Amazon can be a gold mine for sellers. But it comes with challenges, too. Find out how savvy marketers use Messenger marketing to grow business both on and off the channel.
There’s no denying that Amazon is one of the best platforms to find retail traffic. By the end of 2018, Amazon ranked #1 with 20.6 million users per month.
There are many benefits of using Amazon for your online business. However, there are also some pretty significant risks if you build your brand only using the Amazon platform.
It’s certainly tempting to use Amazon to build your brand – no doubt about that at all. But one of the biggest negatives is that the customers belong to Amazon. That may prove problematic for profitability and repeat business.
The Messenger Marketing Solution
The big issue for most Amazon sellers is relying on Amazon as the sole source of business.
What happens if something goes wrong?
For example, Amazon could decide to delist or derank one of your products. If it’s a product that drives a large source of your revenue, your business faces a severe cashflow risk as a result.
There are also occasions when Amazon has banned an entire business. Typically, such bans relate to selling prohibited or counterfeit products. However, it’s possible that they may ban you for consistent shipping issues or for not responding to messages fast enough. An overabundance of negative feedback can also lead to a ban.
While these are hopefully not current concerns for your Amazon business, most sellers lose sleep over them, particularly as with great expectations, they approach the big sales seasons.
In the absence of being able to reach out to and connect with your buyers (all purchases on Amazon are by Amazon’s customers and they go to great lengths to prevent sellers from marketing to them), the typical go-to strategy for clawing back lost ground is paid traffic.
That’s where a Messenger marketing solution can make a huge difference. With an effective Messenger marketing strategy, you can capture your audience before sending them to Amazon, thus getting the best of both worlds.
Three Ways to De-Risk Your Amazon Business
The goal is to take control back from Amazon so that you can build a real off-Amazon business. You can use Messenger marketing to build your own customer base for this. We’re going to look at three ways that you can do this.
Method #1 – Leverage Amazon’s Data
In the past, Amazon has been very shy about sharing buyer data with sellers. It’s still possible to extract a list of orders using tools like ManageByStats, and use that data to build a custom audience in Facebook, but the degree of data matching is lower now than it used to be.
If you’re starting from scratch with learning about your real buyers, a great place to start is the Amazon Brand Analytics tool, released inside Seller Central in February 2019. You can use this to access a demographics report. The data is still sketchy after only a few months, but there still may be some eye openers you can use to refind a custom audience, including average age, income, and even education of your buyers. Plus, you can filter the results down to gender and even marital status.
All of this is data can be used to build a strong click-to-Messenger Ad campaign, and capture more targeted customers. From there, you can choose whether to send them to Amazon, or bring them to your own Shopify or WooCommercs store.
This is a great way for you to build your off-Amazon revenue. Better yet, you may get to appeal to an audience who might otherwise never discover your product among the sea of other products on Amazon.
Method #2 – Use Messenger to Ask for Reviews
Amaaon is a review battle ground. Customers are 9X more likely to leave a review from a bad experience than if they get the result they expected – a perfect product.
The good news is that customers you’ve acquired through Messenger are much more likely to leave a review for you. To maximise your review rate, you’ll need to run an automated campaign that takes the buyer from discovery through to providing feedback.
For example, you could create a Messenger ad campaign to buy the product from your Amazon store. Follow up a few days later to see if they managed to purchase, and if so, ask then for their feedback. If you’re sending coupon traffic to Amazon, remember that discounts above 30% result in non-verified reviews, which don’t count towards your overall star rating.
You benefit no matter where they leave that review. If they post it on Amazon, you’re guarding yourself against black hatters and sales dips due to negative reviews. But you should also consider asking them to leave a review on Facebook, Google or your own site. If they post it on Facebook, your traffic will be better and click rate from Ads can improve. More reviews on your own site will improve your store conversion (and there are no issues with coupon codes here!) Google reviews will improve your Shopping campaigns as well as natural organic traffic to your store.
Method #3 – Create Your Own Ecosystem
The ultimate insurance is to have your own eComm store up and firing.
For example, your Messenger campaigns don’t have to push people towards your Amazon store. Instead, direct them to a landing page that relates to the specific product they’re looking for. This is particularly effective for people who have already purchased from your brand on Amazon, and therefore have already established a level of trust in your service.
Building relationships with your customers is the best way to ensure they keep your brand front of mind. Do everything you can to engage them on Messenger, both before and After an Amazon sale. For example, why not leverage packaging iserts to deliver outstanding customer service and answer your FAQs. Deliver a unique content piece showing how to get the best from your product, or offer the ability to download a manual.
Ultimately, unusual experiences are what stick in people’s minds, long after your Amazon listing page has been forgotten. Messenger provides an unprecedented way to engage the customer and make memorable moments all through the lifecycle.
Eventually, Amazon will become part of a multi-channel ecommerce ecosystem. As a result, any issues that you experience with the platform will have less of an effect on your business.
Build Your Off-Amazon Ecosystem
Relying solely on Amazon for your revenue opens your business up to all sorts of potential problems. Instead of focusing solely on driving traffic there, use the platform to build an audience and have conversations to understand your customers better and create lasting memories of exceptional service.
Facebook Messenger is one of the most effective channels for doing this. The methods described above can help you to de-risk your Amazon business because they help you to build an audience away from the platform.
Beyond Points can help you to put these techniques into practice. Have a chat with our team to find out more about how we can help you to take the risk away from selling on Amazon.
