Let’s face it – your Amazon product won’t sell itself.
While you have the world’s largest marketplace with over billion of unique visitors every month at your side, there’s no guarantee that you’ll make a sale anytime soon. People will eventually stumble upon your listings on Amazon and you can optimize your product pages to make it easier for your audience to find them. However, optimizing your listings is just part and parcel of a larger strategy that you need to implement with your new products.
Therefore, if you want to ensure that you generate sales from your Amazon products, then you need to prepare its launch strategy properly. That means getting your target audience exciting about the product even before you launch. So by the time you make the product available on Amazon, you can immediately profit from it.
In this post about Amazon product launch, I will teach you:
- why developing an Amazon product is just half the battle
- the steps you need to take to launch a profitable Amazon product
- how long should your Amazon product launch last
Amazon product launch: Making money on Amazon is more than just having a great product
As a seller, crafting the best product to sell on Amazon is actually one of the easier steps in making money on the platform. Conducting product research in your market, finding the best suppliers for the raw materials, and optimizing your listings to make them appear on top of Amazon search result are time-consuming processes. However, they’re just half the battle. Even if you complete the processes correctly, you still need to drive traffic to your Amazon listing and compel them to purchase your product.
Easier said than done considering that you are coming up against 1,761,784 sellers on the platform, Part of those figures are your direct competitors selling the same product. You are up against equally talented and probably more experienced sellers than you. Therefore, finding an edge over them is a necessity if you want to turn in a profit over at Amazon.
One advantage is to learn how to develop Amazon product launch strategies successfully for all. As mentioned, there’s more to an Amazon product launch aside from the processes listed above and you’ll learn those things you need to do as well in this post.
The most important thing to achieve with your Amazon product launch
When running an Amazon product launch, you need to have a clear goal in mind. And that goal is to make sales.
However, the benefit of raking in sales is more than just hiking up your profits. You need to understand that the more sales you make on Amazon, the higher the platform will list your page for its keyword.
Therefore, by increasing your product’s sales velocity from your initial Amazon product launch, you can supercharge your product listing on the highest placement possible. That means greater exposure to buyers, higher click-through rate, and greater chances of making sales! Once the product ranks on the first page, you no longer have to run campaigns for it anymore. You can generate sales by leveraging on its placement. And you can achieve its ranking by generating as many sales as possible on your Amazon product launch.
To achieve this, you need to do the following:
- getting those initial product reviews with social proof
- running giveaways or generating coupon codes
- PPC (Amazon’s advertising platform)
1. Get initial reviews
Get reviews first before doing the other two. You need social proof to encourage people to purchase your product. If you run giveaways and ad campaigns until you get to the front page of your target keyword, you won’t be able to sustain your position unless you have user reviews. It’s one thing to rank on the first page, it’s another thing to generate sales that help you keep your high search ranking.
Without user reviews that will serve as proof as to how great your product is, then there’s no reason for your audience to purchase your product. If nobody buys your stuff, then you will see your listing regress in ranking until it no longer shows on Amazon search at all!
Not to mention, you just wasted money on giveaways and ads because you are unable to increase your conversion rate and turn visitors into sales given that you don’t have social proof yet.
How many product reviews you need for your product launch?
In order for your Amazon product launch strategy to be successful, you need at least 5-10 initial reviews. However, and if possible, you need to go for 10 reviews. In the eyes of customers, having reviews in double digits means that your product is popular. This reason also explains the huge difference between nine reviews and ten reviews. Therefore, you might as well put to at least ten reviews to increase your social proof and boost your chances of making a sale.
To get reviews, contact Facebook friends that have no connection to you. Don’t reach out to friends, family members, or loved ones whom you live with, hang out with, or live in close proximity. Ask them to buy out your product and leave a review on the listing. Make sure to incentivize them for their efforts by giving back the money they used to buy your product or sending them a coupon code for your other products.
Before your friend does this, make sure to unfriend them first for extra measure. Amazon has cracked down on reviews because some sellers have fake positive reviews for their products on their listing. The protocol is to ensure that all product reviews are organic and unbiased. And you don’t want anything that will trace you back to your friend.
Also, it would help if your friend has an existing Amazon account and has written reviews for other products s/he bought. It won’t look good for your product listing if all reviews were from users who just joined the platform days ago and haven’t bought a product and left a review just until now.
Difference between verified and unverified reviews
A verified review means that the reviewer purchased the product in full and left the review on the product listing. An unverified review comes from a user who didn’t buy your product but left a review on your listing.
You want an equal mix of verified and unverified reviews. It wouldn’t be bad to have all verified reviews for your product, but the same doesn’t apply if you have all unverified reviews. The purpose of dividing the types of reviews on your listing is so you don’t have to reimburse them all for their time and effort. Therefore, before asking people to review your product, identify which ones will send unverified reviews and which ones will write verified reviews (that you will pay for afterward).
Also, it helps make the product feel more organic due to the mix of verified and unverified reviews.
2. Run giveaways
Now that you have your reviews, it’s time to run the giveaways. The great thing about Amazon is that, once you give away your products, Amazon considers it as a sale. Therefore, your giveaways help increase the sales velocity of your product listing, which in turn helps it rank higher on Amazon search if not maintain its top ranking.
To launch a giveaway from the Amazon Seller Central page, click here for the details. If you want to use coupon codes to hand out to people, follow the directions in the video below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAaV59qNits
The most crucial factor when running a giveaway
When setting up your giveaway, it is crucial to identify how many units of your product will be up for grabs throughout the duration of the giveaway. For best practices, you need to give away as many units like the one organically ranking on top for your keyword.
For example, if the highest ranking product listing sells 15 units a day, then your giveaway must hand out the same number of units every day for the next week or so. This helps you increase your sales and velocity by matching the number of sales the top product listing makes in your niche without going overboard with your budget.
To find out the number of units a product sells every day, you need to copy and paste the ASIN number of that product and run it using the Product Tracker of Jungle Scout” draggable=”false” href=”https://entreresource.com/jungle-scout-alternatives/” data-wpil-keyword-link=”linked”>Jungle Scout. The tool will show you the average number of sales a product makes every day. It will also suggest to you keywords from your initial search that you can target.
Once you’ve successfully launched your giveaway, you need to share it with your friends and Amazon giveaway groups on Facebook to help spread the word and attract more entries. You can also share it on other social media platforms and launch email campaigns about it for your email list to increase the reach of your giveaway.
If you want to automate the promotion, you can hire companies like Viral Launch and JumpSend to do the heavy lifting for you. Obviously, you’ll have to pony up cash for their services of their launch team. But they’re worth the investment especially if you simply want to scale your FBA business and make the most out of your resources instead of doing the manual labor yourself.
3. Amazon PPC
Since you’re still climbing your way to the top of Amazon, you need to invest in Amazon PPC to help bring more eyeballs to your product. Ideally, you want to run your PPC ad along with your giveaways to boost your sales and velocity in the shortest time possible. This way, you can hike up your ranking on Amazon for your product until you reach the top so you no longer have to spend on paid campaigns. At the same time, your earnings from your ad campaigns balance out the products you’re giving away during this period. Therefore, you don’t get to lose much of your profit margin.
To get the most out of your PPC ad, you need to find long-tail keywords and search terms to rank for on Amazon. You can do this using Jungle Scout (assuming you’re already using this for its Product Tracker feature). With the Keyword Scout, you can find its exact search volume on Amazon and exact PPC bid so you can make your ads appear on top of the listings. Having both information allows you to find related search terms to your product with the highest volume and most affordable PPC costs so you can get the most out of your ads.
You can also try out these Amazon keyword research tools to help you find the best keywords to bid on to maximize the performance of your ads.
Prepare your Amazon product launch using the information above!
Launching your Amazon product the right way as a seller shouldn’t be difficult as long as you follow the steps above. Just make sure to do the steps in order. As mentioned, it is key to start with getting reviews first to use as social proof. Without them, then you would yield the desired results for your giveaways, coupon codes, and ads.
Also, you need to consider the duration of your product launch. It is ideally to run the campaign within 3-7 days. Your budget will also play a role with the duration of your launch. For example, if your top competitor is making over 20 sales according to Jungle Scout, then you need to scale accordingly. If you don’t have to funds to run a week-long campaign, then three days should suffice.
After the initial launch is up, measure the results and use your earnings to run another campaign. Consider the keyword you targeted for your ads and find more ways to hike up the reviews for your product. The goal is to grow your sales and velocity until your listing reaches the top of Amazon for your keyword. Until then, make sure to keep scaling your product launch until you reach your goal. Good luck!
If you have suggestions on how to effectively do an Amazon product launch, share them by commenting below!