Growing Your Sales: Amazon Sales Funnels 101
In this article, we’ll outline how to grow your sales using sales funnels for Amazon sellers.
Sales funnels that leverage external traffic (such as Facebook Ads or Google AdWords) are a powerful way to boost your sales velocity, BSR, and rankings. By mastering Amazon sales funnels, you’ll grow your business faster, have more successful launches and get an edge over your competition.
Sounds good? Let’s get started…
What is an Amazon sales funnel?
A sales funnel refers to the buying process that you lead your customers through when they are purchasing your products.
First, let’s start with the most common Amazon sales funnel mistake.
Are you making this crucial sales funnel mistake?
There is a common mistake sellers make when it comes to external traffic. This mistake is to drive traffic straight to your product listing.
You should never drive traffic straight to your product listing. Why? No matter which traffic source you use, it won’t be nearly as targeted as Amazon’s internal traffic.
By sending unqualified, untargeted, traffic straight to your listing you’ll run into two problems:
1) Low sales
Most of the people you drive to your listing won’t be ready to buy your product at full-price immediately. Unlike people who are browsing Amazon, they might not be interested in buying right now.
The result will be that your external traffic campaign won’t be a big success. You’ll end up spending quite a lot of money on ads, without seeing much of a return.
2) Low conversion rates
Low sales translates to low conversion rates. Driving untargeted traffic to your Amazon listing will negatively impact the overall conversion rate of your listing.
What is a conversion rate?
Conversion rate = number of sales / number of people viewing your product. So for example, if 100 people view your listing and 10 buy, your conversion rate is 10%.
Why does your conversion rate matter?
Many experienced sellers believe that conversion rate is a ranking factor in Amazon’s ranking algorithm. This means that lowering your conversion rate by driving external traffic straight to your listing could negatively impact your rankings. In other words, if Amazon sees that your page isn’t making a lot sales for the number of people who visit it, Amazon will direct less people to your page!
A mindset shift: Why capturing emails is more important than sales
The key to a successful external traffic campaign is to understand that, in the short-term, capturing emails is more important than profits.
Why is capturing emails so important?
You’ll be able to:
- Build your own launch list. This will allow you to distinguish yourself from low-quality giveaway sites. Next time you want to get an Amazon product off the ground, simply email your list with a discount offer.
- Send weekly or monthly email newsletters. This allows you to build a long-term relationship with your prospects and customers.
- Drive sales with the push of a button. Running a special offer? Simply send an email and you’ll be able to drive extra sales.
- Build a brand. If you capture a customer’s email before they buy on Amazon, you can send them to your e-commerce site in the future. (This is fully compliant with Amazon’s terms.)
- Retarget customers on Facebook. By capturing emails, you can create retargeting audiences of customers on Facebook.
How to capture emails
The key to capturing your customer’s emails is to collect them before they purchase on Amazon.
Here’s how it works: You want to drive external traffic to a landing page, instead of straight to Amazon.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is a web page that has been designed for one single objective. In our case, that objective is to capture an email. It looks something like this:
Crafting a compelling offer for your Amazon sales funnel
“Why would anyone give away their email on a landing page?”
It’s simple. Give people a compelling reason, and they’ll be more than happy to part with their email address. There are two common types of lead magnets that work well for Amazon sellers.
1) Give away a discount
The easiest way to get people to give you their email address is to give them a big discount. (The best way to do this is to set up single-use promo codes, which protect your inventory.)
This method is highly effective for a number of reasons:
- You’ll be able to build an email list.
- The people who click-through to your Amazon listing will almost certainly buy, increasing your conversion rates.
- You’ll get a lot more sales. This results in a higher Best Sellers Rank (BSR) and overall higher Amazon rankings.
2) Give away educational content such as an ebook
Selling a cocktail shaker? Why not give away a 30-page ebook full of amazing cocktail recipes. Once you get someone to give you their email in exchange for an ebook, you can build a long-term relationship with them, and eventually entice them to buy.
Which method should you use?
Go for the discount option if:
- You can afford to give discounts.
- You want to boost your Amazon rankings and BSR.
- You want to build a targeted customer list.
Go for the ebook option if:
- You can’t afford to give away discounted units.
- Your product already ranks highly.
- You mainly just want to build an email list.
Summary
In this article we’ve explained how Amazon sales funnels work. Yet, many questions remain unanswered. How to build a landing page? How to drive traffic?
This article is just an excerpt from our free course “How To Drive Traffic To Your Amazon Listing: A Step-By-Step Guide”.
Do you want to read the full guide for free? Click here.
Originally published at landingcube.com.
