Table of Contents
Introduction
In this blog you will understand – How to Acquire your Buyer’s Genuine Contact Information and entire purchase history by shifting from Product Focused to a Customer Focussed Approach.
My product listing is fully optimised, have all the right keywords, images, branding, offers and I am paying Amazon for PPC but still not enough sale or ranking. Why?
Question been asked many times, where Amazon Sellers are looking for answers in the products while it is something else. This is a Product-Focussed mindset while your Brand needs to start focussing on customer or your buyers.
How typical Amazon buyer’s get stuck in Amazon by being Product-Focussed Approach?
- They list the product in Amazon Seller Central.
- Optimise the listing with nice title, bullet points and description.
- Optimise for Keywords.
- Create awesome images and if possible add the video.
- If Amazon allows, your Amazon listing description looks superb.
- Then you will add a coupon stack for eg. 5% OFF, 10% OFF, etc.
At this stage your listing looks a killer. It is just like you invest if you open a physical store and it has to look appealing and attracting.
You as a Brand owner is so happy and proud of the work and super excited – “Yes!! Money will flow now and sale will start flowing..”
Results in many cases – Nothing is flowing up or not as expected. You started wondering “How on earth other crappy listing on Amazon is getting good reviews and sales while your appealing listing is not generating any sales”.
And then the light bulb or I would say an email from Amazon – Dear Amazon Seller, go for sponsored Ads and pay to buy the traffic.
And you start paying Amazon to give you some of the traffic if you are lucky. In many instances, even if you have sponsored ads, Amazon is not driving any traffic to your listing.
If you are lucky, you will see sales coming through from those sponsored ads, and that’s the moment you are find your momentary happiness to see someone buying your product from Amazon.
You start spending more, customers are buying from your Amazon listing. Then you go for lightning deals and many more by paying to Amazon. If things goes well, you will have organic sale without ad spend along with sales from Amazon Ad spend. And there are many softwares that are automating the Amazon sponsored ads by finding the right keywords, optimising the bidding and fully automating it.
In short, this is How many Brand Owners find their living on Amazon.
If you really deep dive into financial numbers, 50% of the money goes to Amazon and sometime more and what you are left with nothing as part of the profit has to go to buy the new inventory and this becomes your vicious cycle of being stuck on Amazon where you see the profit and growth but no escape. This is the brief summary –
- Amazon enjoys juicy revenue by selling your products.
- Amazon gets heavy cut by Fulfilling your products to your customers.
- Amazon gets money from ad spend every time buyers clicks on the ad even if they buy it or not.
- Amazon gets the money from lightning deals or other offers.
- Amazon controls the customer data, you do not get any info as a FBA seller other than what they bought and which region they belong to.
- If you are selling products from other brands then you are having a price bidding war with other competitors.
Only thing you can do is to just focus on paying more money to maintain the ranking.
If you are smart enough, you will try other strategies like – deep discounts, cash back or go to some external company where they promise to build the ranking with their customers who will buy at full price and then you will pay them back and company.
Well, these are again fake strategies that one day will cost your Amazon business.
And one fine day, someone complaints about your listing and your products got banned from Amazon and all the effort you did to come to the ranking all goes in water just in one shot. Unfortunately, this is the only reason why 90% of the brand do not survive more than 1-2 years.
This was also my story when I launched my first private label product in Amazon many years back. I failed.
Most of the Sellers are actually Indirect Employees of Amazon
Because most of them can’t escape leaving Amazon as this is only marketplace that generates over 80-90% of the Total Revenue.
They are solely rely on Amazon. It doesn’t matter if your revenue is 100k or $1m per annum, if your business survival depends upon Amazon then your business is at risk just like Amazon employee who can be sacked anytime.
Why 90% of the Buyer’s are Failing to Survive Amazon?
There is lot of misinformation about making a money by selling on Amazon. There are thousands or more Amazon gurus selling their courses and highlighting and luxury lifestyle that you can get in few months by selling on Amazon.
Most of them are fake and those showing real revenue numbers are not showing the real picture about net profit they are actually making. They are potentially making more money by selling their courses, premium memberships than actually selling on Amazon.
Spreading misinformation is pretty easy where any one can create a YouTube hit, fan following in social media and fake it all real.
You start buying multiple courses by looking at the testimonials and started following the exact methods that possibly thousands of newbies are doing it.
So stay away from most of the Gurus and take their strategy with the pinch of salt.
Check out this blog – 9 Strategies to Build a Lasting E-commerce Brand.
How you can Build the Real Brand on Amazon with Customer-Focussed Approach?
It is so simple and never failed method in any business – FOCUS ON YOUR CUSTOMERS. If you focus on your product then you will be racing with others, but if you focus on your customers then you will have a Brand.
You will find the perfect example of Customer-Focussed Approach in Amazon world who has made trillions by following this strategy and making you, as a seller focussing on the product. I think you got it, yes, Jeff Bezos.
His whole approach for building the Amazon empire is Customer Focussed and that’s the biggest secret always there in front of you but still hidden.
Jeff ensures super class treatment to the Amazon customers. Now as a Seller, I never got such treatments. Have you ever contacted the seller central support and ever try to resolve any issues and got stuck? We, as a seller, are second class segments within Amazon habitat.
So, having a Customer-Focussed mindset will make your brand more resilient, because your buyers are connected with your brand. There is a relationship and there is a knowing about your customers.
How Amazon does that?
- Amazon controls the customer data, their details and their buying behaviours.
- Amazon spends billions in analytics and how to personalise each buyers experience based on the purchase behaviours.
- Have you see customer who bought X also bought Y.
- Amazon gives 5 star customer service. Their return policies are amazing and no one have matched it so far. I love Amazon as a customer.
- Amazon knows customer life time value and they know that how much they can spend on external marketing to attract more.
- Amazon know each buyers purchase behaviours like how recently they bought, what’s the frequency, how much they have spend, have they utilised any offers, have they returned, have they opted for subscribe and save. I will say everything you do in Amazon is being tracked to give you special personalised treatment.
Now look at your Brand – 90 % of the brand don’t even know who is buying their product. So all of the listed above is never been thought of. Now that’s the Customer-Focussed mindset that Amazon follows. And the first step is by having two core information:
- Customer’s Information
- Customer’s buying behaviours
Even if many brands knows but failed to do that is because of a thought process that they can not control Amazon buyers’ data because Amazon does not provide that if you are FBA seller. There are tools that mine and give you the buyer’s real contact but you do not have consent to email. I will not recommend buying any customer’s data – this is against the customer privacy.
Brand that is not build on authenticity would failed to connect with the buyers. One happy buyer is worth 10s of one time buyers as he/she will –
- Buy again again from your Amazon store or Shopify Store.
- Leave a genuine review (not 5 start but a genuine review as he/she cares about your product).
- Talk about your product and refer to friends and family.
This is the Exponential Scaling Effect when you connect with your buyers and build the authentic relationship. And this is where you will create a Customer Focus Brand.
Ways to Build a Relationship with Amazon Customers
Coming back to the core inputs on how you can build the relationship with the Amazon buyers and how you can get their core information (real email and buying data) – this is fairly straight forward and it starts with your thought process –
- Figure out who are your ideal customers, create a full profile. Something you can feel and talk to them as if there are in front of you.
- Think of Amazon just a channel where you can find those ideal customers
- Devote time to build the connection with those customers. Find other external channels where your ideal buyers usually seeks solutions to the problem that your product potentially solves.
- Most of your customers will have an account on Amazon.
- Build the strategy to capture their contact details and nurture them to buy from your Amazon listing.
- Build the strategy to match the contact details as in step 5 with their order purchase.
- Once order and real contact is matched, then this give you the first powerful data covering both customer information and their buying behaviours.
- Rest is all various strategies on how you can engage.
Intention of this blog is to give you a view and approach that is Customer Focussed Mindset and based on authentic relationship with buyers and based on serving them with your Amazing product offering.
At Fulon, this is pure focus and there are tools and strategies we apply and help Brand Owners to implement in their businesses.
