Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  0:18  

Welcome, everyone. Happy Thursday. Oh my gosh, I am Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson, a digital strategist with BWG Connect and we are a network of knowledge sharing group, we stay on top of latest trends challenges whatever is going on within the digital landscape. We are on track to do at least 500 of these virtual events this year due to the increase in demand to better understand the digital space. We'll also do at least 100 in person small format dinners. So if you happen to live in a tier one city, feel free to shoot us an email, we'd love to send you an invite the dinners are typically 15 to 20 people having certain discussion around a certain digital topic and as always a fantastic time. So definitely check it out. We spend the majority of our time talking to brands that's how we stay on top of latest trends and challenges. You can feel free to drop us a line and we'd love to chat with you. And you can send it to me at Tiffany@bwgconnect.com. And we can get some time on the calendar is from these conversations we generate the topic ideas we know people want to learn about. And it's also where we gain our resident experts such as product winner who is with us today. Anybody that we asked to teach a collective team has come highly recommended from multiple brands within the network. So if you're ever needed any recommendations within the digital space, do not hesitate to reach out, we have a shortlist of the best the best, we'd be happy to provide that information to you. Also note that we do have a talent agency BWG Talent that we'd be happy to put you in contact with as well. Should you have any hiring needs a few housekeeping items. We want this to be first and foremost fun, educational, conversational. So please put those questions comments into the chat q&a. Or if you feel more comfortable, you can email me at Tiffany@bwgconnect.com. And we'll be sure to get to them. This is a 30 Minute Webinar. So we're gonna get started here shortly. And we will formally end up the 30 minute mark. So with that, let's rock and roll and start to talk about the secret of winning that Prime Day while maximizing ROI as I'm gonna kick it off to you Tim and Matt. If you can give a brief introduction on yourself. That'd be great. And then we can dive right into the info.

Tim Wilson  2:13  

Thank you. Thanks, Tiffany, I hope one day to be able to match your energy. YaSM is great. So my name is Tim. I work at a company named ProductWind where I lead the revenue organization. I've done this a few other times before. Other companies you might know of like commerce IQ, where I joined when they had one company one customer who them pattern, a large three P seller and a few others. So excited to talk to you today about what I'm seeing and what we're seeing about ways that you couldn't find day without having to necessarily, you know, sacrifice too much on your ad spend. So, Matt, why don't you introduce yourself?

Matthew Rosenfeld  2:55  

I'm Matt, great to meet everybody. I used to work at ProductWind I lead up channel and agency partnerships. In terms of background, I've been an Amazon seller myself. So I've launched a number of products over the years acquired brands sold some of those brands to larger aggregators in the space worked with a number of those aggregators and am now i product when and so happy to chat anything Amazon. That's kind of my my area of of expertise.

Tim Wilson  3:21  

Yeah. So Matt is also for those of you that I'm going to make a reference that some of you may or may not know, but Matt kind of like SCI Sperling era, he's not only a customer, or she's me, he's not only an employee here, he's a former customer, right. So Matt used to buy our services, and then obviously worked pretty well for him with his, the acquisitions he's been able to be a part of, and now he's here. So we're thrilled to have him on the team. Very cool. I've got, we've got a few slides to walk through, we're happy to share this deck out to anybody who wants it. So don't worry about taking screenshots or notes, just send BWG a note saying you'd like the slides. We're happy to give them to you. And we're also happy to make this as conversational as possible. So any questions or any comments you want to make? Whatever I can say, to encourage you to do that, I'd like to say right now, so please, please don't be shy. We're gonna walk through a few things today. Just some high level stats on Prime Day. And now, you know, items two through five are really about different things that we're seeing that you can do to be really effective on Prime Day, outside of, you know, Spot winning sponsored brand and sponsored brand, placements throughout, sponsored product, etc. So, first up, so stats from July because there's two prime days now, right? There's July and there's October. So July 2022, prime date. One of the things that's interesting is that See, with COVID, there was a major bump in increase in Prime Day purchases. And even though there was a major bump 2022 still saw even increases above and beyond that. So there were 60,000 items purchased every minutes, you know, worldwide, there were 300 million products sold and, you know, 12 billion revenue. But those of you that are familiar with the Chinese market, this isn't exactly Singles Day, but it's definitely the biggest, they're the closest thing that we have to it here in the States. So the exact date for primary this year has not been announced. I haven't heard any, but the rumors I hear are going to be similar to what it was last year, people are expecting something around July 13, or 14th. But that's just that's just people guessing at this point, if anybody happens to have heard any other rumors, love to love to hear. We'd love to hear so when you have that major surge in interest on the like, that's not always great news. There's there's, it's because it's going to impact some things right, most notably, the CPC is the cost per clicks just seem to be getting higher and higher. I was talking with somebody was at shop talk earlier this week. I'm not sure if any of you were there. But I had a conversation with one person. And he was telling me that they've recently learned within Amazon, you can't place a bid above 4999 With a click is it it's maxed out, and it's bananas to me? Oh, some companies are paying $50 for a click. You know, it's I think pattern put out a study that said at this point 35%, I should look it up on as I'm sure my screen, I believe it's 35% of ad dollars spent on Amazon now have a return less than one. So it's getting really more difficult and fewer and fewer organic placements on the page as they find different ways to monetize, right? So spend across the board is up. And again, this speaks to the surge we saw already with 2021 because of COVID. Right, it's continued to go up. So there's a lot of people who are really excited to advertise on Amazon. And I think it's an important thing to do for sure, is just how can we make that spend? And how can we make your ad dollars be more efficient? How can we stretch your dollar now? And that's one of the things that a lot of people had difficulty doing because they ad efficiency is across the board getting more and more challenging. And kind of on a downward trajectory.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  7:51  

So gone are the days where you could rely on five star reviews that were hundreds, if not 1000s of reviews as like your organic like ranking. Now. It's that plus $50. A click spared. Yeah, well, yeah.

Tim Wilson  8:06  

I mean, Amazon's while the $50 will click Well, I haven't heard that from other people. But

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  8:14  

we haven't sold that Amazon. But yes,

Tim Wilson  8:16  

dog I know dog food and other terms. Some of them are just bananas. Yeah. But we'll talk a little bit about what you need. And Matt can actually help lead that conversation about, you know, what is Amazon look for with their Amazon with your organic placement? Certainly things like sales velocity and conversion rate are a big part of it. We'll talk through that. Matt, why don't you kind of talk through a little bit about, you know, what we can do to, to win on Prime Day?

Matthew Rosenfeld  8:42  

Yeah, so the biggest thing, I mean, starting here with product discoverability is going to be you aren't going to want to pay for placements right on Prime Day. Because if you are, you're gonna be spending a substantial amount of money to remain and retain the placements that you're having heading into it. And so the best thing you can do is position yourself organically for success to capture that increase in traffic without having to increase your spend or pay inflated CPCs. So product discoverability should really be a top priority here. And you should really be able to focus kind of the way in which we think about it is look at conversion rate, look at click through rate, look at sales velocity and understand how that's impacting when and where customers are discovering and purchasing your product and focus your efforts on ensuring that you are maintaining kind of relevancy there to keep boosting those metrics.

Tim Wilson  9:33  

Yeah, yeah. And then the whole goal here is to, if you can position yourself, it's like if anybody serves, if you can position yourself well ahead of the wave and then just ride it when it comes in. That's the best way to really have an amazing Prime Day. Amazing Black Friday, Cyber Monday. I know a tier one. Absolute tier one consumer electronics brand that didn't advertise at all? I'm like, do you know that on the turkey five? What they just put all of their money into coupons and discounts? Seems like we're already organically there. Let's just see if we can capture more people by by providing, you know, price breaks. So we'll talk a little bit more about that. But we're starting to see this becoming more and more common, right? What can I do the four or five, six weeks ahead of time to position my products really well, for that surge and then ride the wave. Right. And that's, that's really what we're, what we're talking about here, where there's 200 million Prime members that are shopping on Prime Day, globally, that's just blows my mind, there's that many people, right. And the deals and the promotions that you have are what's going to really help drive your click through rate and your conversion rate, which are two strong signals in the a nine or a nine is commonly referred to as Amazon's search algorithm. And click through rate conversion rate are two more powerful attributes that the a nine is looking for. So you can if you have a strong organic placement already, you're able to create some of these deals, that will help drive up your click through rate and your conversion. Those are some helpful signals that are really going to keep your products buoyed up quite high.

Matthew Rosenfeld  11:25  

And I think there's something to know there too, on this is that a lot of people, I think when we talk about deals and promotions, immediately default to thinking about running deals and promotions only on right Turkey five or Prime Day or that actual event. But I think something really important is understanding that running them actually leading up to the event, like we're talking about kind of that four to six weeks in advance, positioning yourself to improve your rank heading into that peak season, because there's always a little bit of a lull, right, and that seven to 10 days before Prime Day may occur where people know what's happening, they're going to expect deals, volume kind of drops a little bit. So if you can position yourself ahead of that three to four weeks to really boost ranking, sales velocity, click through rate conversion, all leading up to the event, you're going to see everything kind of compound once that increased traffic does start to roll in.

Tim Wilson  12:16  

Matt, can you maybe talk a little bit about relevancy and how that works here as well, when you start thinking about your, your SEO and your your placement? In that perspective?

Matthew Rosenfeld  12:26  

Yeah, so relevancy has been, I mean, very top of mind, I think in the Amazon community, and for us recently, where you want to make sure that you are bidding on terms, placing yourself on term showing up in a place where your product has the highest likelihood of getting that first click and getting that conversion, right, because if it doesn't, and you're driving people to your listing, but it may not be the most relevant product to their search, what's gonna happen is they're gonna land on your listing, they're gonna evaluate the product, and then they might bounce. And that's going to actually be detrimental, right? It's, it's lowering the overall conversion rate of your listing, and may actually impact negatively your ranking across the board. So it's very important to be mindful of where your product is relevant, who it's relevant to, and do different kinds of analyses here to say, on this term, we know it's relevant, but the average price of the top selling products is 40%, below our price. And so there's a lot of different ways where you could say, Look, we're a relevant product, but we're not a relevant price to this customer demographic on this term. And so it's very important to just look at those different metrics and understand where you're going to be most applicable to the actual audience that's searching and converting.

Tim Wilson  13:33  

All right. So what we want to we want to do what we're talking about here is generating that momentum. So one of the things that we see top performers doing with Amazon is essentially sending different signals, or data points to Amazon, to help him boost that products. Ranking. Right. So Amazon is extremely algorithmically driven, which means it relies on data, just by definition. And because of the a nine algorithm, you know, we may not necessarily know what the order of priorities are, per se. Although there's a lot of people that have high degrees of confidence that they're that they understand what it is you can you can google it pretty easily. What you really want to do is send all of the right signals to Amazon ahead of time that your product is hot, because it's Amazon's constantly looking to put the most relevant product high in the search ranks because they want to help capture the sale. So we're going to talk through what those different signals are that Amazon looks for. Right? This So some of the key signals that we feel that you can really help control. Well, Matt, why don't you Why don't you actually walk through this slide and expand on some of the others that are not listed? Yeah. So I mean,

Matthew Rosenfeld  15:13  

the biggest levers you're going to have to pull here and kind of what's going to drive momentum and that impact with Amazon. First one, starting with external traffic. I mean, there's been a lot of conversation here. Amazon loves external traffic, right, you're doing a favor to the marketplace by either bringing people in who weren't initially starting their search for a product within the ecosystem. And so there's different refers right? That is going to come from when we talk about competitive traffic. So if you are able to send traffic from a Tiktok, from an Instagram, from a Facebook, right via an ad, influencer, your branded channels, anything like that through to Amazon, that sends an amazing signal to the platform that you are giving them traffic, you're trying to send sales through, and they place a heavy weight on the value of that traffic in terms of how it boosts your product. But again, the key thing here is going to be relevancy, because it's not, it's not a matter of saying I can send a million eyeballs through to my listing and one person is going to buy, it would be a lot better if you sent 10, right, and all 10 bought, or you sent 10 and nine bots. So again, you've got to focus on relevancy here. And that kind of trickles down, that external traffic trickles down to say if it is relevant, you're going to see that you have an extraordinarily high click through rate and extraordinarily high conversion rate, it's going to drive an increase in your sales velocity. And again, relevancy kind of trickles down everywhere, across the key levers and key metrics, you're trying to do like leverage to influence Amazon and say, Look, if this is a really relevant product, and it gets to the right person, their likelihood of leaving a positive review is also higher, right, your review rates, I mean, your return rates are going to be lower, you're going to see kind of those downstream impacts across the board benefit you. That's those are going to be in my opinion, the key things you can kind of set yourself up for in terms of driving that success. And really being able to move the needle for Amazon to say, and like the goal at a high level, right is for Amazon to say, this is a hot product, we need to make it easier for the customers in our network to find it. And so the logic there is they will then move it up in search so that people are finding this product more easily. That's what you are trying to incentivize like that is the behavior you're trying to basically make Amazon the actions you're trying to make Amazon take in regards to your product.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  17:27  

Awesome. We actually have a question. And it's an interesting question from the audience.

Matthew Rosenfeld  17:30  

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. Yeah, I

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  17:33  

love the idea. So if you have too high performing items, you create a virtual bundle, then add more sauce onto it, you discount that bundle? So will the relevancy from the individual ASINs be applied when you run the ads? Or will we benefit from organic traffic that we built behind those original performers?

Matthew Rosenfeld  17:59  

So I can kind of start here, Tim, obviously jump in this is a really interesting question. First of all, I would say that the sub The cool thing about bundles is that they're actually individual listings. Right? So like to that key and like to what you just said, they are very limited, right, and that they're a standalone listing. So it's a completely separate asin, you will have to it will have to generate its own organic rank and its own reviews, separate from the base listing, right that you've built the bundle off of. So it from your first question, if you run ads against it, you won't really benefit from the existing kind of relevancy, traffic volume, credibility, right of the basin. But to your point, you will benefit from the traffic on that the base asin, right that you built the bundle off of where if people do scroll down on the PDP, they will see the bundles that you're offering, and you will get that in front of more customers. And something to be said here, I would say is there's this idea in Amazon, where it's a it's a real estate game, right, and you're listing your product, you want to control as much real estate as possible, right. And so on your PDP, there are people running ads against your product, right? Whether it's DSP display, product targeting, there's ads all over, the more real estate you can control, the less likely it is that someone is going to purchase a competitive product bundles take up a substantial amount of real estate on your listing, right where you're still showing your own products. So if you are running a number of bundles, it people have to scroll further right to see competitive products and competitive ads. If you're running 56789 different promotions that are being displayed on your PDP, you're taking up more real estate, right, that's more scrolling someone's gonna have to do to get to those competitive products that are advertising. So there are other impacts that virtual bundles have but I would say in terms of like increasing EO V or something like that they don't generally have the impact that I would have liked to see when I've done So this in the past and talk to people who have done that.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  20:03  

Super interesting that makes a lot of sense. It's this idea. I mean, it's like, yeah, I could see from the Amazon lens. But more complicated we have another question. On top of that is, would you recommend that a seller just send physical bundles to FBA, and launch that Asin. So they have all the data and add capabilities that get the ASP boosts of a higher price item.

Matthew Rosenfeld  20:31  

I personally would for sure, right, because the other thing you can do here is you can position it as a variation of that listing. So if you do send in the physical bundle, and you're trying to drive your ARV up, you can immediately benefit from the reviews from the organic traffic that's already existing on that listing, as long as you don't have other variations. And if you do, there are generally ways to get a little bit creative in terms of how you're making your variations to have that be on the same listing, obviously benefit from the ASP boosts, but also benefit from the fact that you may not need to change your advertising strategy too much where you can use the individual item as kind of like the first click drive, right? So that's what you're driving your first clicks from the price is more approachable. You get people onto listing, and then they upsell to that that bundle. Awesome. Right on both

Tim Wilson  21:22  

questions. Absolutely. And the only other point that I would make too, on this slide, when we start talking about high click through rate, high conversion rate, getting external traffic, especially external competitive traffic, right, we know Amazon values traffic from a tick tock more than it does from a non competitive threat. All of these metrics are always in compared to what it's compared to your competitive set. So if you can higher have a higher than average click through rate as compared to your relevant competitors. That's what Amazon is looking for. It's not compared to the entire ecosystem of Amazon. So just keep in mind, and keep a BIA have an awareness of what works for your particular niche, because it's always compared to your competitive set. So last slide here, and we can continue on with some q&a, please ask more questions. This is a summary. Right, the first thing you really want to do is make your product extremely discoverable, highly visible, right, there's there's essentially, three things that drive are three things that drive sales. And if you want to just summarize it, it's visibility, credibility, and availability, people have to see your product, they have to believe in it, and it has to be available for purchase. So we're going to keep things up to your supply chain teams and your shipping teams to figure out how to get products into Amazon, whether you're trying to get Amazon to increase their POS, if you're one p or ship more products. And if you're three P but have your availability there in terms of visibility, making it discoverable across the different mechanisms, we talked about, you know, boosting your SEO, improving your organic placement with and improving your share of voice, do that ahead of time, right? The credibility is going to come in the forms of driving ratings and reviews. If you need help figuring out a rating and review strategy. That's one of the things that we can help with, please feel free to you know, feel free to ask us some questions around that. And then lastly, right use this time ahead of time to prepare for the exam, prepare for the test to make sure that you are maximizing your click through and your conversion rate, make sure you're boosting that as compared to your competitors. So you get that organic boost, right. And you can do that by testing things over these next, you know, 812 weeks, test your image, your titles, your content, AB test as much as you can to really optimize for those, click throughs and those conversions. And then lastly, if you can be organically well positioned, direct some of those funds into, you know, different types of coupons or different types of ways to drive a compelling price pressure for your product that will drive higher conversion rates, you know, see what you can do in terms of deals. Matt, is there anything else that you would add to that?

Matthew Rosenfeld  24:12  

That those are kind of all the levers I would pull kind of at your disposal here? I would say if you if you haven't been been testing yet, I would say that's kind of the number one thing I would implement is optimized for click through rate, right. And that's going to be a key driver of that is main image title optimizing titles from mobile discoverability. They changed mobile recently where the scrolling experience now goes through every image before you actually get down to the listing. So really optimize your image stack like what is the story that you're telling to get people through that file that like sales decision funnel, but only from the perspective of graphics and imagery? That's where I would be allocating most of my my time. Great. Awesome.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  24:54  

Another question about bundles, so are virtual bundles eligible for all Prime Day? deals?

Tim Wilson  25:04  

I believe so but I'm not sure, actually,

Matthew Rosenfeld  25:07  

it's a good question. I actually have never tried to run a Prime Day deal on a virtual bundle before. So I can check on this, I think they are because they're individual ASINs. I think that discoverability of them is not going to be the same as your core, kind of like, non bundle license. So I don't know what like kind of the effectiveness of those deals would be if you're paying for them. But I think that would be a pretty interesting test

Tim Wilson  25:35  

to run. And, yeah, Matt, I know, if you want to give us your email address, I know exactly who I would ask this question to. I'm happy to do that and get back to you. Perfect.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  25:48  

And the question here is somebody who manages a very large portfolio, what are your thoughts on your ASINs? With deeper discounts versus more ASINs? With smaller discounts? Is there one better than the other?

Matthew Rosenfeld  26:02  

Two, really good question. I would say like this gets a little bit more into the dynamics of your portfolio? Are the ASINs variations, like, do you have listings with a lot of different products on them? Are they individual listings? How is it set up? I would say, in general, if you have a very large portfolio and their setup, where listings have a number of different variations within them, I would say I would do a fewer, fewer ASINs with a larger discount to just drive more traffic to the listings to capture it, get it into your space, and then control the narrative from there and have people upsell and maybe you you end up having people not necessarily go as steep on the discounts. If they are separate listings, I would go more asin smaller discounts. The other thing I would say about just discounting in general here quickly is I would always optimize for the types of discounts that customers may not claim. Right. So the claim rate of discounting on Amazon is lower than you would expect on coupons, right versus a Prime Day deal or a Lightning Deal where the discount already applied for Prime members, you can go out you can get a little bit more aggressive, I would say on your overall discount with a coupon in monitor that claim rate very closely, because you may find out it's only being leveraged 40 or 50% of the time. So the actual discount, you're offering maybe substantially less than what your what you're factoring in or thinking it through in your head, which can still drive that that transformational improvement in click through rate. super interesting.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  27:35  

I will say like clicking that box for a coupon versus seeing that like percent off the slash to the price. As a consumer I just gravitate towards, like seeing that percent off in that price discount versus like finding a clipping coupon. I mean, it's like and I know, but I worked with Amazon for 10 years. It's like, but it's still it's just that reaction, the psychology of it. So super interesting. We're in our last minutes and a half year, no, not even one minute. Anything to summarize Any final thoughts?

Tim Wilson  28:06  

The only thing I would say is, there's a lot of there's a lot of excitement around retail media and appropriately. So I think that one of the things we want to be careful of as you as we continue to, you know, grow our investment into different retail media channels is to just take a break every now and then to think through how efficient is the spend? And at what point does it you know, are there other ways that you can make your dollars be more efficient. And I would argue, boosting your products organic rank is the number one way to do that. I know, people typically are running their, their retail media efforts across their portfolio trying to as a way to drive the organic rank and then shifted dollars off of one asin or SKU to another. There's a lot of ways that you can do it. If we go back to this slide here, like these are the primary things to be thinking about that you're going to be able to do, you know, sales velocity and conversion rate are two of the most important factors with driving your organic rank. That's why new products can rise to the top so quickly on Amazon. So just think through how do I do these bullet points right here. And certainly advertising, the traditional advertising methods will be one of the ways to do that. But there are alternative ways as well. You can talk to your colleagues talk to BWG we have a capability here product one where we can help drive some of these bullet points as well. But just always be innovating and trying to find a new way to just position yourself ahead of that search. So you can really just ride the wave and that's where you're gonna get major, major. You know, advertising efficiency. 

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  29:51  

Awesome. Anything to add that? Are we close?

Matthew Rosenfeld  29:55  

I think we're that was that was great. Nothing to add on top. Yeah.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  29:58  

Let's Tim Matt. Thanks. You so much for the time the information lovely as always, thank you all for attending today we definitely encourage follow up conversation with the ProductWind team and like they said they are happy to share the deck with you. So feel free to reach out to myself Tiffany@BWGconnect.com and I'll be sure to get that back to you. I will also be in correspondence with your team as well as product one. So thank you both Matt and Tim and everybody had a lovely day, great weekend and see you on the next event that you provide