product is seasonal. This could explain it. So once you've got this data, now you have an idea of your products relative potential and seasonality. Okay. Very, very useful information to have. Now what we can do moving on from that is actually try and ramp up your product sales in the marketplace. Okay. By optimizing absolutely everything. So the first port of call is to optimize your products listing. Really go through everything and try and make it better. So improve the title, more relevant keywords, more benefits. Shape the title almost like a headline so people just can't help but click on it. Make the title as appealing as possible and then go over to the photos, make them as appealing as possible, Compare them to other photos on the marketplace. Do your photos look professional? Do they look nice and clean? Or is the lighting kind of dingy? When you compare your photos next to the product they're competing with, how does it fare up? If you're a customer choosing which product to buy on the platform, does your photo really show its product in its best light or does it let it down a bit? You can even consider going out and hiring a photographer to take pictures of your products. I've done that a few times with some of my bigger imports. Got to remember when, when people are looking for products on Amazon, they can't physically see the product, hold it in their hands, touch it, you know they're just going by what's on the listing. So if your listing is terrible, people aren't going to know if you have an amazing product. So this, this has to be optimized 100%. Once you've done that, go ahead and optimize the description, the bullet points, make sure everything is up to 100% as good as it possibly can be. Fill out every single little bit of space on that listing. So once you've done that, you set yourself up a good foundation to actually boost the sales of your product. Next, what you want to do is bump up the reviews message. All the customers who have bought your product even from like a year ago, still send them a message because they could still leave you a review. They could have just forgotten to actually do it. You can message customers two or three times, gently nudging them, reminding them, asking them if they'll leave you A review, people forget, they get busy, they, you know, they mean to do it and then they'll go off and do something else. So I actually end up messaging customers like two or three times to leave reviews. And I think that's okay because it's only an email. I don't think they're going to get too bothered by it. That will increase the reviews and actually make your product more competitive. The marketplace, once you've done that, this is kind of like the main foundational stuff, then you can go into boosting your marketing. So go over to your advert campaigns, increase the bids in your pay per click advertising, make new campaigns with new keywords. Have a look on merchant words, see which high traffic keywords you could use. Use exact keywords, broad phrase, try everything, different variations of campaigns, just see which one captures. Pay per click is all about testing, trying different methods to try and get more sales. So just try as much stuff as you can to get traction now. It's worth noting actually, usually when I try and boost the sales of one of my products, I end up spending money. I'm not necessarily making profit as I increase the sales of my product. But that's okay. What we're doing is we're investing in our products ranking. So over the long term we actually make more profit, we get more sales. In the short term we might lose out on a bit of cash, but actually overall it works out better. So if you spend money trying to do this stuff and try and make things better, getting photos, spending more on pay per click, things like that, long term you're going to come out on top. Then what you can do once you've boosted your pay per click advertising or sponsored ads is run some more promotions. When was the last time you ran some promotions? Maybe give your product another BSR spike. Obviously you want to be careful with this. Make sure you have enough budget for promotions, run all of your numbers, make sure you're profitable and then go ahead and try and give some products away for free. This will boost your sales, it will get you up to page one. It's also worth having a look at different keywords on Amazon, typing them in that relate to your product and seeing how well your product ranks. Obviously your products ranking for a load of different keywords on the platform. So see what your positions are. Maybe they've slipped down in the rankings, maybe a competition has come in or maybe for some reason customers just haven't been buying your product as often for whatever reason. Could be any number of reasons. Right? So what I like to do is just keep a good score of how well my products are ranked. I actually use AMZ Tracker for this because they give you all the rankings right there. You can see, you know which keywords you're using and which ranking positions you have. And I like to keep these as high as possible. Generally I aim to just be on page one. I don't try and be number one best seller or anything like that. Just try and be on page one. Then when customers type in keywords for your product, they're going to see your product and they're going to be much more likely to buy it. Another thing you can do is lower your price temporarily, just for maybe a couple of weeks, just to get in a couple faster sales. With E Commerce, what a lot of the time what happens is there'll be like a sweet spot, right? You can lower your price, get more sales, less profit. You can raise your price, you'll get less sales, you'll get more profit. There'll be a sweet spot in between those two prices where you make a decent amount of profit and you make a decent amount of sales. So that's where you kind of want to aim to be. But if you want to ramp up your products listing, get it more visible, you can lower the price, increase the volume of sales, make less profit for a little while, and you'll get your product showing higher in the search results. So this is another way you can actually boost the sales of your products and get it back on track again. We might lose out on a bit of profits, but we're investing in your products ranking. So long term, this is a really, really, really good idea. So up until now we've discussed the main things to do if your product is slipping. These are like the easiest possible things to do. They're all inside the Amazon platform that are rough and ready. You can probably crank out most of them today or tomorrow to get your product selling fast again. But there's a few other things you can do which take a little bit more time, which you might want to consider if you want to increase your product's potential, if you want to get even more sales, or if these things aren't necessarily working quite as well. So another strategy you can use is to start considering some outside marketing. Maybe you want to sell your product on ebay as well as dropship it from the FBA warehouse, create fulfillment orders and sell it to ebay customers. Maybe you want to do the same thing with Shopify. Maybe you want to build your own landing page, send some traffic to it and sell your product and fulfill it using fba. There's loads of ways you can boost the sales of your product. Google Shopping is actually another way you can start to get more sales from another platform. You can use AdWords to boost the sales of the product. There's tons of ways you could do it. So first of all, stick with the basics. The stuff that's on Amazon, that's easy, easy, that's quick. And then you can start opening up cans of worms and doing outside marketing to get your products to sell. So if you're getting slow sales right now, carry out all of the steps I talked about in this podcast episode. Put in a ton of effort, ton of energy to get your product on track. If it doesn't work, shoot me an email and let me know. I'd love to know if this stuff didn't work with you, because I guarantee you that it will. The amount of times I've had a dead product and it just really slowed down and I realized actually it was because I was letting a few things slip. I hadn't been optimizing the listing as much as I could have done, hadn't been keeping an eye on those advert campaigns, really trying to optimize things, find new keywords and keeping up with it. Generally, I find like 10, 15 minutes a day looking at all my products, making sure the marketing still going smoothly is enough to, to keep my business ticking over. And here's the thing, you want to make sure you have a broad selection of products at some point. Like some products might slow down and it might be a little bit tough to get them to sell again. You know, a lot of competition might come in. It could happen. So the more products you're selling, the more you're spreading the risk or your capital over several products. You don't just want to be like a one trick pony Amazon seller who's got one product who obsesses over for years and then, you know, if that product fails, the whole business goes down. You want to be selling, you know, a range of products so you've got loads and loads of eggs and loads of different baskets, so to speak. So this is the aim, if you really want to build a sustainable business. This is why I'm such a big believer in building a brand. Cool. So I've given you some ideas. Go through this stuff, implement it. I hope it gets you more sales. If you want to take this one step further, then please, please download the resource that comes free with today's episode. Go to ecommerce freedom.com forward/16 that's numbers 16 so ecommerce freedom.com forward/ 16 and grab my product audit PDF. This is a free cheat sheet for you anytime your product starts slowing down. You can just load up this cheat sheet, print out if you want, and go through all the steps to audit your product and get it back up to speed again. I can't wait to help you boost your sales again using this PDF. So thanks so much for listening today. I'm going to be recording a ton of more episodes for you to keep your business moving. So thanks so much for listening and I'll catch you next week.