Episode Summary
In this episode of the 7 Figures and Beyond podcast, host Greg Shuey converses with Mike Begg from AMZ Advisors about the intricacies of Amazon Funnels. Mike discusses his journey from working in consulting and real estate to founding his agency focused on Amazon marketing. He explains the concept of Amazon Funnels, emphasizing that while marketing funnels are common across industries, applying this concept specifically within Amazon can drive substantial brand awareness, consideration, conversion, and customer loyalty. Mike highlights how Amazon’s high conversion rates, primarily due to trust and Prime membership benefits, make it a lucrative platform for e-commerce brands. He also shares effective strategies for leveraging Amazon’s advertising capabilities, affiliate marketing, and optimizing product listings to improve conversion rates. Finally, Mike discusses the importance of focusing on customer acquisition costs and lifetime value, especially for consumable products, and shares insights on navigating Amazon’s platform amid rising competition from platforms like TikTok
Key Takeaways
- Amazon Funnels Explained: Amazon serves as a crucial part of the marketing funnel, starting with product discovery and progressing through awareness, consideration, conversion, and customer loyalty. Applying traditional funnel concepts within Amazon can help brands better understand and leverage the platform for growth.
- High Conversion Rates on Amazon: Amazon’s average conversion rate is significantly higher than that of D2C websites, primarily due to customer trust and the reliability associated with Prime membership. Leveraging Amazon’s platform can therefore yield better conversion rates and justify directing more traffic to Amazon listings.
- Effective Amazon Marketing Strategies: Advertising on Amazon, both through campaign manager and programmatic DSP, is highly effective due to Amazon’s extensive data on purchasing behavior. Affiliate marketing, particularly through publications and influencers, can drive significant traffic and brand awareness at a lower cost.
- Optimizing Product Listings: Key areas for optimizing Amazon product pages include effective copywriting focused on benefits, compelling main images, detailed product images, and A+ content. Reviews play a crucial role in conversions, with strategies like the Early Reviewer and Vine programs helping to build initial reviews.
- Navigating Amazon’s Platform: Understanding key metrics such as ROAS, ACOS, customer acquisition cost, and lifetime value is essential for ensuring profitability and growth. Brands should consider the nature of their products (consumable vs. non-consumable) to tailor their focus on either profitability or customer acquisition.
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Mike Begg LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mbegg/
AMZ Advisers: https://amzadvisers.com/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey: 0:26
Welcome to episode 33 of the 7 Figures and Beyond podcast. Hope everyone is having an amazing day and is absolutely crushing it. So today’s guest on the podcast is Mike Begg from AMZ Advisors. If you’ve never heard of them before, their agency specializes in all things Amazon marketing.
Greg Shuey: 0:50
I have known Mike for about a year or so and I really enjoy following him on LinkedIn. He shares a lot of really insightful tips and information and he talks about a lot of things that he and his agency does for their clients. And he talks about a lot of things that he and his agency does for their clients. They’re super smart guys and super pumped to be able to talk to him today. Today we’re going to be talking about Amazon Funnels and honestly, I didn’t even know this was a thing. I mean, it makes sense now, but until Mike and I started brainstorming ideas for this episode, I had never thought about the fact that there is a funnel inside of Amazon, and as soon as he mentioned that I’m like, yep, that’s the one. So it’s going to be a really fun, really good conversation. So, mike, thank you for taking time to chat with us today.
Mike Begg: 1:38
Hey, greg, thank you for having me on, excited to be talking with you and yeah, talk a little bit about Amazon and the whole marketing funnel there.
Greg Shuey: 1:44
Heck yeah. So before we jump in, would you just take a few minutes and introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your personal story and how you’ve gotten to where you are today?
Mike Begg: 1:55
Of course. So I myself. I am originally from Connecticut. I grew up there. Pretty much my entire life Went to school in Philadelphia. After I graduated, I went and worked in consulting for Deloitte. I absolutely hated working in the big four, so I left and went into real estate. I was working in real estate development for Sears. We were doing a lot of interesting stuff. This was back in 2012, 2013. And Sears was pretty much already starting to show that it was going to go under. So what we did initially was try to raise a bunch of money. We raised $2.5 billion from spinning off a real estate investment trust. We burned through that money and we started looking for other opportunities. So my job became how do we redevelop properties, how do we sell off properties that are worth money and one of those deals was actually with Amazon and I was like why does Amazon want to buy a Sears store?
Mike Begg: 2:51
It turned out that they were turning a closed mall into a fulfillment center, and that’s where I started learning all about Sears and everything there. Yeah, exactly.
Greg Shuey: 3:00
Interesting Okay.
Mike Begg: 3:02
Yeah, so that’s where it started from, and ever since then I’ve been creating eBooks selling those online. Then I started my own brand, sold those online. Now I’ve been consulting with brands and helping them scale their sales and their presence on the Amazon platform.
Greg Shuey: 3:17
That’s super cool. And now you’ve got your agency and you are based out of Mexico, right? I?
Mike Begg: 3:23
am? I currently live in Mexico. I live in Guadalajara. I’ve been here for almost seven years at this point, which is kind of crazy to think about. But it’s been fun. It’s always a new experience here. It’s always an experience being in a different country, I guess in general, I really enjoy it.
Greg Shuey: 3:39
And there is amazing talent in Mexico and you’ve built an amazing team. That talent in Mexico and you’ve built an amazing team. That’s awesome. Yes, I have Cool, cool, cool. All right, you ready to jump in? Yeah, let’s go for it. Let’s get right at it then. So can you start off by explaining the concept of an Amazon funnel and why it is important for?
Mike Begg: 4:03
a brand that’s looking to start selling on Amazon, to really understand. Yeah, I mean, I think a funnel is nothing new.
Mike Begg: 4:07
I mean the marketing funnel exists in pretty much every industry. It’s just thinking about that same concept within Amazon and actually how Amazon fits within that entire funnel. So first of all, it started off with, like when we think about product discovery, the numbers like 70% of all line product searches start on Amazon. So just from a brand awareness standpoint, amazon is essentially the top of your funnel, within your entire marketing funnel. So just think of it that way Like customers are looking for products. How are they finding your product? Amazon SEO, they’re going to Amazon. They’re looking for a product. They find it Great. You’ve created brand awareness for yourself. So that’s how Amazon kind of fits in the big picture.
Mike Begg: 4:48
It’s like the smaller funnel at the top of your brand awareness funnel. Now, when we look at Amazon itself, the same thing exists. We have to consider brand awareness, we have to create more consideration for the product, we have to convert people and we want to try to get repeat purchasers or create customer loyalty. So the same concepts exist. Now, when someone’s starting on Amazon, we always just recommend starting from the bottom and building up. Like how do we have people already searching for our brand? Do we have people that are ready to buy and searching for a keyword? Can we put our ads in front of them at the right time to get them to purchase? And then moving up is like how do we create more consideration for our products over competitors and how do we create more awareness beyond there?
Mike Begg: 5:29
So, yeah, it’s a very simple concept. It’s just applying it to the platform itself.
Greg Shuey: 5:34
That’s cool, you know. I know that we kind of talked about questions that we were going to touch on and you kind of already touched on our second one. But I’m going to flip it just a little bit and I hope I don’t catch you off guard here. But so you know very crystal clear that the funnel is the same right Awareness, brand awareness, consideration, conversion, would you say, when you compare Amazon to a D2C website, like, are there different nuances or are things pretty much the same in terms of the funnel between the two?
Mike Begg: 6:11
I mean, I think the main thing that you’re gonna see is that your conversion rates at the bottom of the funnels will perform much better on amazon than it’s gonna perform anywhere else, got it? Look at just industry standards. Uh, amazon’s average conversion rate is eight percent. Okay, shopify, I think, is somewhere between one to three percent. So you’re getting about two and a half times more conversions on the amazon platform than you’ll ever get from your website. So, uh, that’s the main difference. Uh, when we look at it from that standpoint is like, when we know we’re going to convert more traffic from amazon, well, why don’t I send more traffic to Amazon? Now, the obvious argument here is I don’t own the customer data. But at the same time, once you get a customer to purchase, or you acquire that customer for the first time that’s when your work starts it’s like all right, how do I get them to come to another platform? How do I get them to come to my website? So I do own that.
Mike Begg: 6:58
Or how do I encourage them to redeem some free gift or free product or whatever it may be. All of those ways are ways for you to take advantage of the higher conversion rate and then figure out how to actually leverage that for your other channels.
Greg Shuey: 7:10
That’s awesome, cool. Why do you think that is? Why is our conversion rate so much higher on Amazon? Is it just trust?
Mike Begg: 7:17
It’s trust yeah, I mean it’s trust and it’s the Prime membership. It’s those two things. In general, when customers think of Amazon, they think of getting their product in two days or less. I mean.
: 7:26
Amazon.
Mike Begg: 7:26
Prime set the standard for reliability. I mean, now it’s not the case anymore. Sometimes I order stuff on Prime and it doesn’t arrive for four days, but that was the original connotation that everyone had with Amazon. It’s kind of lasted, even though the performance hasn’t been as great. So that is probably the main reason that we see more conversions to that platform, and they know that. From a customer service standpoint, if I don’t like the product and I purchase the product through Prime, I’m going to get a refund, no matter what.
Mike Begg: 7:52
So those are probably the two things that lead to more conversions through the platform.
Greg Shuey: 7:55
I like that. Yeah, all right. So let’s take some time and dive into the top of the funnel. So what are some of the most effective strategies that you and your team are doing right now to drive top of funnel traffic to your Amazon store or directly to the product listings?
Mike Begg: 8:14
So there’s a couple different things that we’re focused on. One is advertising, and Amazon’s advertising platform is incredibly powerful. You have two different sides the campaign manager and the programmatic side on DSP. Both of those are going to get great benefits and I’ll dive into them a little bit more. The other, or the second, area where we’re focused a lot right now is on affiliate marketing, because affiliate can be an affiliate influencer, public relations, getting placements, publications all of that can lead to cheaper traffic on the platform over time, which is going to be a win for you from a blended ROAS standpoint. To jump back to the ads a little bit, when we’re talking about targeting capabilities, we have to think about how much information and how much data Amazon actually has when it comes to purchasing, so they know exactly what everyone’s buying, they can understand what people are in which affinity groups, and then you’re able to leverage that information to do audience targeting, to do in-market targeting, lifestyle targeting all these different types across a variety of different platforms. On the programmatic side, you can do it through the Amazon website. You can do it through other websites that Amazon owns which most people don’t even know they own. They own Goodreads, they own IDMB, they own a few other ones as well. You can do video targeting, you can do OTT. There’s just so much you can do on the programmatic and DSP side.
Mike Begg: 9:37
When it comes to actually getting people to be aware of your brand, now we can talk about that pretty much ad nauseum. That’s another episode. Yeah, yeah, exactly, it’s, it’s, it’s incredible. But uh, that’s the one piece. The other piece is obviously, like I mentioned before, affiliate. Uh, working with publishers, influencers, uh, publications to get your product out in front of people is another great way to really build that brand awareness. And then, using what’s called the brand, what’s called Amazon attribution, to actually do the tracking and the performance gives you what is essentially an incentive from Amazon, called a brand referral bonus. They give you 10% credit on the actual FBA costs or the fulfillment costs from Amazon, so you actually make money. They’re encouraging you to send traffic through those.
Mike Begg: 10:23
So it’s a great win-win when you’re leveraging both of those.
Greg Shuey: 10:25
Yeah, interesting you talked. You know you touched on affiliate twice, do you? Do you do a lot of affiliate work? Are you doing outreach and pitching and getting people to put those links on their sites and social?
Mike Begg: 10:36
profiles. We do yeah, we do do that a lot and we focused a lot more on publications. More than anything, because things live for so long. Influencer can be great. It’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of legwork. If we have someone that comes to us, we’re not going to say no, but for us to pull together and influence our campaign and coordinate 20, 30, 40 influencers it’s very time consuming and the returns aren’t guaranteed. So we tend to focus more on publications, blogs, affiliate networks, even media buyers on where we know they’re going to get placements.
Greg Shuey: 11:11
That’s cool, nice, all right. Here’s the one that I’m like really struggling to wrap my head around is, once we go into the middle of the funnel right, once they’re aware of the brand and the products, how do you keep their attention as they go out and they research comparable products? I mean, I would assume, I mean I’m an Amazon shopper. Once I find a product, I’m going to go see what else is out there. So, like, how do you, how do you keep their attention and bring them back for more?
Mike Begg: 11:36
Yeah, so this is where we’re going to shift. So we talked about DSP a lot. We’re going to shift more to the campaign manager, which is the on-platform ads, more than anything. There’s really two ad types that you’re going to leverage here. One would be sponsored brands. With sponsored brands we can do what’s called product or category targeting, so we can essentially target the competitor products or our main competitor products so that our sponsored brand ads show up. And when we think of sponsored brands, it’s usually the headline ads at the top. They sometimes have video, they sometimes have an image in there, but it’s essentially featuring right at the top of search results.
Mike Begg: 12:11
It’s really eye-catching, that’s one way we’re going to do it by focusing on the product targeting and category targeting. Sponsored display and sponsored products also have a product targeting feature, but the placements show up in different places. We’re going to leverage both of those to consider to increase consideration as well. Sponsored display is super powerful because the ads for those show up in two really high visibility places right below the buy box or right below where you click to buy. There’s usually an ad there that’s sponsored display. And then right below your bullet points when you’re on the website, there’s also an ad placement there that’s also sponsored display.
Mike Begg: 12:46
So customers are on our page or on our competitor page, I should say about ready to make a purchase decision or doing the research. And there we are again. They see the name again, they get familiar with the brand again. So that’s really where we’re focused on consideration, Got it? Sponsored products has placements in, like the other sections, the slider or the carousels down below that are, like you know, sponsored for four plus stars, sponsored related, something similar, whatever they call them. That’s where those placements show up. So all of that’s helping us create more consideration for the product by being on the category pages, for our product, being on the competitor pages. All of that’s like just creating more visibility for the product by being on the category pages for our, for our products being on the competitor pages.
Mike Begg: 13:23
All of that’s like just creating more visibility for us.
Greg Shuey: 13:25
So is there like a retargeting type of ad? You can do as well.
Mike Begg: 13:30
There is, so we can do retargeting in two different ways. They’re both give us two options for retargeting. One is a view retargeting, the other is purchase retargeting, and obviously it depends on what your goals are and how you’re going to leverage those.
Mike Begg: 13:46
With the sponsored display you have both of those options. The targeting is, I think the look-back windows are up to 365 days. You can go back pretty far. Obviously, the way we do it is we split it into different windows to see which ones perform better. That would be one way to do it. The other way would be with a DSP or the programmatic side again, where we can do off platform targeting so we can say, all right, these people view the product in this many days, but they’re on these websites or they have, they’re in these affinity groups. Let’s focus on advertising to these affinity groups through these types of platforms. So that is the power of the retargeting side.
Mike Begg: 14:24
And again, we’re just leveraging all the data that Amazon already has.
Greg Shuey: 14:27
It’s been years since I’ve run Amazon ads and I didn’t remember that being an option. Is that something relatively new? The retargeting side.
Mike Begg: 14:34
It’s relatively new. It’s probably come out in the past three years. But yeah, when it came out it was a really big feature. I would say initially the returns we got from it weren’t great. Obviously, I think they were just kind of refining everything. But, what we’ve seen over time is that it’s become more and more powerful for getting people back to the product page and actually converting customers more.
Greg Shuey: 14:58
Yeah, Another thing that just dawned on me is I don’t know that I’ve ever seen like an abandoned cart email go out from from amazon, like I wonder why they don’t do that.
Mike Begg: 15:08
I don’t know. I mean I so every once in a while I’ll see stuff like that, but um, it’s, I think they they’re just I don’t know.
Greg Shuey: 15:17
Actually it’s a very good question, a browse abandonment, an abandoned cart, you they’re leaving a lot of money on the table. That’s mind boggling to me. Huh, all right, cool. So let’s go to the bottom, like what are the critical things a brand should be doing to their product listing pages to improve conversions?
Mike Begg: 15:34
So, okay, that’s a very good, very good question. When it comes to the actual product page itself, there are essentially three different things we recommend. So well, I guess I would say four, but the first thing would be obviously your copy. You got to make sure your copy is calling out what the main keywords are, what the product is used for. Obviously, we focus on we don’t focus on features so much in the copy. We want to focus more on what the benefits are, how we’re actually solving a problem for the end consumer.
Mike Begg: 16:02
That is step one. Step two is the main image. Your main image is essentially what’s going to determine your click-through rate. If you have a really good main image, your click-through rate is going to go up. Click-through rate goes up and your conversion rate stays the same. You’re going to make more money, no matter what, because more people are visiting your page. So we look at what we’re trying to do with the main page. We obviously want to kill as much of the white space as possible. Other things we make we are able to do is potentially let’s say we’re selling I don’t know a supplement. Let’s say we’re selling vitamins. We might put a bottle of the vitamin.
Mike Begg: 16:41
We might put some like graphically designed vitamins, like outside of the bottles people can see what it looks like, or we’ll lay it off or something that’s attention grabbing. Those are different ways we can kind of play with that main image to try to test and improve click-through rates yeah, so that’s area number two. Number three would be your product images, and we focus on those a lot to kind of highlight the features and not the features I’m sorry the benefits and how we’re solving the problems for consumers, also calling out the main keywords.
Mike Begg: 17:02
So it’s very clear to customers what we’re doing. When you’re shopping on mobile, the first thing you see after the product title is the product images. So everything that is really important to pass to the consumer, we want to be able to pass it to them right there in the images. So we’re just reinforcing essentially what we’re putting into the copy. And then the last one would be the actual A-plus content. A-plus content is kind of just a way to educate consumers more, to highlight more features of the brand. I personally don’t ever look at the A-plus content pages, but consumers do the data actually shows that it leads to about a 5% to 13% improvement in conversion rates.
Mike Begg: 17:36
Wow. Okay, those four areas are really where you want to focus on, on the individual product pages Interesting.
Greg Shuey: 17:42
What about reviews?
Mike Begg: 17:43
Reviews obviously play a big part as well. I mean, I think anyone uh trust something that has more reviews or more star ratings or whatever it may be. Uh, most to the point where most people don’t actually even read, uh, what the reviews say. It’s like oh, this is a higher star rating. And it’s actually been interesting for a few different reasons because for a while a lot of sellers were kind of hijacking old listings. So interesting there. I mean, there’s millions of sellers on Amazon but there’s millions more that have started an account and then failed but had a ton of reviews. So these third party sellers were coming on and finding these products and then relaunching a new product on that same listing. So it already had a star rating, even though the reviews were not related to the product.
Mike Begg: 18:25
But when a customer sees the product compared to other products and it already has 2000 reviews, even if it’s about something else they’re not checking, so that was not happening for a while. Amazon’s cut most of that out, but it goes to show how important that is for launching your product. The other thing that Amazon says as kind of a reference point is your product is not retail ready or not ready for advertising until you have at least 15 reviews on your product page.
Mike Begg: 18:51
So on your product, so it does play a big part and it does have a big impact on conversions. Obviously, more reviews over time is going to be the big winner for you, but once you have those customer reviews and there’s a variety of different programs on platform like Early Reviewer and Vine to help you get those initial reviews Once you have those, that’s really going to help your product stand out and convert even better.
Greg Shuey: 19:16
That’s awesome. So for a business owner that’s just getting started on Amazon, that’s awesome. So for a business owner that’s just getting started on Amazon, they’ve got, you know, a hundred products. Like, pulling all of that content and the imagery and everything together, that’s a lot of work. Like, how, how are brands if they’re not working with you because you’re doing a lot of it? Like, how are brands tackling this? Are they using tools? Are they using AI to help them create content? Like, what are they doing? I would say most brands aren’t. They’re doing the bare minimum to get up on they are the ones that.
Mike Begg: 19:50
So it’s very interesting you see a very big dynamic. There are a lot of companies that are, you know, one to two people and are doing millions of dollars and they’re the ones that have figured out. You know, I need this. I need this VA to do this work I need this VA to do this work. I have this agency to manage the ads, whatever it may be.
Greg Shuey: 20:06
They’re the ones that are incredibly efficient. They’re the ones that make me question whether or not I’m in the right business, you know one to two people, millions of dollars.
Mike Begg: 20:15
That happens to me at least once a week, especially when I hear the problems they have and I’m like, are you guys kidding me? How have you not solved this? But yeah, there are plenty of sellers out there that are making money like that.
Mike Begg: 20:27
It’s interesting. That’s one dynamic. Now. The other dynamic is more established companies that might be legacy companies or have have a significant ad budget and just don’t know what they’re doing on platform, or they have a significant team and there’s a lot of stakeholders and no one’s really making decisions. Yeah, uh, so you see a mix of everything. I think, uh, when it comes to actually managing the catalog, the ones that are more nimble are the ones that are actually able to do it better than the ones that you know are, have more stakeholders and more people in place, because everybody wants to have their stake on what content looks like or what it says got it.
Mike Begg: 21:00
We’ve seen it many times where we produce content for them or the designers produce content, uh, or their designers produce content for them, and then they we bring into, you know, the team meeting or whatever, with the 10 or 12 stakeholders that are there and three like it, seven don’t, and like everyone’s arguing about everything and it just slows things down and nothing moves forward.
Greg Shuey: 21:18
It’s a mess and nothing moves forward.
Mike Begg: 21:20
It’s a mess and nothing moves forward. Yeah, exactly so that’s very common to happen as well. So, yeah, a company like ours. We help them essentially organize everything better. There’s a lot of third-party softwares that can manage catalog as well. They’re particularly helpful because they can manage catalog across different platforms.
: 21:36
So if you’re on, Amazon, walmart and Wayfair.
Mike Begg: 21:38
So if you’re on Amazon, walmart and Wayfair, they can help you manage the catalog from one place on all of those platforms. I think that’s a unique benefit of them. And the other thing you asked about was AI. Most of them are not leveraging AI. I think one powerful feature that we’re looking at doing it for using generative AI from a creative standpoint is around what’s called Amazon Posts. Amazon Posts is essentially the in-platform social media of Amazon, so you can essentially create your own social media content. It’ll show up on the mobile app.
Greg Shuey: 22:08
I’ve literally never heard of that. Ever Is that new?
Mike Begg: 22:11
No, it’s been around for about four or five years now, but most people aren’t leveraging it, and mainly because if you already have the content production on your social media side, it’s easy to just reshare it. And huh, mainly because if you already have the content production on your social media side, it’s easy to just reshare it and post it, if you don’t, then you can use something like generate more time and yeah create me a bunch of content and I’ll put it up there every day.
Greg Shuey: 22:30
It’s free, traffic doesn’t cost anything, so you’re better off creating it than not interesting and do you find that the brands that do that actually pull more traffic?
Mike Begg: 22:38
they, they do I mean? What we’ve seen is that Amazon posts and this was there’s a very interesting trade off here is that Amazon posts will not generate a ton of traffic, but for a while, what they were generating was people following your brand, your brand, on platform. Now, the benefit of that? There were a few different benefits. One was called manager customer experience custom, custom experiments, excuse me where you could essentially do email marketing within platform. Amazon took that away a couple months ago, so that was one benefit of having followers and now it’s kind of gone. The other benefit is from the Amazon creator side, or like Amazon live, where you have influencers promoting it, is that you can promote the live stream to the people that are following your brand now that still exists, but I haven’t seen a great benefit from that in general.
Mike Begg: 23:26
Uh, the email marketing side was a lot more beneficial in my eyes, but it’s kind of like it’s one of the things. It’s like the posts live out there. It’s a good way to acquire followers, but to really leverage those followers, there’s not a lot of options right now.
Greg Shuey: 23:39
Interesting. Huh, you learn something new every day, I guess Cool. So as brands start to navigate the platform, as they start selling, what metrics should they be really dialed in on to ensure that they’re being successful?
Mike Begg: 23:56
I would say it really depends on we call it the business model. But the question you need to ask yourself as a brand owner is is my product consumable or is it not? Is it non-consumable? Does customer buy it once and then they never buy it again? And if you fall into that ladder bucket where they buy it once and never buy it again, then the main metrics you want to focus on are your ROAS or your ACOS, which is the inverse of ROAS average cost of sale.
: 24:24
You got to maximize for profitability.
Mike Begg: 24:26
If you’re not maximizing for profitability, it’s very easy to lose money on the platform, especially if you don’t have a consumable product. When you’re in the consumable product category, where we really focus on is customer acquisition. Now, how much does it cost me to acquire my customer and what’s the customer lifetime value? Those are the two metrics that are obviously going to determine profitability in the long term. We prefer working with consumable products because it gives us a little bit more room to be more aggressive on the advertising and marketing side, when we know that every customer we acquire is going to lead to more revenue for the brand. So those are the different metrics that you’re probably going to want to focus on depending on what your business model is for the actual products you sell.
Greg Shuey: 25:07
Cool. I’ve never looked at the analytics of an account that has, like a subscription you know built into it. Can you see lifetime value and how long subscribers stay with you? Does Amazon share all that data?
Mike Begg: 25:22
Yeah, they don’t share all the data, which is part of the problem yeah, they share pieces of the data. You can see, uh who I’m blanking on the terms they use right now, but they have like uh, active customers. They have like total customers, active customers, uh, hibernating customers and at-risk customers or something like that, where you can see some data like that, uh, they won’t show you what the lifetime value is or what the customer acquisition costs are.
Mike Begg: 25:46
You need to actually use a third party tool to calculate a lot of that, which is fine, Like I mean it’s, it’s worth it to see it. The other area where you can actually see the number of subscriptions you have and the growth of the numbers of subscriptions you have month over month is called subscribe and save. So that’s where you may have seen, like you know, buy, get 5% and it gets shipped monthly, or weekly or whatever the cadence is.
Mike Begg: 26:08
That’s really where you can see the revenue increasing over time, but again, you still don’t get good insights into what the actual cost of acquisition is.
Greg Shuey: 26:16
Interesting. That makes it so hard sometimes to make educated decisions and do they allow you to be able to and I already can’t remember those buckets but, like you said, one of them was like subscribers at risk Do you, do you, did they segment that and allow you to like, offer them promotions and talk to those people specifically to try to move them into a safer bucket?
Mike Begg: 26:40
So no, not easily. I mean the way that you would really leverage that would be the retargeting features that you have on DSP and sponsored display. You would want to be retargeting people that have purchased the product in the past. You just have to test different windows to try to get them to re-engage. You know that’s the main way you’re going to reduce that number over time and put that back into the more healthy buckets. But it’s also a good indicator that if you’re running that type of ad and you’re not seeing an improvement on the number of at-risk clients, it might be actually pointing to a problem with the product or a problem that the customer had with the actual product when they made the purchase.
Greg Shuey: 27:18
That’s cool, nice, all right. Do you have any predictions, kind of for the rest of this year and next year? Do you see Amazon continuing to grow and scale? We’re seeing TikTok shops rise up. Are they starting to capture market share? I’m just curious, kind of what your thoughts are.
Mike Begg: 27:36
So I mean, yeah, I think Amazon’s going to continue to grow over time. I mean there are different uh factors, like economic factors outside of amazon’s control, which might determine how quickly they grow, or, you know, they may see a slight downturn, but from a market share standpoint, I I still think they’re going to continue to dominate. Uh, tiktok shops is growing quickly and we are a big fan of tiktok shops, especially how it relates uh to kind of the brand awareness piece. We see customers or clients that run a lot of tiktok ads or run their own tiktok shop store. Uh, we see a lot of spillover to amazon of customers coming to purchase.
Mike Begg: 28:10
Again, it comes back to that trust factor and, uh, knowing that they’re going to get the product with prime and everything uh, so they can play together very, very well. Well, I mean, obviously TikTok has its own challenges with kind of some of the legal issues going on, but I think it is great to be on multiple platforms. I mean, my general belief is be everywhere, but I think if there’s one platform you want to focus on outside of Amazon, tiktok is a really good one to be on, right, now.
Greg Shuey: 28:36
Yeah, we’re doing some things with just a couple of clients right now and they are absolutely crushing it. It is wild, kind of just watching this thing grow and evolve.
Mike Begg: 28:45
It’s nuts, yeah no, it’s great, and the interesting thing for brand owners is that, uh, the way TikTok handles affiliate commissions they pay the commissions, it doesn’t come out of your pocket, so like that’s a win-win for everybody. Uh, so it makes a ton of sense for a brand to be on there.
Greg Shuey: 29:01
Yep, it’s awesome, I love it. Any final words of wisdom, or even just like if they could pick one thing to double down on this year, what would it be?
Mike Begg: 29:11
I think, uh, I think the main thing that you should focus on obviously, you know, we’re kind of coming into a big holiday period with prime day right now, uh, uh, it’s focusing a lot bottom of the funnel, uh, and then kind of seeing how things play out, I mean the expectation I have is that it’s going to be another big prime day. It’ll be, you know, the best selling prime day ever.
Mike Begg: 29:28
Uh but I expect every year I expect between uh, between july and october, between the second prime day I mean you’ll have the back to school period there’ll be some sales there for certain product categories. I expect expect sales to probably lull a little bit between those two periods until we get into Q4. So it’s a really good opportunity to get prepared for Q4 after we get through Prime Day, but really starting to try to build out some of these aspects of the funnel within your own brand focusing on testing different targetings from an audience and lifestyle and in-market standpoint, as well as even leveraging some of the existing data you have in your account through retargeting.
Mike Begg: 30:03
I think those are some of the great ways that you’ll be able to kind of leverage and focus through the rest of the year on growing sales.
Greg Shuey: 30:08
Yeah, I like that. You know, from the D2C side, right On the website side, I had a conversation on our podcast last week where we were talking about just expanding content on page and it’s overwhelming Like, like you mentioned, we have kind of like this down period, this downtime like take a page a day, you don’t have to do it all tomorrow, and a lot of people get paralyzed by thinking this is just so much work. Take a page a day, build it out, do all the A plus content and get prepped and ready to go. I like that.
Mike Begg: 30:41
I think that’s a great, great tip definitely yeah, I mean you got to invest to be able to grow.
Greg Shuey: 30:46
So yep, cool man. Well, thank you again for your time. That was a really good discussion. Really helped me kind of visualize and understand amazon funnels and I assume all of our listeners appreciate it as well. So thank you awesome.
Mike Begg: 31:00
Thank you for having me here, Greg.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
