Driving External Traffic On Amazon: An Investment That Will Bring Dividends For Years

How is that actually possible? Separating your product from hundreds of product that looks identical to yours. Yes, obviously they are not as good as yours. But how will a customer know that? You need that extra edge. It might surprise you to hear that most of the top Amazon sellers use external traffic to drive traffic to your product detail page. This supplementary traffic helps you make sales before any extra noise comes in. Read this blog post to know why this is such a powerful strategy and how you can also effectively use it to get a leg up on your competitors.

Why Drive External Traffic To Your Product Detail Page?

Half of the customer searches begin on Amazon. So why not just rely on Amazon’s organic traffic? There are several reasons why bringing external traffic is a must for your Amazon store.

Get An Edge Over Your Competitors

You have the most beautiful photos, competitive price, convincing copy and enhanced content. But the problem is that your competitors have all these too. With more and more sellers jumping in the Amazon selling bandwagon, distinguishing your product from the pool of similar products is next to impossible. You don’t just battle for organic ranking but the sponsored ones as well. By driving external traffic, you gain a competitive advantage over your competitors because it gives your product the opportunity to be seen first, on its own.

Build An Email List

With an average return of $44 for every $1 spent, it is the most profitable medium of advertising in digital marketing. But according to Amazon’s stringent guidelines, you cannot use customer’s email address and in recent years, Amazon has taken away the ability to see the customer’s email address.

However, if you make contact with the customers before they reach Amazon, then its 100% white-hat. By capturing the right audience and setting them up through the right sales funnel, then you can get an email list. Here’s all you can do with that list:

• Run marketing campaigns

• Ask for reviews

• Build long term relation

• Push cross-sells and up-sells

• Inform customers about the discount offers

• Filter the traffic. You can share promo codes through email and only the interested customers will use that code. This way your bounce off rate will decrease

Brand Awareness, Brand Awareness & Brand Awareness

Another way to stand strong in the game is by building a strong, recognizable brand. A brand customers blindly trust and a brand that differentiates yourself from the cheap sellers. Amazon has various tools for brand awareness such as EBC (A+ content now), Storefront, Sponsored Brand ads and much more. But it has pretty strict rules for all of these. While you advertise outside Amazon, you can be as creative as you want to be. Create a unique brand voice that stays with the audience for long. Just like how you remember the logo, tagline and jingles for some huge brands such as Nike and McDonalds, do something similar and impactful for your brand too.

It’s A Backup Plan

Amazon is, without any doubt, the best platform to sell on. But it’s cold, unforgiving and not-to-forget, highly competitive. Things might be running smoothly for you now, but you should always prepare for the worst. There have been thousands of cases where the seller’s account was suspended all of a sudden because of a policy infringement or black hat tricks or they have been thrown out by competition. The emails list generated through the external traffic will act as a fallback plan. So if someday you don’t have Amazon’s customer base, you are not out in the cold.  You know how to drive traffic and fast. If you have a relationship with your customers, if your customers know your product, know your brand, it will be a lot easier to bring sales even when you don’t have Amazon.

Amazon Rewards Listing That Drive More Traffic

While nothing is proven yet, it’s usually assumed and accepted that Amazon rewards listing that receives external traffic by increasing its organic ranking.

How To Drive Traffic Effectively?

This is easier said than done. But if you are able to crack the formula, then it is a valuable skill to have one. There are no sure-shot techniques, but here are a few tips that can help you cut down the error from your trial-and-error methods:

Make Your Listing Ready For The Traffic

First things first, make your product retail-ready before even thinking of spending your advertising dollars. We have discussed this concept before in our Amazon Sponsored Ad series, episode 1.  If your listing is not competitively positioned with adequate number of reviews, appealing images and informative copy, then all the money you spend on bringing the traffic will go waste. Consider your product detail page as the landing page of your advertising. It should be attractive, scannable and user-friendly. You should always check the below-mentioned things before kick-starting your campaigns:

• Images – All 9 images including product-in-white, infographics and lifestyle images)

• On-page content – Informative, scannable and SEO friendly

• Buy box – Your product should ALWAYS have the buy box, that is Add to Cart button

• Reviews and rating – At least 15+ reviews with a rating of 3.5 and above

• Stock Availability – Always stay on stock

Choose The Right Channel

Once your listing is ready for the traffic you need to decide where it’s going to come from. Now there are so many sources to bring external traffic, which one is the best? Well, there is no fix answer to that; it depends on your product, market and obviously your budget. We have summarized a few channels most of the advertisers use:

1) Email Marketing: As mentioned above, email list is an invaluable tool for building a long term customer base. Through email marketing, you can engage with your customers, find them what they like and dislike and also let them know about the promos, giveaways, discounts and product launches.

2) Organic Social Media: It is needless to say that this source has the most potential. Every second person uses social media and an average person spends about 136 minutes on social media. So setting up a social media ad campaign is a no-brainer. All the major social media platforms have advertising programs. You can utilize various types of content like videos, banners, polls, blogs to engage your audience and get them interested in your product. Here’s the information about each of them:

• Facebook: With 2.7 billion active users per month, Facebook is the No. 1 social media platform. It offers highly targeted filters for capturing the right audience, including age, gender, languages, and connections. It also enables you to exclude people from an audience based on interest, demographics, and behavior. If you are looking to target a wide audience, then Facebook is the best choice for you.

• Instagram: Slowly and steadily, Instagram has become a social media powerhouse with over 800 million active users per month. That’s double than Twitter! Because of its heavy focus on visual aesthetics, it is an excellent platform for building a brand. About 70% of U.S. businesses use Instagram. The reason you ask? Engagement. According to Instagram, 80% of its users follow at least one business. Instagram is also highly popular amongst young audiences, so if your advertising campaign is geared towards the young audience, then Instagram would be a better choice than Facebook. You can run an ad on Instagram with t he help of Facebook ad manager.

• Twitter: Despite its rocky growth, Twitter is still one of the most largest advertising platforms, with over 320 million active users per month. If used strategically, Twitter can prove to be a gold mine. You can start with a broad targeting, but you can fine-tune your variables to get very, very specific. Visit ads.twitter.com to get started. <>

• Pinterest: It might not be that popular but not many know that 90% of Pinterest users plan to purchase using the platform, 2 million products pin products every day and conversion on Pinterest click-through generate $50 on average which is higher than any other social media platform. It might take a few tests and maybe some failures before you can properly optimize your campaigns, but it is worth it. Visit ads.pinterest.com to get started. <https://ads.pinterest.com/>

Other platforms you can use are LinkedIn, Reddit and YouTube.

3) Influencers & Affiliate Marketing: Social media influencers have the potential to drive thousands of customers, if not millions. Find out the influencers in your industry and reach out to them. The trick is to find the truly influential personality who has enough clout to get people to try your product. You can approach these influencers directly or through their PRs. Some may ask for a fee and some may promote your product in exchange for free products and samples. So working with them is quite cheap compared to other sources.

4) Blog and Guest Posts: This is the least popular yet very effective tool; everyone should start using. If you create engaging content, then customers will keep coming back to you and will be interested in what you sell. You can populate your blog posts with links to your Amazon product page or brand store and steer your readers towards them. Aside from maintaining your own blog post, you can also write a guest post for other people’s blog or partner with them by having them review your product.

5) Just two powerful words – Google Adwords: Yes, you are selling on Amazon but not taking advantage of Google means you are missing out on great opportunities. Maybe Google AdWords are already a part of your company’s existing marketing strategy, but you didn’t think of how can you take advantage of Google to drive traffic to your Amazon store. You can target the audience searching your product on Google and then direct them to your product detail page. Tip: Go for short as well as long-tail and phrases when you are advertising on Google.

Whether it’s Facebook or Google you choose, don’t ever make this major mistake, most people make

They send traffic directly to their product detail page. Why is this bad? Shoppers you target on Amazon by PPC are there for a reason; they are ready to make a purchase. Because of this, traffic on Amazon converts a lot higher than ANY other platform.

While the average conversion rate across all retailers was just 3.32%. This means that any external traffic you bring to your product detail page is less likely to convert. Your conversion rates will drop drastically and your ranking will drop too.

What to do now? Enter: Click Funnel.

You can send traffic to a landing page or similar sales funnel. Using software tool like ClickFunnel, you can generate a landing page which shows of product’s benefits and standout features. It will help you to:

• Filter your traffic

• Eliminate those who aren’t ready to buy

• Allow you to retarget

• Provide you with contact details

• Promote discounts and product launches

Here’s how it works:

So first you get in front of your potential audience through external sources and then you send them to a landing page. This way, you will get their email address before they go to Amazon. Then you send a promo code so they can use this while shopping on Amazon. So only the interested customers will move from the landing page to Amazon. This way, you will bring extra traffic to your detail page while maintaining a happy relationship with your conversion rates. It is equally necessary to make sure that your landing page is also attractive and informative, just like your product detail page.

Now you know how to get traffic right? Start working on them and make your Amazon detail page a traffic generating engine!

Final Thoughts:

As more and more customers flock towards Amazon, it becomes difficult for third-party sellers to stand out. External traffic not only gives you another channel for bringing sales but also helps you to rank higher and make more organic sales. It’s good for you, for customers and Amazon. Now that’s what we call a win-win situation. This is something I do for all my clients and highly recommend to you also. Yes, the process can be a bit complicated, ensuring that you have a proper strategy is the key to being successful. If you are thinking about exploring this option, feel free to reach me with questions. Just click here to schedule a meeting with me.