NOVEMBER 25, 2020

Some depressing Amazon stats

1. YETI create, or curate (you decide), brilliant lifestyle images for their full product range. Why should you care?
2. “The most critical tools in successful e-commerce expansion are customer-centricity and a test-and-learn mindset.” – McKinsey Digital shared this in a recent article, and it’s no surprise that this echoes Amazon’s leadership principles “Customer Obsession” and “Bias for Action”. Most of you reading this though will be bitching about the cost of great content, or rushing through the ‘customer journey’ discussion for your website. Then you’ll complain that Amazon eats your margins. Reality is, if you create an exceptional customer experience on site, one that cannot be replicated on Amazon, then customers WILL shop there and love doing so. Check out Frank Green’s experience that I discovered this week, see the difference?
3. Many brands have poor processes when working on their Amazon Advertising. As a result, this poor structure not only makes your life harder, but it also feeds skewed data back to you, which you then make potentially bad decisions on. We recommend utilising Portfolios and being as granular as you possibly can with your campaigns, also incorporating a structure for naming each component of your activity. This way, you’ll not fall for the trap in thinking a campaign is performing great, when in-fact it’s just branded search terms driving all the sales, and non-branded terms sucking spend away. I’m going to pester Destaney Wishon about this in the coming weeks when we record another podcast ep. Subscribe here to remind yourself.
4. Search Term Impression Share is being seen in some US accounts. It’ll help you understand which search terms you lose ad traffic to your competitors. This is particularly big for defensive campaigns on your brand terms, as well as anything that sits in your Primary search term category. If it’s below 100%, you’re losing traffic to competition.
5. Be careful with dynamic bidding up and down on Amazon, you could be spending 4x more than you hoped for a click.
6. I really liked this video from the brand MISFITS, they work in the health space, think bars etc, and this is super engaging. Videos like this are what we all should be aiming for, I know I know, these things don’t come cheap. But we’re setting the bar here, and I’m here to be your bar raiser. If you set the bar low, you’re customer expectations and sales bar may as well be low as well.
7. Amazon are ramping up the customised packaging and I’m loving it. Check out this example by Nintendo, then this Christmas themed bad boy. This brings me back to my ongoing point of the opportunities you’ve got to better the customer experience, and packaging is obviously part of that, but often gets overlooked. It’s as simple as “which of these 10 boxes are we gonna chuck and which will we keep for storing something in?”. A discussion we all have internally or as a household. If you’ve got great packaging, you get picked to stay (kinda like Toy Story for packaging I guess). If you stay then you stay front of mind, your brand is front of mind, and you’re much more likely to get another purchase from that customer. You’re also more likely to get those Instagram shoutouts, but that’s a whole other topic I can talk about another day.
8. I really like this way of looking at complaints vs. request. You could manipulate it with your post purchase communication by asking “how can we make this experience better?” as opposed to “do you have any issues?”. You’re setting the tone for the conversation, right? If you approach it with a leading negative, then you’re more likely to receive a negative, and that could be the customers impression on the brand. Whereas, by rephrasing it, do you open up a positive conversation, a constructive feedback loop, whilst also addressing any customer pain points?
9. Here’s some depressing stats about Amazon’s profits in comparison to small business closures.
10. Here comes Amazon Pharmacy. I was gonna write a little more about my opinion on this, but then Scott Galloway did a piece on it that I completely agree with. He’s more intelligent than me, so it’ll be a better read too.

Thanks,

George

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