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Whether you’re a new or an experienced seller on Amazon, your goal is to make more money and run your business more efficiently.
Enter the concept of “Growth Hacking.” The term was minted by entrepreneur Sean Ellis to describe the sustainable growth approach used by hyper-growth companies like Airbnb, Amazon, and Slack.
Growth hacking is a process of analyzation, rapid trial and error, and product development to identify the most efficient ways to grow a business.
We’ve compiled 6 growth-hacking strategies that can be implemented into your business model quickly. These ideas are designed to grow sales, expand branding, and give you a hand up over competitors.
1. Personal Touch
Whether you’re selling wholesale or private label products, you can always add a custom touch to your shipment. Put each of your items in a customized poly-bag, or send a business card with each order stating how a customer can contact you in case of a problem. You can even include a pamphlet with short links to all of your other products available on Amazon. Just make sure to avoid leading customers away from Amazon itself, which will earn you a quick suspension.
2. Backlinks Building
A “backlink” is any link on a non-Amazon web page which leads to an Amazon product page. The Amazon algorithm accounts for this web traffic, so you are more likely to show up at the top of the page when a customer is searching for your product.
Rather than spamming the comments section of every blog you can find, consider establishing quality backlinks. You’ll drive more traffic on websites with higher domain authority.* High-traffic blogs, Facebook, and Instagram are some of the easiest to start with.
*Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score which predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages. A Domain Authority score ranges from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank. Read more details here.
3. Master the Follow-up Email
A week after a product reaches its intended destination, send the purchaser a follow-up message through Amazon’s customer communication portal thanking them for the purchase and offering help if it’s needed. This will reduce bad reviews (since a majority of customers will reach out to you first) and encourage follow-up sales. If you sell more than a few items a day, consider an automated software program like Feedback Genius to save time.
Remember, nobody likes spam. Customers only need to be contacted once.
4. Get the buy box faster
When selling wholesale products (especially when sharing the buy box with many sellers), traffic can be slow coming at first. Amazon doesn’t start giving you a full rotation of the buy box until you have a few sales under your belt. Ironically, it can be hard to get sales until you have the buy box (especially on low-volume items).
A real-life example pulled from an Amazon Seller Facebook group: Seller X had a single product. There are 25 sellers on the product, and overall it moves 20-30 units a week. Of those, 21 sellers were at the exact same price point ($14.99 in this case). Seller X had the product in stock for two weeks and sold nothing. After digging into the statistics (Reports>Business Reports>Detail Page Sales and Traffic) the seller saw that they were getting the box about .05% of the time, with no sales to show.
They moved the product to break even price ($7.99 in this case) for just a few hours and then raised it back up to the standard buy box again. While this may seem unconventional, their buy box percentage more than tripled over the next few weeks, putting them in line with the percentage of the buy box they expected to receive.
There are some circumstances is a bad idea that can cost you a lot of money. For example, if you’re selling a very well ranked product, you may get an onslaught of break-even sales in the few hours your price is low. It depends on your business model — if you’re comfortable moving some product at break even, this is a great option.
5. Cross-listing
When you’ve already gone through the effort to acquire and market a great product, there no reason to only put it in a single marketplace. Amazon even has a program called MCF (Multi-Channel Fulfillment) that will store and ship products just as you do with FBA. All you have to do is tell Amazon where to send the product. There are many websites that allow third-party sellers, but start with the biggest and most reputable ones: eBay, Etsy, Wal-Mart, and Jet to name a few.
6. Listing Management
Unlike other online marketplaces, listings on Amazon do not belong to a seller. Essentially they are “owned” by Amazon and sellers share the listing. This gets complicated when a listing has a discrepancy or incorrect information. Any seller can go in and change the listing, but all sellers are notified and can veto the change.
Amazon will email all sellers each time a change is made to a listing. Watch these messages carefully — it may not be a huge deal if there’s a slight spelling error, but when another seller changes a quantity (or something of equal importance), it may create a scenario where you’re missing out on potential sales without realizing it.
Here are a few things to keep changes you’ll want to keep an eye on:
- Discrepancies (e.g. title says a product is 30 ounces but the listing description says 3 ounces)
- Good Pictures with clean white background, clearly showing the usefulness of the product.
- Keywords (Are relevant search terms included in the copy?)
- Strong Title (Amazon suggests “Product Brand/Description + Line/Collection + Material/Ingredient + Color/Size + Quantity”)
A growth hacking mindset takes business owners outside the traditional marketing box to expand reach, develop and run tests, find new products, and implement programs that drive more online sales — using as few time and money resources as possible. Most of these can be strategies can be implemented in 24 hours or less. What are you waiting for?