Hey everyone, we're super excited to announce the launch of our slack community for D two C pod. This is a space exclusively for D two C founders and operators to connect, share ideas, ask questions and support each other. You'll be able to engage with the best minds and operators and consumer and currently we're on a waitlist and it will open up the community once we reach 150 members. So apply using the link in the description and we hope to see you on slack. So before we kick off today's recording, I've got one more for you. Keeping up your momentum this year starts with the right selling tools. And if you're looking to increase revenue, grow faster, build more pipeline, and close more deals, check out the all new sales hub from HubSpot. You'll be able to manage your whole sales process.

Plus my favorite part, the reporting. It's super intuitive, powerful and customizable. Plus the whole thing is powered by AI, so your teams can spend less time on tedious, time consuming stuff and more time on developing relationships. Also, no one likes a clunky platform that takes months to onboard onto, but getting set up on saleshub is really quick and easy. It's free to get started. The pricing will scale with your business, and with more than 1300 integrations and add ons, you can tune it to your exact needs. Visit HubSpot.com sales to start selling with sales Hub welcome to today's episode of d two c pod. And we are back with Mina Elias, who has been on the show before.

But when it comes time to talking anything, Amazon, that's who we go to. So, um, Mina, I'll let you kick us off for maybe our new listeners who, who aren't familiar with your background. Let's just run through it really quick so everyone knows kind of a little bit about you, what you do, and then let's dive directly into today's, uh, conversation, what we're going to be covering.

Yeah, I'm hyped because, uh, you know, I'm bringing a lot of value in this one. The last episode we did together was great and it was like a, an intro, if you're a DTC brand that wanted to expand to Amazon, uh, but, you know, don't quite know how to do it or validate the product if it's going to be a good fit for Amazon or not. So check out that episode. I think that was really cool. But, um, yeah, my background is, I started on Amazon back in 2018. I was a full time engineer, uh, you know, working in, you know, project management decided to start a supplement brand out of a passion for supplements and because I was an MMA fighter, uh, but I couldn't sell it in stores, like, you know, retail, that kind of stuff. So I figured like, let me get it on Amazon. So, you know, went full obsessed on Amazon, figured out how to sell on Amazon.

Groove scaled that brand in the course of a year to about a million. It was doing like ninety four k a month in revenue in about, you know, year 1112, 1314 months. Then Covid hit. And so when Covid hit, I was like, okay, I want to get on podcasts and start sharing everything that I knew kind of knowledge. So, you know, start sharing everything. Became a name in the industry. An aggregator hit me up to run one of their brands under the guise of consulting. And I realized that I was way better than a lot of other agencies.

And so early 2021, I decided to start an Amazon agency out of like a very large demand for it. And, you know, the personal brand was helping. And then fast forward, what, three years later. Now we grew from one employee to about 85, 86, 185 brands under management, largely CPG brands. Um, big mix of people who are starting on Amazon because they want like, uh, you know, to make money on Amazon and a lot of big, direct to consumer brands that uh, you know, realized after Covid that being on Amazon is super important, uh, and that they needed to expand. And so, and those are honestly our ideal clients are, you know, people who are building a real brand, good products, and that, you know, people want to consume and we help them grow and scale on Amazon.

Awesome. And today we're going to be talking about some of the core pillars of like, what it takes to grow on Amazon. So like you said last time we talked about, okay, if you want to launch on Amazon, how do you do that? But now we're going to be talking about, you know, how do you grow on Amazon and what you need to do, especially as, you know, competition goes up, there's more brands going after similar products. It's, you gotta, you gotta get yourself right. So why don't we, why don't we walk through first, what are the core pillars we're gonna be talking about today? And then we can kind of jump into each and run through them.

Amazing. Yeah. So the three core pillars that I, we, I call it the trivium trinity. Right? Because like, the three things that our team needs to focus on at all times is traffic. So growing traffic, uh, you know, click through rate, getting a better click through rate and conversion rate, and the, and the reason is Amazon is a, is a simple funnel, right? It's like any funnel. At the top there's impressions, so there's people seeing you, uh, in search results and on product pages. And a certain number of those impressions turn into clicks. And that's going to be based on your click through rate.

And there's seven factors that affect that, which we'll cover. And then uh, you know, a certain number of those people that make it to your listing turn into a customer. And that's based on the conversion rate. And there's also a certain number of factors that affect that. And so if you just have this focus of, okay, how do I grow my impressions, you know, through paid ads, through organic, how do I increase my cookthrough rate through the seven, you know, pulling the levers of the seven factors and how do I increase my conversion rate? If you just do that consistently, you're inevitably going to grow on Amazon. And there's a couple other things we can touch on, like lifetime value and average order value. Obviously, you know, a larger AOV means people will spend more money with you. A better LTV means they'll come and, you know, buy again and again.

But if you just focus on those core pillars, you will ultimately scale. Right. And so Amazon can really, I know it can be very complicated, but can be simplified into just focusing on those three things.

Yeah, and I think that's super important as well because a lot of times there's, if you look at even an Amazon listing, there's like a million different things you have to do. But like, just thinking about it a simple way, um, I think is really helpful when it comes to growth. So let's talk about, let's start out with traffic, like under that umbrella, like, what do you think about when it comes to traffic? And, um, you know, how do you grow and scale your traffic?

Great. Yeah, great question. So, you know, traffic can come from two ways, paid and organic. So let's start with paid. Um, and when I talk about traffic, I'm essentially talking about just increasing the number of impressions, so increasing the amount of people, uh, the number of times that people are seeing you.

Right.

Because I can't influence someone to click on me. But, you know, as, you know, like when you're running. And I learned all of this by the way, by looking at what people on d two c were doing, like Facebook and stuff like that. Because what they were doing is they were, you know, running ads and they were getting a certain number of views and a certain CPM and a certain click through and all that kind of stuff. So essentially, you know, with paid, the goal is how do I show my product to the most amount of people? But in a way that makes sense, right? In a way that converts. So, you know, idea, let's say that you add a product with 500,000 reviews, right? You know, you're going to convert on everything. So what you would do is simply you would identify every single keyword that a customer would potentially search for this product with and then create a campaign and show up on the top of the first page. And that will result in you showing everywhere, getting the maximum number of impressions and converting on all of them because you have 500,000 reviews, which is more than anyone else.

But all of us are limited by our click through and conversion rate. We don't have that many reviews. We have maybe 1500, 200. And so it's still the exact same playbook. You're identifying every single keyword that you can potentially convert on, but then you're starting to make educated guesses and testing them. And so, you know, let's say my budget is $500 a day, right? So I'm, I know that I can go, you know, and target all thousand keywords. Let me just target, you know, 50 or 100 of those keywords. And so I'm taking those keywords, launching them in campaigns, targeting them, and, you know, based on my bid is how high or how low I'm going to show and I'll talk about the nuances in a second.

But sure enough, the broad concept is I want to target all of these keywords. I want to get the data. So I want the keywords to get ad spend and there's a certain threshold. So in my opinion, at least 50% of your product price needs to be spent on a keyword. So if you have a $30 product, at least spend $15 on a keyword, then you can make an accurate decision on is this keyword converting or not converting. Now the nuances is the bids, right. The higher you show up in the search, the more clicks you're going to get for sure, right, which means more traffic. However, if your click through, if your conversion rate isn't good enough, then you start bleeding because you're getting way too many clicks and not enough sales.

And so based on whatever your conversion rate is, you start optimizing your bids, you start lowering your bids and instead of showing up on position one, you show up on 5815 16. The thought behind it is the lower you show up in the search results. If someone makes it all the way down the page and then clicks on you. There's a higher buyer intent. You know, for a keyword like electrolyte powder or just whey protein, right? Like someone's looking for whey protein. If I show up on top of the search first page, I'm gonna get all these people that don't even know what kind of whey protein they want, right? They're whey protein. They're like, um, maybe I need whey isolate, maybe I need a plant based protein. So it's like you don't want to catch someone in the beginning of their search, but if you show up a little bit lower in the, in the search results or on longer tail keywords, it means that that person has a way higher buyer intent.

That's super interesting because I think about Amazon in a lot of ways very similar to how you might approach SEO. But when you think about SEO, a lot of times if you have something that ranks a little bit further down, that means it's a shitty result for the keyword that you've been searched for. And Google is like, that's not that good of a result. It's almost like the further you go down Amazon, the less likely you are to get good conversion and get intent. Because like Amazon saying, or Google saying this isn't good. But that's a very interesting viewpoint in terms of Amazon, that actually it's, you know, being number ten in a search query isn't necessarily a bad thing for the right buyer and the right keyword.

Exactly. And it differs from keyword to keyword. And so that's why when, you know, we take all these keywords and we test them because we're number one, testing will they convert at all? And number two is it, will they convert and at which position? Right? Because let's say you're buying a food scale. So if you say, like, you want a food scale, like 250 grams, whatever, like, let's say it's a very specific keyword, you're most likely buying whatever is on the top of the search because you're very, like, you're looking for something specific. So what is at the top? What has good reviews and a good price? I'm buying that, right? As opposed to if you just type in food scale, it's like, whoa, you know, there's a lot of different types, there's a lot of different shapes, there's a lot of different specs, so you might browse way more. So. And the keyword also matters. Like you can have broad keywords where being positioned 10, 15, 20, you know, is fine and you can have a long tail keywords where no position being position 1520, no one even makes it that far.

Right. Because at that point, they're very specific.

There's only a couple results for it.

Yeah, exactly.

So one thing that I actually wanted to address before, like, we get any further here is how do you think about. Because I think one of the challenges for, uh, I, for brands who are selling online, right? Like you've got Amazon, that's its own strategy. You've got meta or Facebook, that's like its own strategy. Like, how do you think, and you were, you were talking about budget and different rule of thumbs, but how do you think about, how should a brand, like, think about how much they're allocating to spend on Amazon if they're going in on that strategy? Like, how do you compare the two? Do you. And then I now, I now know a lot of people are thinking also about TikTok shop and like running that strategy up. So, like, I, where does it, where do you see Amazon fitting in with your brands? Is it like the sole strategy or like, you know, just, just talk to me about the mix, I guess.

Yeah. With Amazon, it's usually a core. Like, I mean, you know, most of the big DTC brands come to us and very quickly, Amazon becomes close to 50% of the revenue, right? And if they're like, performing really well on meta or whatever, TikTok shop is new, right? So TikTok shop, you have to. And I, we can, I can do a whole other, but, but TikTok shop, you're kind of more experimental. Amazon is core, right? And it's catching people who have, like buyer intent. They're ready to buy and, you know, you know, if they're on Amazon, there's a very high chance that they're converting. And so the way that I look at the budget is, I always say, what are you, okay, you know, losing, for example, and we run the numbers, I say, okay, if I spend $300 a day and like, worst case we do a one x roas, what does that play out to? Well, 300 a day, one x roas, that's like losing $4,000 a month. And I'm like, can you handle that? And it's like, actually, we can handle losing ten for the scale of growing.

Because initially you're doing all this discovering of the keywords, which ones will convert, which ones won't convert, and then you start being a little bit more mature and I'll explain how the budget changes. But you start by saying, okay, I'm okay losing $4,000 a month. So 300 a day is fine. And then the initial dollar, 300 a day in budget, that is fully experimental. So you're testing, let's say 100 different keywords. You know, let's say $50 of that budget converts profitably. The other 250 doesn't. You now take the 250, recycle it.

Yeah.

Try another set of keywords. Now you have 100 converting profitably, 200 not. And you keep recycling that until you get to a point where 300 are converting profitably. And then the more that you improve your cookthoring conversion rate, the faster everything, everything converts profitably. And then you're like, okay, now I'm at $300 a day at max profitability. The only way you can improve is either to improve cookthirty conversion rate or to spend more money. So then you add more budget, you're like, okay, now at 300 at Mac, at the maximum profitability I can achieve, I'm making $2,000 a month or 3000 profit.

Exactly.

And then you recycle.

And it's just a simple equation. And then just one more follow on question. Then I want to get back to, um, what we're talking about is so for like, for a brand that's like, you know, launching and starting to grow Amazon, how long do you think it gen, like, how long does it generally take you guys or typical brands to like, figure out that strategy? Like what keywords work? What's our budget? Like, how long does it take them to ramp?

Yeah, I mean, generally, like, rule of thumb, right? If you're spending a decent amount of money, let's say three to $500 a day, you're looking at about six months to break even. And the reason is not because you can't find the profitable keywords, is because you want to keep growing and increasing that revenue. So you're not trying to become breakeven because I can get you break even in two months. But then you're break even at, you know, $5,000 a month in revenue.

Exactly.

You know, so a lot of it is, this is how I think about it. I'm willing to lose 4000. So I'm like, okay, in the first, you know, five, four months, let's say I'm willing to lose 4000. And then in month five and six, I'm willing to lose 2000. And then seven, I want to break even. So let's say in the first month that occurs at ten k and then in second month, at ten k I'm already at breakeven. No, I'm going to go to, now I'm losing 4000. And then in the third month that occur, you know, I'm already a break even.

No, let's go to, you know, 40, 50k. So I'll keep reinvesting and spending more money and growing that revenue until it's like, okay, I've now, you know, done with my, my investment and I want to break even. Then I want to turn profitable because.

Just from a business perspective, like, if you're putting in the time, like, you want to be breaking even at 50 grand a month instead of like two grand a month, right? So.

Exactly.

Okay, cool. Let's get back to what we're talking. So we started with, um, paid traffic. Now let's talk a little bit about organic. How did, and how did the two relate to each other?

Yeah, so, so paid traffic. Before I wrap it up, um, one quick thing is campaign structure. So just, just as a, you know, another kind of detail is campaign structure is usually one campaign, one ad group. Uh, because multiple ad groups result in uneven splitting of the budget, we don't want that. We want to focus our budget onto like one ad group where we can control how much money goes to the keywords. And then usually no more than five keywords. Um, single match type. The reason is when I see, you know, 1015 keywords, usually the top five get all the budget.

The other ones don't start with $100 a day daily budget. It won't spend that. It's not like Facebook, where if you do 100, it'll spend 100. Sure it'll spend based on the bid. So if you put 20 cent bids, you're on position 80 and no one's clicking on you. So just, just, you know, keep that in mind. Now, how do we get organic? So obviously, paid traffic is great. Another paid traffic, by the way, is programmatic DSP, which is utilizes audiences on Amazon and you can target those audiences on different placements on Amazon on different devices like desktop, mobile, web, mobile app, and, you know, with different creators.

But usually what I do. So I'll build the funnel. Pretty simple, right? Bottom of the funnel is loyalty. So people who purchased for me in the past, but have not repurchased or purchased my competitors, above that is cross selling. So people purchased one product, haven't purchased another one. Above that is retargeting. So they viewed my product, but haven't purchased it or purchased my competitors. And then above that is competitor targeting.

So people who viewed my competitors but haven't purchased them and they haven't viewed me at all. So this fresh audience, then complementary products, similar, you know, thought process and then contextual is almost like an auto campaign. And with, you know, DSP I can basically target these audiences very like in a very granular way. And then on Amazon, so I usually stick to just doing Amazon. I change the frequency up so sometimes higher frequency if I see that I'm converting well. And then I use responsive e commerce for the graphics. So instead of custom creatives, I'll just have it pull from the Amazon listing so it looks a little bit more natural. So that's the other way of driving paid traffic.

Organic is simple. Organic is fully influenced by how many times you convert for a keyword. So there was this thing called search, find, buy back in the day. Now it's against terms of service, but you could get people to search a keyword like electrolyte powder, scroll, find my product, click and buy it. And then that triggers on, Amazon says this product converted for that keyword. If I get, let's say 15 conversions a day for that keyword, Amazon says, wow, this person is converting so well for that keyword, increase their organic rank because it means when we do, they're going to convert even more. And Amazon wants more sales, right. They make more money.

So we figured that out. But they banned that, so you can't do that anymore. But hypothetically, if you had a good product and you used ads, even, even at a loss, right? So I'll take a keyword, for example, electrolyte powder. Do a single keyword campaign. So campaign, one ad group, one keyword, and then, you know, big bids and big budgets show up high and convert a lot for that keyword. It's going to result in my organic rank going up. So that's one way of getting organic rank higher, which then it's nice, right, because you're spending a day making, let's say, you know, whatever, a thousand in PPC sales. But now that same hundred dollars a day is making another thousand in organic sales.

So your overall roas goes from ten to like 18 or 20, whatever. Not realistic. I'm just giving numbers examples.

Yeah, of course.

But the other thing that also affects click through rate. Sorry. The other thing that affects organic rank is click through rate. So the better your click through rate is and conversion rate, but more click through rate. Amazon also increases your organic rank because it sees that you are providing a good customer experience. So when they say someone typed in electrolyte powder, they scrolled, saw your product, clicked on it. It means that this is a desirable product. Now, obviously conversion rate has to be decent.

If it's completely trash, then, you know.

No one's buying it, they're not going to do it, but they want to see that it's something that's visually appealing that people click on and spend time on the page. Yeah, that sort of stuff.

And if you think about it, every position on Amazon's page is an investment by them because that is, they're investing in you to make a sale. So let's say that it's between me and you. I have 10,000 reviews, you have 20. If they give you position five and people are like, I'm not going to buy this. You know, then they're losing money versus if they give me position five, then they're making money.

Exactly.

So for them it's a very calculated equation of who am I going to show up in that position that has the highest likelihood of converting into a sale?

And so that leads me into another question. I think that's a really good, good way to think about how do you break in as a new brand, right? Because a new brand isn't like, yeah, maybe I do have 20 reviews and maybe getting those 1st 20 reviews are hard compared to an incumbent in a space that has, you know, thousands of reviews. How do you, like, are there ways to accelerate that process through paid or through this exploratory process?

Like, yeah, I mean, inevitably when you launch your conversion rate is going to be low and you're going to need to invest in a lot of paid. But ways that you can get around this like, you know, as best as possible is number one, product differentiation and showcasing that differentiation in the main image. So I see so many brands. Like I think I was talking to HVMN recently and I'm like, you guys have an incredible product. You show the box in the main image but I don't see any selling points on the box. You know what I mean? It was the same with another z biotics, right? A conversation with them, fact. It was like, I'm like, okay, great. But like where, where's the selling points in the main image? You guys have a box, like take advantage of that.

So I think number one is having a differentiated product, right? Because it is like a shelf in a store and you're looking at these different things. And so like when I go to buy like a barbecue sauce, I'm like, okay, barbecue, barbecue. Oh, sugar free, organic, you know, whatever, grass fed, like whatever. I'm like, okay, like that catches my eyes. So you just have to think the same way. How can I create a main image that showcases that my product is a better solution than everyone else and is also like visually attractive. That is honestly the best way. Prices also, you know, you can also always start with a much lower price.

Not much lower, but like lower market. So like if the market is 19 to 30, maybe start at 1920. More attractive price is more likely to get people to at least give you a shot while you build up the reviews. But make sure that you have a review strategy, an Evergreen review strategy. And if you want my strategy, I can share it. Yeah, but yeah, just make sure you have a review strategy. So you are getting reviews. But you know, having that foundation of a really good, differentiated product with a really good differentiated main image that will affect click through rate from the beginning.

Amazing. Let's get back to CTR. Like, you know, what, what else do we need to know?

Perfect. So, you know, back to the funnel, right. We're increasing impressions through paid and organic. Next step is if we increase the click through rate now we're exponentially increasing the number of people making it into our listing. So the seven factors that affect that are going to be the main image, the price, the reviews and the star ratings, the title discounts on coupons, shipping speed. So if you're FBA versus FBM and badges. So I'll break them one at a time. So main image, right.

Main image needs to fill the white space. It needs to be attractive. It needs to have selling points on it. So it also needs to make you differentiated from everyone else. So not only is it going to be sharp, I prefer like 3d renders because they're way sharper than, you know, like just using like a photograph. But I also like to include like a box or some packaging. And sometimes I actually manipulate the label. So if you look at my product, MMA nutrition, the, the lid says zero carbs, zero sugar, zero calories.

Actually the lid doesn't have that right, but, and I also have like another badge. And I've also changed like the middle of my bottle to say hydration in a much bigger font. Because when someone types in, you know, electrolyte powder, I want to make sure that they immediately see that mine is sugar free and is like more hydration. So that's one thing you can do with the main image. Always adding some eye candy, like, you know, blueberries on the side. Or if it's like, you know, let's say it's a keyboard, let's say like you're adding, you know, the box and like an ergonomic, you know, like some sort of like eye candy where everyone looks the same and you look slightly different.

Yeah. And I think that's important because basically what you're saying is the main image isn't just about your label, it's about how do you create an attractive image that conveys to the Amazon buyer what, like, you know, maybe someone in the store would see your label can interpret.

Right, exactly. And just think about it. If you were running an ad on Facebook, but it wasn't, the way that was going to show up is you were going to have six ads from six different competitors all show up and you could only use the product image to do the ad and you couldn't put any text on it, you know, besides what was on the label or the box. How would you create the best ad that has the highest chance of someone clicking on you? And so once I think d two c brands start thinking that way, they're like, oh, okay, so I have limitations. I have to only use the, the, you know, the product, right. The product box, bottle, whatever you want to call it. Um, I can only add a few different elements. I can't add text except if it's on the product, you know, quote unquote on the product.

How do I stand out from, you know, other people? And then it's like, okay, now, now we're thinking, um, so that's the main image. Price is self explanatory.

Yep.

I understand a lot of people have map pricing, so maybe it's a lot harder to play with. Um, you know, we talked quickly about how should you price your product versus, you know, your shopify or, you know, your DTC sites. I like to keep everything even. There are some strategies, for example, like we'll launch a product only on d two c first you get the traction there so you can collect as many emails as possible. Once you start seeing it plateau, you're probably starting to lose money because there's a lot of people that would buy it on Amazon. So then you would launch it on Amazon and get traffic there once you've collected as many emails as possible, things like that. So prices is always going to be self explanatory. Start with or the lower your prices, the more likely it is going to be to get a better click through rate.

However, always experiment with increasing your price. Now, if you have d two c, sometimes it won't make sense. Like sometimes it would make sense, like if, you know, you're dollar 40 on d to see, you can go up to 43 on Amazon and they're like, I'm okay because it's still free shipping, less hassle. You know, it'll have to deal with a website. But a certain point, you know, it becomes like, okay, I'm just going to go buy it from the d to c side. So always experiment. That's, that's the honestly the best way to put it because there is no rule of thumb.

And I think this takes us into reviews.

Right? Reviews and star rating.

But my, my question about reviews and stars as it pertains to prices, I feel like as a consumer, um, when I look for a product, like you were saying, everything's kind of priced in the same general range. And it's almost like as the price goes up on Amazon, the reviews and stars kind of start to come down. Cause like price seems to be also a pretty big driver. So a lot of times when I'm looking at products, um, you'll, I'll start, I'll basically see. And I know there's like a broad generalization, but like some of those branded products that like people love in like the D to C world, they don't quite do as well on Amazon because they're priced like, you know, 30% more than everything else. And that kind of gets reflected in some of the star ratings sometimes, so.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And part of that is probably because they're selling way less. So they're getting way less reviews. And a lot of DSC brands, they do not have a review strategy. And so they end up just putting it on Amazon and like hoping for the best. But you, you do need a strategy. But, you know, with the reviews and star rating, it is a direct correlation. If you want to guarantee success on Amazon, you just need to get 10, 20, 30,000 reviews.

Right. It's been like this since the dawn of time. They did a survey and I think the top two things that affect conversion rate on Amazon or like the purchase decision on Amazon is price and reviews.

Yep.

Which makes sense, right? Amazon, like, everyone goes to Amazon to find the best price, the best deal, and then the user reviews as a, like, is it worth buying? Like, do a lot of people say it's good or not? Now, the beautiful thing is as your reviews go up, not only are you going to make more sales, but you're, you can also charge more.

Yeah.

Right. And I think you'll notice that like the top brands, you know, a lot of times the ones with the most number of reviews are able to be priced slightly. A little bit higher because, you know, you. Okay, you're 28 and I'm 33, but you have a thousand reviews and I have 20,000 reviews exactly like, okay, I.

Mean, who you're gonna trust, right?

Yeah, I'm gonna go with the one that 20,000 people have trusted and left five star review sport, as opposed to the one with less.

So is that something you see where you're. You can actually play with the pricing strategy as, like, the reviews go up. So maybe kind of the mistake that we're seeing before is if you're a new entrant, you enter with a really high price, you get low stars because people are like, hey, this stuff's too expensive. It's more expensive than everything else, and you're almost shooting yourself in the foot. So maybe the strategy is as you're rolling out, you know, come in with a market agreeable sort of price on Amazon, build up the reviews, and then when you have the trust, now you have the leverage to price however you want, right?

Absolutely. That's exactly how I would do it. That's it? That's. Honestly, I couldn't have said it better myself.

Amazing. Okay, so moving on from reviews and stars, let's talk about discount, discounts and coupons.

Yeah. So discounts and coupons is another one where you have to split test. So rule of thumb, what I found is if you do, like, $5 off on Amazon, it actually translates into, like, two and a half dollars off because 50% of the people that end up clicking on the coupon actually clip it. And so that's nice. But the whole purpose of discounts and coupons is, for one thing, is it's going to show a little green badge in the search results. So with everything being the same, one of the search results is going to be a little bit differentiated with a discount or a coupon. With that being said, I like to constantly track click through rate, conversion rate and bottom line profit. And, you know, let's say two weeks ago I made, you know, $1,000 in profit.

Last week I made $1,000 in profit. This week I put a 5% discount or coupon, whatever. What happened to my bottom line profit? If that number doesn't go up, then it's not worth doing the discount. And a lot of times, you just have to test. You have to test, you know, a 5% off, a 10% off, a 20% off. Discounts and coupons and promotions really start playing a crucial role when it comes to major holidays, prime day, Black Friday, cyber Monday. That's when you can start applying for deals. There's Prime Day deals and Black Friday cyber Monday deals.

And if you're lucky, you can get a seven day deal or deal of the day. Seven day deals and deals of day absolutely crush. Amazon has special placements for that, and they will show you to like ten times more people if you have those deals. And they're very hard to get with Prime Day deals and Black Friday cyber Monday deals, anyone can apply to them. And generally we've seen that you will sell more. But the question always remains, was it worth selling more? Did I make more bottom line profit or did I have to discount 20%? After all is said and done, I didn't make that much more money.

We are really excited to announce that DTC pod is officially part of the HubSpot podcast network. The HubSpot podcast network is the audio destination for business professionals, and we're really excited about being part of the network because we're going to be able to keep growing the show, bringing you guys amazing guests, and obviously helping you guys learn from the best founders, marketers, and builders of the most successful consumer brands. So anyway, keep listening to DTC pod and more shows like us on the HubSpot podcast network@HubSpot.com. podcastnetwork. Yeah, I think that's a really great way to think of it, too, because, and that's something that I think is universally true. It's like, okay, I can reduce my price by half, but, you know, that means I have to sell twice as much. And so understanding, like, is it worth it? And maybe. Maybe part of the strategy, maybe it is worth it, right? If you're going after either a specific keyword or you have intention and you want to get more reviews and you're like, I need volume to do this to build trust or whatever, then, you know, then it makes sense.

If you're. You're selling more to break even, but if not, or you're losing money on it, then you can, like, reevaluate. Cool. So did you have anything else on discounts or coupons or you want to get into?

Yeah, you bet. You mentioned something really good. You said, you know, start with a discount to build that sales velocity just for everyone. My personal experience with all the brands we worked with, lowering the price, like lowering the actual price, always performs better than having a higher price with a discount. So a lot of, I know a lot of clients are like, you know, we're priced at the 40. Can we just do, you know, 10% off I'm like, I would rather you just go down to, you know, 35, 99 because that will perform better in the search results than 40 with a 10% off.

Oh, that's okay. That's super interesting, too. Yeah. Because people are seeing that number. And I know sometimes some retail strategy is like, especially in direct, it's like, you know this $100, but you can get it for 60 and it's like a slash through price. But you're saying, just go through, go, go with the lower price. Okay, cool. Let's talk a little bit about titles.

Yeah. So titles. This one is simple. We don't need to touch too much on it because the title just needs to be SEO optimized. That is, the core driver of your SEO is the title. So I use a tool called data dive where you can literally look at your competitors titles and then keep chain. Like, you get an exact SEO value for each title, including yours, and then tweak your title until you have the highest SEO value. So the title just needs to have the main keywords right at the beginning and then the rest of it needs to be somewhat readable.

Like, so it's, you're basically, how can you hit the limit of keyword stuffing.

But still readable and still make sense?

Exactly. Right.

Yeah, because it's, it's this dance where you could just say, like, the name of your product, but if you don't say what's in your product, then people searching for other stuff, they're not going to search you and you're only going to rank for branded terms. So it's about being able to put in keywords but have it make sense and not be too overwhelming. So I think that's a great way to think about it. And now let's talk about shipping speed.

Yeah. So this is FBA versus FBM, you know, shipping speed. Essentially, we're all spoiled on Amazon if it's not arriving tomorrow, day after or day after, like. Exactly. I don't want, it's too long. I'm just gonna go buy another thing. Right. And honestly, that's how I feel a lot of times.

Like, I look at products, I'm like, I'll just buy this other whey protein because this one's going to take too long. And so for that, I see a lot of d two c brands saying, hey, can I test out doing fbm where we'll fulfill, we already have a three pl or a warehouse, let me fulfill from there. And then if it works, and I'm like, it's not going to work because you're FBM. It will only work because if all of your competitors have the prime badge and they're two day shipping and you're the only one that is like five, six day shipping, even if you have like fast shipping, it's still, you're going to be inferior. And my theory is that Amazon will, will show you lower in the search results because you don't have the prime badge. So the rule of thumb is unless you are a multiple product or a furniture product or something, you know, that.

Is, you literally can't do it.

Exactly. You should 100% always go for FBA, which honestly is not. And the numbers always play out to be more favorable to just do FBA versus FBM.

Awesome. Okay. And badges.

Okay, badges. You know, there's Amazon's choice badge and that depends on, you know, who is converting the most for a certain keyword. Again, there's not too much you can do to influence that besides just do your best to sell the best seller badge, though. If you get the best seller badge, I've seen literally sales double overnight from getting that badge. And the way to get that badge is to go and look at all of the subcategories that exist on Amazon that could be remotely related to your product and see which one has the, you know, the best seller has the closest amount of revenue to you. And then, you know, let's say like, for example, key nutrients did this. They basically are an electrolyte powder, but they found that chromium supplements had like the top seller had the least amount of revenue. So they went and they adjusted their formula to add chromium and then they categorized themselves as a chromium supplement.

Then they went and they blasted money on ad spend, grew the revenue, got the best seller badge, and all of a sudden their sales skyrocketed. And now they were incredibly profitable, even though they were kind of like losing money just trying to get there. So that is the only strategy to utilize badges.

Badges. Okay. Gotcha. All right, so that's, we covered everything on CTR. So just to recap, the seven factors that affect click through rate are going to be main image, price, reviews and stars, discounts and coupons, your title and getting the SEO stuff right there, shipping speed and badges. So, okay, we crush it on that. Now, moving on to CVR conversion rate. What do we do to boost conversion rate and how does that affect growth?

So conversion rate. Yeah, has another set of factors. Right. We have the rest of the images. So there's like five other images and five six other images on the listing. There's videos on the listing that show up under the main images. Then you have bullet points. You have virtual bundles.

You have brand story and premium a plus content. You have ugc content uploaded by creators. You have Amazon posts, which is kind of like the Instagram version of Amazon. And then you have images and videos in the reviews. So these are all things, again, you got to think of it as a landing page. You have one landing page and you're stuck with that format. It's not like in DTC where I can bring up testimonials or I can add a video. You're just stuck with what you can get and you just have to maximize what you can do out of it.

So with, let's start with the most important, right, the rest of the images. Yep. People on Amazon literally buy by swiping through the images. I'm sure you've done it. I do it. I open up a product and I just swipe through the images and does it tell me that this is the product that I need? Yes or no? Does it convince me? Because I already know the price and the reviews. The price and the reviews were agreeable enough for me to click on it. So now can I be sold? Like, does it satisfy all of my questions? Yeah.

And so every single image should sell. The product should explain why this product is better than everyone else, should explain why this product is a better solution than any other solution. And you know, how it's going to make your day better or, you know, solve your problems, whatever it may be. And so just think of it as infographics, very image heavy, like not a lot of text, big call outs. So it's very simple and easy and like your brain registers it quick and it's like selling you, selling you, selling you, selling you, and you're like, okay, I have, yeah, I'm sold. I have no more doubts. And so that's how the main image, the rest of the images work.

Yeah. And I think what's so interesting about that is just like putting yourself in the buyer's shoe as you go through that journey. Like what you just said, I think is so important. When someone goes to buy on Amazon, they type in something. Then they look at a bunch of pictures and titles, reviews and price. Whatever has like the best combination they click on. Then again, you're going and you're looking on the images, even if sure, like you have to get the description right and all the other information. But like what shopper is going and reading the fine text before looking at the images? No, you're looking at that and then you're probably going down and cruising and like, you know, looking at the stars, reviews, images in the review, like all this other stuff.

So I think this is like, right on. And super important not to, like, get lost in. It's like, understand that buyer's journey and then go build for that. Okay, so once you've done the, like, now talk to me about videos, right? Because we've got images and some products have videos, some don't. But like, yeah, how do you think about videos? Why do you need them? How do you build them?

And I love that you mentioned the buyer's journey. There's a company that we used called Rankbell. And then what they do is actually they can, they go to people and they help you understand that buyer journey. So they get them to, like, record the screen and fill out all these surveys, basically browsing the search results. So check them out. Right. Like, that's cool because it is very important to understand how people, you know, what the buyer journey is. But I'm, I always understand what it is because it's like, this is what I'm going through.

You know, you can always do focus groups and stuff like that. But, yeah, let's jump into the videos. So videos, you can, you know, upload four, five, six videos. I, you know, would recommend to take as much advantage as possible of those videos. But also you pretty simply, you can go find a creator, tell him, listen, I want you to do an unboxing video. I want you to talk about the benefits of the product and why you liked using it. It doesn't have to be anything, you know, crazy. And people will, you know, click, watch that video and then make sure that it's designed for no audio.

So there's captions on the screen, all that kind of stuff. Because a lot of people watch with no audio. And its goal is just another thing that can sell the product. For me. I was sold many times on products, but when I watched the video and it's like someone using it, like when it's a utility product, like a mic or whatever, and I'm like, okay, wow. Like, that sold me. Like, I know now know that my audio is going to be better and so I end up buying that product. So think of it from that lens as how can you showcase someone using the product in a way that is going to convince someone else that this is the right product for them.

Sweet. Um, and I think that's a really important part. Like you just said, understand that it's not just a video for the sake of video. Like, it's not just like make sure it helps them get through their buyer journey of like wanting to see that and be like, oh, now I need to buy this. Not just like a fun, random, entertaining video because you happen to have collateral or like some random UGC that like ended up being a crappy piece of UGC. You want the right video that's going to help with conversion and, and satisfying those buyer, um, questions. So, okay, after video, um, what about the bullet points?

Yeah, bullet points is another, uh, like SEO kind of goldmine, right? This is where you want to also SEO optimize because title bullet points are the top two places where Amazon decides what your SEO value is. Right. And you can rank way higher by having more optimized SEO. The way that I like to structure the bullet points is the first sentence is going to be a very quick short, like selling point, right? So like, you know, maximum hydration, maximum affordable hydration, something like that, whatever, you know, and then it will be like dash and then a sentence that talks about, you know, hydrate your body with good ingredients like sodium, potassium, magnesium, blah, blah. And all of that is just a nice sentence that is SEO optimized. Right. But the, the people, what people are going to read is just the first call out. Now, if you, if your product has specs, that is also an amazing place to include specs because that's where, you know, if you can include specs in the image, amazing.

But if it becomes like a little bit where you need like more text to include specs, that's a perfect place to also include. So, you know, compatible for the following models, you know, iPhone 1312, galaxy s, blah, blah. Like let's say it's a mic that's compatible for a bunch of stuff. So that is the way to think about bullet points is SEO value, quick selling points and then specs.

Awesome. Okay, so we've hit bullet points. Let's talk about what are virtual bundles.

Yeah, so virtual bundles is a new cool thing that Amazon came up with where you could basically take any two of your products and create a virtual bundle where if someone buys that bundle, it will just take two of your individual products, wrap them up and send them to the customer. So it's kind of like buying two products at the same time. It's a great way to upsell your product. But the beautiful thing about it is virtual bundles show up in a place where usually you'd have sponsored products related to this item. Show up. So instead of it being your product and then above the fold, seeing your competitors ads and then maybe, you know, it's my product, and then Liquid IV with 100,000 reviews shows up and steals some of my customers. Now I push those people down below the fold. So it's, you know, why does it help conversion? Just because right off the bat it pushes people below the fold so they can't see competitors right away.

Yeah. Okay. That's super cool. And how have you seen that? You know, how does it work? Do you see a lot of people buying those virtual bundles or like what have you seen at the side?

So, I mean, some people will buy it, right. It's nothing groundbreaking. It doesn't, it's not anything huge, but I have seen an improvement in the conversion rate just because of the fact that they're seeing less of my competitors.

So that's super interesting. Basically, one of the main reasons you want virtual bundles isn't just for the fact of like upselling your own products, but for the fact that it's taking the view other similar products or other shoppers like these and like, you know, effectively pushing them, pushing that part down so people aren't bouncing off your page, they're spending more time and they're buying your product.

Exactly.

Really cool insight there. Okay, let's talk about brand story. Like how does, you know, you've got d two c, which is purely brand, and then you've got Amazon, which is this combination where brand is important, but it's not the same way it's important on an own personal t two c shopify site. How does brand play into an Amazon listing and how do you get it to drive conversion?

Yeah, brand story has a dual function. Number one, it functions as a place where you can showcase the mission vision, values of the brand, the founder story, and you can also upsell some products. So it's this creative piece in the middle of your product detail page where again, the background can be a nice little image. You can have these different modules in it that talk about anything. It could be our mission, how we give back. We plant one tree for every product or something like that, and it can link to other products. But the thing that I like about the brand story that is much more added value is that if you have a brand story on all of your products, it opens you up for premium a plus content. So premium a plus content is actually like that.

That's what we're after. Regular a plus content is, you know, it's okay, it's, it used to be, you know, kind of great, right. Because it's just like these pieces of creative that you can stack up and if you do it well enough, it looks like a very nice landing page. But premier a plus content takes it to a whole new level. And the beautiful thing is you can actually a b test your old a content with new premium a plus content.

So, so what is premium a plus content?

So premium a plus content takes like it takes the a plus content and then makes it wider so it really fills out the page, blends it all together so there's no gaps. And it is desktop and mobile optimized. Yeah, compared. So basically you'll submit one for desktop, one for mobile. So it'll look way better, you know, than having just the same for both because the font can be bigger on desk on mobile to showcase like where it wouldn't show if it, you know, it show normally on desktop. And not only that, you can have video, you can have carousels and you can have large comparison charts. Right. So it really just takes a plus content and takes it to a whole new level where you can sell your product again, like how we talked about the rest of the images.

You can sell people, you can remove Dao, you can, you know, show that this is a better product than everyone else.

Yeah. And you can bring in elements that maybe were harder to bring into Amazon. Like you could bring in your own, you know, charts and your own, you know, comparisons and that sort of stuff. Us versus them, like that sort of stuff.

Yeah. You can actually compare versus other products or you can have all of your products lined up and then you can show like how each one works for a different, you know, use or something.

Awesome. Okay, UGC, this one's fun because, you know, UGC is a big part of getting good creative in D to see a lot of times for ads or whatever. But how does UGC factor into Amazon and conversion?

Yeah, so UGC is a great way to get people to kind of see how others are reacting to the product. There's a module right in, you know, below the a plus content, what we talked about. And it just says upload a video. And so what you can do is you can literally like click on that, copy the link and then go to creators that you've worked with or, you know, creators that you can, you know, look for on Instagram and you can say, hey, I would love to give you a free product to try it out. In exchange, would you do a review for us, a video review and upload it to Amazon and getting that social proof up there, we've seen really, like, we've gone from, you know, one or two videos that the brand uploads themselves to like maybe eight videos that are all like by different creators. And, you know, creators, they know how to create content, they know how to speak on camera, they know how to, you know, sell. And a lot of times they're not selling, they're just being like, oh, look at what I discovered and look at why I like it. And they just want to, you know, just, it's the way that influencers and creators are, right? There's like that natural element to it.

And we've seen by adding those videos, conversion rate goes up.

Wow, awesome. And then what are Amazon posts?

So Amazon post is basically an Instagram feed on Amazon. And so you could, it has to feature the product, right? So any image that features the product could be a lifestyle image or whatever you can upload there. And so it's just a nice visual way to showcase your product in a more lifestyle environment. It's not going to add a huge amount of conversion, but it is another thing that you can take advantage of on the listing. And the goal here at the end of the day, like, the reason I'm mentioning all this is some people might be like, oh, like, this doesn't really matter. That doesn't matter. And I agree. Like, there's some elements that, like Amazon post that don't matter that much.

But having a really beautiful, well presented, you know, listing that is going to drive conversion. Like another thing is like the storefront, right? Like that we didn't mention, but, you know, under your title, it's going to say, visit the MMA nutrition store. Now, if you click on that and it takes you, if you don't have a brand store, it's just going to take you to the search results where MMA nutrition is the search term. Right. But if you do have a Bradstore, it'll take you to this storefront page that is like nice design. Now, are you gonna make a shitload of sales from that? Probably not, but it is gonna showcase your product in a little bit of a better light. And every, it's like 1% better every day. Every percent matters.

Exactly, exactly. And then this one's fun. Images and reviews, like, how do you deal with them? How do you like. Yeah, just how does it work?

Yeah. So I've noticed that reviews with images, like, impact performance way more than just regular written reviews. Someone will, because it's also the first thing that shows up in the review. So as soon as you go down to the review section, you'll click and you'll go and look at the images and read the reviews on those images before scrolling through the rest of the images. So by you going and, you know, maybe friends and family or whatever and going after people and asking them to upload images in the reviews to talk about the product, that's also helped brands convert better, you know?

Yeah. And going back to buyer journey, I find myself a lot of times when I'm shopping Amazon products, I kind of, like I said, I land on the page by picking out, you know, pricing stars, photo title. I get into the page, go look through the creative, then I'm heading straight down to like the reviews. And like you said, one of the first things that jumps out is the actual, it's like nice to see real people take pictures with that product. Cause it's different than the Amazon listing, which is like you said, maybe it's 3d or fake, whatever. And you're conveying an idea. So that's kind of where you go to see like the real, the real deal. And so having a sort of strategy in there and just knowing that those sort of reviews are important to drive conversion I think is a super important, important way to approach it.

Okay, awesome. So we tackled everything in CVR. Was there anything else you wanted or I'll just recap.

No, you can recap it.

Okay. So again, to nail your CVR, your conversion rate, um, for your Amazon shop, you want to make sure all your other images are great. You want to make sure you have great video, um, you want to provide all the information in the bullet point section. You want to nail your virtual bundles to push down, um, you know, all your other competitors. You want to tell a really solid brand story. You want to leverage premium content, a plus. You want to leverage ugc when you have it to drive conversion. Amazon posts, you want to be able to leverage that.

And images and reviews, you want to make sure they look good because that's where people are, are looking before they buy. Okay, let's move on. Average order value.

Yeah.

What do we need to know? How do we get it up and how does it impact your growth?

Yeah, so, you know, we talked about the core pillars are driving more traffic, more people see you improving cookthrough rate, more people end up inside of your listing and improving conversion rate, more people end up buying from, from that listing. Now, a couple of things that you can also do to increase revenue. Right. And the reason I mention everything is so you can, you know, keep hitting all of those. And if you hit each one consistently, you're inevitably going to keep growing and making more money. But aov average order value is another great way. Now, how do you increase average order value? Virtual bundles is one, right, where you can, you know, create a virtual bundle and get people to buy more than one of your products. Multi pack discounts is another one where you can say, you know, buy two, get 10% off, buy three, get 15% off.

I always like to activate that, right. Because it doesn't, never hurts.

Right.

Just having it there is nice variations is also a great way. And so like doing like a, let's say a 60 day supply instead of a 30 day supply. And so you have two types of variation. You can have a multi pack variation. So new products combined. So it's essentially like a real bundle, not a virtual bundle.

Yep.

But you can also have just like an economy value.

Right.

So instead of a 30 day, you know, you have 180 day supplies, stuff like that. So those are all the ways that you can increase average order value. And then the final piece is lifetime value. Right. And so how do we get the people to, you know, buy more and more from us? If you are not a consumable product, the only way is to. Through upsells.

Yeah.

And that is through DSP. DSP is the only way you can target people who purchase from you and then cross sell them another product. But if you have a consumable product, then you want to get them on, subscribe and save. So number one, activate subscribe and save and do the 10% off. Subscribe and save. So that just gives them a percent off to subscribe, you know, just for being subscription. But then you can add an additional subscription for the additional discount for the first subscription. So $5 off your first subscriber save, which incentivizes people to then sign up for subscribers.

If, because they're like, okay, I'm anyways gonna use this product, the subscription is gonna be 10% off. And like, this is an additional 5% off. That's or $5 off. That sounds like a deal right now, people will cancel, but as long as the people signing up are more than the people that are canceling, you're building subscription and that's increasing your lifetime value. And, you know, we've seen anywhere from like, you know, people who are subscribed will spend 1.8 to like, 4.6 times more than the average person, which means for every subscription, they're worth, let's say, an average of three times more than a regular person, you, you acquire the customer once and you don't have to acquire them the other, let's say three times that they purchase.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So we covered a lot on this one. Um, so are there any last thoughts you have wrapping up? I mean, I think we, we, I think we covered it all. Like, I think, you know, if you're growing on Amazon, like this is what you need to be doing. You need to be, you know, thinking about the three core pillars for traffic, click through rate and conversion. And then, you know, on the back end of that you obviously want to be thinking about your average order value, how to get that up, as well as different ways to improve, increase LTV through things like subscription and stuff like that.

That's it. Yeah, live and we covered everything. I mean, you know, execution wise and logistically, you want to think about this as like one thing at a time.

Yeah.

You do not want to, number one, you don't want like when you're driving traffic to launch all of your keywords at once, you don't want to change your main image. Listening images, add videos, do all because the goal is like how can I measure my improvement? And so if you can only change your main image, you know, and then measure the improvement there. Okay, profits went up. Revenue went up. Great. Let's move on to the next thing. Let's optimize the second image, third image, or let's update our a plus content, make it premium a plus and utilize like experiments on Amazon. It's called manage my experiments and it is basically a b testing your title, your, your, you know, images, your a content or p, your brand story.

So there's a lot of different modules that you can a b test on Amazon. So take full advantage of that, you know, because it never used to exist.

Yeah. And you know, I think this is really great because it's a great framework for even if you're getting started, right, you're launching your store on the first time. Like these are all the pillars that you want to have taken care of and given thought. And then obviously as you start to scale you have more insights into keywords and how they're performing. You can run tests, you can say, oh, we swapped our video. How did that impact everything else? But I just like this as a framework. Cause, you know, it's applicable for, for everyone really at all stages of, of that growth journey on Amazon.

So exactly.

For, for anyone who's tuning in and wants to connect with you, shout out your socials, where do we find you? Uh, on Instagram on LinkedIn. Where do we connect with you? In trivium?

Yeah, yeah. So hit me up on LinkedIn. Uh, mina Elias. M I n a e l I a s. Uh, the. The website is trivium co.com, so triviumco.com and then Instagram at the minaelias. I'm pretty responsive everywhere, so if you have any questions about any of the things that I covered, hit me up. And then my YouTube channel.

Mina Elias. There's so much more fire content than this. So if you want, like, hours of this, check out the YouTube.

Hell yeah. All right. Thanks for coming on today.

Awesome. Thank you for having me.

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