Hi, and welcome to AidanBooth.com!
This month’s blog post is about a unique system we use in our Amazon eCommerce business to generate sales momentum, real reviews, and boost our Amazon rankings.
I haven’t seen anyone using this exact same system, which is weird, because it works so well!
Today’s FREE Thank-You Gift…
Before you do anything else, download the free presentation about the 10 ninja tricks we use to Reverse Engineer our competition on Amazon.com…
This video explains what we look at when analyzing our competition, and is a key part of the process we use to identify winning Amazon products over and over again.
More on Amazon shortly…
Firstly though, some personal highlights and thoughts from the past month…
Back to London!
Steve and I were in London 2 weeks ago for the quarterly Blueprint Academy mastermind weekend. Here’s a snapshot of what these workshops are like:
Not connected with me on Facebook? Click here!
We had 2 intense days of training workshops, and 5 (heavy) nights in London… lots of pubs, lots of food, and great company.
Business Class makes me money…
I flew British Airways direct from Buenos Aires (where I live).
A few years ago I made a conscious decision to start flying Business Class (especially for work trips). At first I found it hard to justify paying double or triple the price on a 13 hour flight…
HOWEVER, I now think flying business for business trips is actually money well spent… in fact, it makes me money.
Firstly, you arrive refreshed.
Might sound silly, but it makes a BIG difference on the day you arrive. You’re able to hit the ground running and be operating on all cylinders (important when you’ve got 5 days of back-to-back meetings!)…
Secondly, you’ve got space to work.
I don’t work on every flight, sometimes I just sit back and watch movies. Heading to London though I worked solid for 6 hours, I would have struggled to do this in economy sized seats.
Side Note: After getting a good 6-hour work session in, I hit the Malbec’s and passed out shortly afterwards, waking up just as we touched down at Heathrow.
Six hours work is worth WAY more to me than the premium I paid for Business Class.
The math here is simple… work out what your hourly value is (earnings divided by hours worked), then compare how many hours you’d work in Business to the price you’d need to pay to travel in business.
EXAMPLE:
- You earn $100,000 per year
- You work 40 hours a week, 48 weeks per year = 1,920 hours
- Your hourly ‘value’ is therefore: $100,000 / 1,920 = $52/hour
- Every hour you work is worth $52
If you’re earning $100,000/year, your ‘hourly rate’ alone might not be enough to justify a Business Class upgrade, but it all adds up.
Thirdly, lounges… more work time or better relax time.
The lounges are pretty good too. Lots of space, an open bar, and plenty of food. Some lounges even have showers, great for refreshing on a long airport layover!
Fourthly, MINDSET.
This is more important than the other three things combined.
If you want to succeed in business, it’s VITAL that you have the ‘success mindset’. It’s vital that you think in terms of abundance, not scarcity. I’m not saying you should be frivolous with your spending, but make a conscious effort to think like the person you’re striving to become… and we all want to improve our lives in some way…
Side Note: I once had a goal to get my business to a point where it was successful enough so that I could afford to fly business all the time… funny how what you think about, comes about!
Tips for Booking Flights
Two last travel tips before I get into the content:
- Use www.kayak.com to find the best flight deals
- Use SeatGuru to see which are the best seats on a flight (and which to avoid)
Anyway, I digress, time to dive into today’s content.
Amazon Funnels
A key part of running a successful Amazon business is being able to generate sales momentum for new products, or for old products that need a bit of a boost.
But it’s not just about momentum, reviews are a critical piece of the puzzle as well.
In 2014 we designed a system that allows us to:
- Get real customer reviews
- Generate real sales (and momentum)
- Increase rankings for specific keywords
- Move up the Amazon Best Seller rankings
Since 2014 we’ve continued to tweak and improve the system month after month… it’s now a finely tuned machine.
The Amazon Funnel can be applied in a number of ways depending on where you’re at with your business. For example:
- To generate initial reviews for a new product (Review Campaign)
- To generate more sales momentum for established products (Momentum Campaign)
- To become a legitimate sales channel that makes you money (Sales Campaign)
The great thing about our Amazon Funnel system is that minor tweaks of the coupon discount amount are often enough to switch between a review campaign (1), a momentum campaign (2), and a fully fledged sales campaign (3).
How To Reverse Engineer Your Competition
The link and image above will give you access to a special presentation about how to effectively reverse engineer your competition. The video you’ll get access to was recently filmed at our Blueprint Academy mastermind event in London.
Here’s the 7-step process in a nutshell:
- Create ‘one-time-use’ coupon codes
- Build a product giveaway page
- Setup an optin list
- Send targeted Facebook traffic
- Automatically reply to people who optin, ask for confirmation, and provide the coupon code
- Follow up with the buyer
We’ll now dive into more detail about each of the 7 steps.
Step 1: Create a One-Time-Use coupon code
Here’s a video I made to show you how to create exclusive one-time-use coupon codes:
If you’re doing a ‘Review Campaign’, we recommend you either give your product away for free (100% off coupon), or make it so that your product is priced at a ‘no-brainer’ price point, like $1.
For ‘Momentum Campaigns’, we normally create coupons that give 60% – 80% discounts off the LIST PRICE (not the regular price people actually pay).
We normally expect Momentum Campaigns to run at a loss (loss leaders) or sometimes break even. They aren’t designed to be stand-alone money makers, however the momentum you gain from these campaigns CAN actually make these campaigns profitable, since a little momentum can spur on a lot of real organic full priced sales.
Reviews are a positive spin-off in Momentum Campaigns, unlike with Review Campaigns, they are not the main objective.
‘Sales Campaigns’ are designed to run profitably on their own as stand alone sales channels (in other words, they should make you money even when you don’t include the positive momentum and boost in organic sales that you’ll get as a side-benefit).
Sales Campaigns have lower discount coupons. If you have a 40% net profit margin, then your maximum coupon discount would be for 40%. Similar to Momentum Campaigns, Sales Campaigns are NOT focused on getting reviews, however these will inevitably happen.
Step 2: Build a Product Giveaway page
You product giveaway page must:
- Be mobile optimized (critically important if you’re sending Mobile traffic)
- Look attractive and professional (unprofessional pages look less trustworthy and won’t get the same optin rate)
Here are a couple of examples:
These pages are built using the ‘u-design’ WordPress theme, and set up using simple landing page templates (which can be generated using plugins).
Key components outlined on the page are:
- Your brand name (in the example, it’s ‘Wireless World’)
- Your discount to grab peoples attention (e.g. 100% off!)
- Justification as to why you’re offering a huge discount
- Eligibility rules (these also help make the giveaway more believable, people are expecting some kind of a catch)
- A call to action (e.g. ‘Click Here to Participate’)
Once you’ve got this page ready, you need to integrate it with an Optin list.
Step 3: Setup An Optin List
We use Aweber for most of our auto-responder lists. Setting up a new list is easy, here are some step-by-step instructions:
You’ll need a different list for each of the three campaign types. If you’re selling a wireless keyboard, you might name your lists as follows:
- WirelessKeyboard-ReviewFunnel
- WirelessKeyboard-MomentumFunnel
- WirelessKeyboard-SalesFunnel
Clear naming will help you keep your leads organized.
Once you’ve created an email list, you need to create a webform and then embed it onto your webpage, or simply link your webpage signup link to an Aweber hosted form.
If you’re using something like LeadPages (which we love by the way!), then you can have these links create nice pop-overs in the same page. In the ‘roughest’ form you can have a simple subscription page on your site. In the example we have this page set up (you’d want to make it a bit prettier than this!):
If you’ve progressed this far, then at this point you should have:
- Created a discount coupon code
- Built a product giveaway page
- Setup an optin list
Next step is to send traffic!
Step 4: Send Targeted Facebook Traffic
Obviously Facebook isn’t the only traffic source, but it is the easiest to get quickly setup with and start sending some targeted traffic, so it’s what we recommend you use to begin with.
Here’s a summary overview video, showing you the step-by-step ad setup process:
We’ve built entire courses around leveraging Facebook traffic, it’d be impossible for me to give you complete training on Facebook ads in this blog post, however the video above will help.
Here are the key settings for starting your traffic campaign:
- Use ‘Website Conversions’ as the ad objective (you may see it as the option named: ‘Increase conversions on your website’)
- The destination page for your ad should be your giveaway page (set up in Step 2)
- Install Facebook’s tracking pixels so that you can monitor your optin rate and cost per lead. You’ll need to insert the pixel code on your landing page, as well as on a thank-you page which is shown to people after they’ve subscribed
- Start with a small budget of just a few dollars per day
- Target just the Mobile News Feed ad placement to begin with (this is a great starting point where you can get cheap conversions)
- Use overlapping targeting (aka ‘Flex Targeting’) to pinpoint the best audiences. Remember to look for people who will BUY your product
- If you only want people who can buy on Amazon.com, then ONLY target the USA (country specific targeting)
Step 5: Automatically Reply To People Who Optin
NOTE: For steps 5 and 6 I’ve assumed that your objective is to generate reviews, so I’ve written these steps accordingly. If you want to generate momentum or simply have a sales funnel working for you, then modify these two steps to place less emphasis on the reviews. In fact, for Momentum Campaigns and Sales Campaigns, you can deliver the coupon, and that’s all that needs to be done… no further follow up is needed.
The objective of step 5 is to further filter people who have opted in to your list, to ensure they’re the type of people you want to give free coupons (or big discounts) to.
Step 5 is most important when running giveaway campaigns where you’re actually giving away your products for no immediate profit.
I recommend that you keep this super-simple to begin with, a simple message such as the following works fine:
Message Subject Line:
Coupon Confirmation (important)
Message Body:
Hi NAME, thanks for signing up to get PRODUCT NAME completely free of charge! Before we send you the code, we wanted to re-state the eligibility rules of this coupon:
- You must be at least 20 years of age.
- You need to have an Amazon.com account (or be able to open one).
- You need to agree to leave us a review on Amazon.com after you have received your product.
If this all makes sense, and you’re ready to get your coupon code, then simply reply to this email and we’ll send you your unique code right away.
Thanks,
YOUR NAME
++++++ ++++++ ++++++
This will filter out the least responsive people, and the people who can’t be bothered jumping through more hoops. You’ll be left with the best leads and you can then send reply to everyone who contacts you with email like the following:
Hi, thanks for your message! Here’s your unique coupon code:
INSERT CODE HERE
You can get the wireless keyboard on this page:
http://www.amazon.com/your-product-url/
Let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks!
Aidan
++++++ ++++++ ++++++
NOTE: To improve your keyword rankings, it helps to either give a Super URL (some debate these don’t work… we haven’t seen any evidence suggesting this is the case however), or better yet, to get the subscriber to go to Amazon and search for your product using the keywords (search phrase) that you want your listing to rank for.
Step 6: Follow-up With The Buyer
The final step is to follow up with the buyer.
If someone has used your coupon code, then it’s time for them to fulfill their part of the deal, and leave you a review.
Make sure your buyer has had enough time to use the coupon and receive the product, and then reply to them in the same email thread you started in Step 5 (this makes it more personal, and makes them feel more obliged to follow through on what they promised).
This step isn’t rocket science, you just need to request that the review is left. You can give a link directly to the Amazon review page to avoid complications, and then send the occasional reminder requesting that the review is left.
It’s inevitable that some people won’t leave a review… there’s not much you can do about this, apart from reduce the risk of this happening by sending personal emails and follow-up messages as described in Step 5 and Step 6.
Switching Between Review, Momentum & Sales Campaigns
The main differences between these three campaigns are the discounts you’re providing. By simply switching the coupon value, and making some minor page and email tweaks, you can easily build out multiple campaigns.
The objective should ALWAYS be to end up with a set-and-forget Sales Campaign that runs at a profit. Sales Campaigns set you up to dominate your market, and make you almost unbeatable (your competition won’t know what hit them).
So there you have it, our Amazon Funnel process in 6 simple steps!
Don’t Forget Your FREE Download!
Click the button below and enter your email address to get the secret download link for the ‘Reverse Engineer Your Competition’ presentation from our London Blueprint Academy mastermind event:
More Amazon Training…
There’s a HEAP more Amazon specific training on this website, here are some of the most popular Amazon related training articles:
- 26 Amazon Ranking Factors
- 7-Step Amazon Optimization Plan
- 7 Top Secret Amazon Research Tactics
- How To Build A Whitelabel eCommerce Website In 25 Minutes
- Dissecting Successful Amazon Products
- Click here to see the full list of blog posts
Thoughts? Comments? Questions?
If you’ve got a question about this method or anything else, or just want to say hi, leave a comment below.
We’d love to hear how you go with this!
Aidan
Amazon Funnels: Get Sales Momentum, Rankings & Reviews shared from AidanBooth.com
Amazon Funnels: Get Sales Momentum, Rankings & Reviews syndicated from Aileen Batts Blog
from Leslies Tumblr http://lesliesrubin.tumblr.com/post/149769141787
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