ER 020: Digital Coupons, Social Media Promo Codes, Backlinks, Facebook Ads
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Email | RSS
Check out our Amazon SEO guide for optimizing your product listings: http://azmarketers.com/listing
Want to join an ecommerce mastermind? Sign up: http://azmarketers.com/mastermind
Links:
Digital Coupons – Viral Launch Blog Post
Amazon Private Label Sportswear
Check out how many products Amazon sells here – cool data
Show Notes
This is The Ecommerce Roundup, Podcast 20, today is November 17, 2017, I’m your host Bryan, and here’s the ecommerce news roundup for this week –
___________
- Run through the news
- Digital Coupons in Seller Central
- Social Media Promo Codes in Seller Central
- Backlinks to Amazon listings
- Facebook conversion events for getting email signups
- Wall Street Segment
A quick run through the news you should know
First, Amazon Australia will launch by Black Friday. This is huge in terms of Amazon’s global expansion. And in general I’m very supportive of this. I hope to be selling on Amazon myself and I look forward to helping clients and students sell in Australia.
However, let’s not get carried away. Australia has a population of about 24 million. Canada has a population of about 36 million. So for a rough estimate take your Canadian sales and subtract a third to get your estimated sales for Australia. I have heard though that Aussies love to shop online, so I might be wrong and Australia could be even better than Canada. My only point is don’t get distracted from what’s most valuable to your business so you can open up shop in Australia. If you have time for it, then great, do it. If not, then wait until you do. There’s still more Amazon gold in the US and EU than there is in Australia even though it’s brand new.
Second, this probably belongs in the Wall Street Segment, but it applies to you as an ecommerce business owner so I’ll say it now. I saw an article on CNBC quoting an analyst projecting that Amazon will have a record breaking holiday season and will own almost half of all online sales. Think about that for a second. Half of online sales. Isn’t that unbelievable?
The message here is to keep working on your Amazon listings, keep running ads, and to keep doing what you’re doing.
Digital Coupons in Seller Central are here
Under the Advertising tab in Seller Central, you will now see a Coupons page. You can now create digital coupons in Seller Central and offer discounts on a single product or set of products.
These coupon codes will show up in search results among other places which is a big deal.
There’s a lot to unpack here and I could have a whole podcast episode on just this, so I’m actually doing to direct you to Viral Launch’s blog post on this topic for a full explanation, and I think they do a good analysis about this new feature too. Coupons have been available to vendors for a long time, so I’m not sure this is going to change much, although we have to see the implementation of it.
I encourage you to read the blog post, I’m going to link to it in the show notes. After you read it I would immediately test this feature out. I know I am. – https://viral-launch.com/amazon-blog/news-updates/amazon-news-updates/coupons-in-amazon-seller-central/
Social Media Promo Codes in Seller Central
Check out within your promotions tab within Advertising.
Sellers can make a temporary promotion page with a unique URL and decide who you want to share it with.
Amazon says – This is a targeted promotion type; these promo codes are not shared with all customers on Amazon’s deals page or product pages. Sellers can tell customers through social media or e-mail and drive traffic to their products on Amazon. Simply direct customers to the unique promotion page and the discount automatically applies when they add an eligible item to cart. No extra fee for this. Must be in Brand Registry to do this. The discount must be at least 15% off site price and can be a maximum of 80% off. Promo codes can start four hours after they are created and can run up to 30 days. This feature is currently available in US only.
So my take here is number one, get into Brand Registry if you’re not already, because Amazon keeps rolling out new features for those within Brand Registry. Second, this is Amazon’s take on a landing page. This could be very valuable for driving traffic to your products. However, sellers already do this with Super URLs. And the reason they use super URLs is because apparently super URLs still help you rank. This isn’t just hearsay. Pretty much everyone I speak with uses super URLs and I see big brands on Amazon using super URLs. Therefore, I’m not sure there’s enough value here for sellers to ditch using super URLs to drive traffic to Amazon and instead use this feature. It’s nice that the discount is already added when a shopper adds the item to their cart, but again I’m not sure about this.
I’m going to test it out because I haven’t yet. You should test it too. Try using it by emailing your list or running Facebook ads.
Backlinks to Amazon listings
A powerful way for you to sell more on Amazon without doing more on Amazon is doing blogger outreach. I’ve been thinking about this for a while because this is what normal online businesses do, but then I saw an article on it recently that claimed when you do this, it has an outsized effect on your Amazon performance.
The idea is you want to get backlinks to your product on Amazon. This helps your product get more exposure and more sales. Most effective are backlinks from Amazon affiliate websites because these are websites that are directly generating sales on Amazon. If you do this right it’s like free advertising for you.
So how do you do this? Easy. Go to Google, and search your competitor’s name. Also use keywords like review, unboxing, and verses, in your search. Then look through the first 10 pages of search results, and contact anyone relevant to your product to tell them about your product. Offer to send your product for free so they can review it. Also send them the link to your product on Amazon.
If you don’t have competitors, then use your niche as a keyword for searching on Google. This sort of activity you should be doing anyway for your main website. The key difference here is to pay attention to Amazon affiliate websites and ask them if they’ll list your product too.
This will also work with YouTubers. You can go to YouTube and search for relevant YouTubers to review your product. Ask them to make a video and review your product and to drop a link to your product in the video’s description. This is standard influencer marketing so it’s something that you should be doing anyway. It’s best if the reviewer can link to your ecommerce store and to your product on Amazon.
This is a nice little hack that will separate you from your competition. This is also an ongoing task that should never end. Blogger, influencer, and YouTuber outreach is a key task for any business these days.
Side note, YouTube is the best platform for these besides blogs because YouTube videos come up in Google search results. Other social media platforms are fleeting, or don’t show up in results, or are private. So focus on blogs and YouTube.
Facebook conversion events for getting email signups
Facebook has a new optimization feature where you have a Facebook conversion ad that optimizes for link clicks until enough conversion events start kicking in so that the algorithm can start to learn who to serve your ad to for getting more conversions. This feature has been around for a few months, and Digital Marketer tried it out a while back and said that it was more expensive for them to use but I recommend trying it in your campaigns now for getting email addresses from Facebook ads.
Basically it works like this. Say you want to build your email list with Facebook ads. You then run conversion ads with a conversion event of a complete registration, or an email address. Well Facebook needs about 25-50 conversion events to optimize your ad, and if you aren’t getting 25-50 email sign ups per week then this type of campaign won’t work. In the early stages of your ad this is a big problem. So Facebook has a solution where in the beginning of your ad’s lifetime they’ll optimize for link clinks, and then once they get enough data to learn who will convert then they’ll switch the optimization to your conversion event. In theory this is an amazing feature so try it out. You’ll find the option in the ad set level at the bottom as your making your ads. It’s a little radio button that you toggle on.
If you don’t get results from this because you aren’t getting enough sign ups, then make your conversion event one step from the real event you want. Say instead of making your conversion event email sign ups, make it for when people land on your landing page. This way you’ll get your magic minimum 25 conversions per week so Facebook’s algorithm can take over. Or if you don’t want to do this then just increase your ad spend so you get to the minimum 25 conversions per week. Just don’t lose all your money in the process if you go this route of upping the ad spend.
Wall Street Segment
According to CNBC an analyst at Morgan Stanley thinks Amazon is going to be worth $1 trillion within a year. And I agree. That means Amazon needs a share price of about $2,000. I haven’t done the math on that so don’t quote me on an exact share price.
Amazon is taking over the world. They are becoming the global mall, plus with AWS they’re a massive cloud computing company. But if Amazon becomes worth over a trillion then Google and Apple will also certainly be worth over a trillion too. The message is to buy tech stocks and forget about the rest.
Amazon is coming out with its own private label sportswear to take on Nike, Under Armor, and Lululemon. Amazon quietly is coming out with its own brands. There’s danger on the horizon for big brands unless they can continue to innovate. Link in shownotes – https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-06/amazon-s-push-into-private-label-sportswear-makes-quiet-debut
Amazon has augmented reality so you can virtually shop for furniture and see how it’ll look in your house before you buy it. The feature is in its mobile app.
I think this is one of the best use cases of augmented reality I’ve seen yet.
I think this is going to help a lot of people buy more furniture and high ticket items online. I’ll link to the article in the show notes – http://www.businessinsider.com/review-amazon-augmented-reality-shopping-feature-2017-11/
I found a cool article that describes how many products Amazon sells worldwide. It’s just fun data to look at. Amazon US has over 600 million products it sells. Worldwide the number is 3 billion. I’d assume there are double counts here because the same product could have different ASINs or different SKUs, but it’s still a ton and it gives you an idea of the enormous size of Amazon. According to this data, an average of 1.3 million products are added to Amazon’s US catalogue each day!
I’ll link to it in the show notes – https://www.scrapehero.com/how-many-products-does-amazon-sell-worldwide-october-2017/
___________
So that’s it for today. Thanks for listing.
Hit subscribe now so you can be notified of new podcasts coming.
Also, I want to offer you a free 15 minute ecommerce strategy session with me. We can talk about whatever you want. Amazon, Facebook ads, Wall Street, you name it. All you have to do is leave this podcast a review. Then, take a screenshot of your review and email it to info@azmarketers.com. So leave a review right now, and email me a screenshot of the review to info@azmarketers.com and then we’ll schedule a time to speak.
Also, I’m putting together a mastermind of experienced ecommerce business owners so we can compare notes and help each other grow. The mastermind is going to be free, and it’s only for business owners who are doing over a certain minimum revenue per month. So it’s not for beginners. It’s for intermediate to advanced ecommerce business folks. Sign up at www.azmarketers.com/mastermind and I’ll keep you posted.
And last, if you need any help with your ecommerce business, we’re at azmarketers.com.
Until next time, keep selling and keep growing.