Every seller is looking for new ways to increase sales on Amazon, but 95% of them fail to achieve real growth because they don’t know which strategies actually drive results. That’s why our PPC team at AiHello put together a list of the 19 tricks to improve your Amazon sales that have helped us grow our 5000+ Amazon seller accounts over the past few years.
In this list we’ll cover the best way to advertise Amazon products, our top Amazon selling tips, how to increase organic sales on Amazon, and how to boost your Amazon sales overall in small bite-sized pieces of advice that can be implemented in 30 minutes or less.
Understand Which Metrics Matter
If you’re looking to increase your Amazon product sales, you’ll need to understand what metrics actually matter when it comes to getting results. That’s because winning on Amazon is a numbers game, and the three numbers that matter most are your sessions, your unit session percentage, and your Average Order Value.
All of these numbers can be found on an ASIN level on the business reports page under the ‘Detail Page Sales and Traffic’ section.
Now, if you want to increase your sales on any particular ASIN you’ll need to improve at least one of those numbers. This means either getting more people to visit your product detail page, increasing the percentage of visitors who end up buying, or increasing the average amount they spend on an order. These are the only paths to growth on Amazon, and any growth strategy we’ll discuss in this blog will be focused on improving them.
Once you understand the impact each number has, you can start setting targets for yourself, like 10,000 monthly sessions by July 31st, 2023, and begin to reverse engineer a plan to get you there.
For example, let’s say your current monthly revenue is $40,000, your AOV is $40, your unit session percentage is 10% and your monthly sessions are 10,000 and you want to grow your sales to $60,000.
You have three options to get there, either get your AOV to $60, get your unit session percentage to 15%, or reach 15,000 monthly sessions.
All you have to do is pick one of those goals and focus on them for at least 3 months and all the other pieces will fall in place.
Back The Right ASINs
Death, taxes, and limited resources are the three truths every seller has to face. That's why knowing how to divide your efforts and ad budget across the right ASINs is crucial for success.
Usually, ASIN performance follows the Pareto principle where 20% of ASINs produce 80% of revenue, and achieving exponential growth always comes from getting the most out of the 20%, rather than trying to get the 80% to perform better.
So, how do you know which 20% to focus on to drive more sales on Amazon? The answer is pretty simple, there are 3 telltale signs of a good ASIN:
It’s Already Performing Well
The best ASINs are almost always your current top performers. It’s never a good idea for a seller to go after diamonds in the rough instead of just pushing their obvious winners
There’s Room to Expand
If your biggest competitors are only selling 10% more than you, it’s probably a sign that there isn’t much room for growth. The best ASINs are the ones that already sell well but exist in a market where there’s enough demand to be selling at least 2x more.
You Have a Good Product
Good products have good demand. If you sell a product with a real value prop that makes it better than what's available you’ll find it a lot easier to scale.
Now, to find those super ASINs, we suggest you check business reports and order all your ASINs by sales. Then make a list of the top products that together produce 80% of your current revenue.
Once you do that, the next step is to use Helium10 to get a rough estimate of how much your top 5 competitors sell and use that to gauge whether or not these ASINs have the potential to grow.
Once you’re done with your analysis and picking your ASINs, you can use the next 17 tips we cover to accelerate their growth.
Use The Right Tools
As Amazon becomes more and more competitive, using the right technology will be the main differentiator between sellers who rise to the top and sellers who fail.
Increasing your Amazon sales requires you to constantly create campaigns, find new keywords, update your bids, and test new things at lightning speed. Many sellers will try to do this on their own, which works fine at the beginning, but ends up crippling them as they grow.
That’s why thousands of sellers flock to tools like AiHello to help them grow their Amazon business. With AiHello, they’re able to create hundreds of campaigns in minutes, update their bids on all keywords daily and run thousands of micro tests to improve performance every day.
Users of AiHello just set an ACoS target and an Autopilot Goal (increase sales vs lower ad costs) and the software does the rest.
This level of efficiency allows these sellers to outpace competitors who rely on manual optimization because they’re simply unable to keep up.
If you want to learn more about AiHello, you can speak to one of our advertising experts here.
Make The Most Out of Your Auto Campaigns
Using auto campaigns isn’t as simple as it sounds. There are several tricks we implement here at AiHello to get as much out of them as possible.
Here’s a quick list of everything we do to get as much as 50% more sales from our campaigns:
. Catch all campaigns
Create a single auto campaign with all your ASINs and keep your bids at $0.10 with a 100% TOS boost. This campaign setup generally brings in 5-20 new sales each month at a 1-10% ACoS with almost zero maintenance.
. Give each ASIN its own campaign
To get as much reach as possible, each ASIN needs to have its own auto campaign. If you have several ASINs in one campaign you should split them up so they each get their own and if you have ASINs with no auto campaigns you should create new ones for them.
. Split your auto campaigns into 4
Don't Run all four targeting types in one campaign. Instead, what you should do is create one campaign for close match, one for loose match, one for compliments, and one for substitutes. This way you’ll get more reach and have higher control over how much of your budget each targeting type gets.
Harvest New Keywords Daily
Once you have all these autos set up, you’ll start discovering new, profitable search terms every day. The next step you should do to transform your account is to transfer these search terms as keywords and ASIN targets into your manual campaigns. Doing this will help you add hundreds of new, performing targets to expand your reach every week and ultimately grow your sales.
To do this, you can manually download CSVs of the search terms generated by your auto campaigns every day and check for new search terms to extract, or you can have it set up automatically across thousands of campaigns with AiHello.
To set it up with AiHello, all you have to do is select the auto campaign you want to harvest from and link it to the manual campaign you want the keyword to be added to from the autopilot settings.
Test New Ad Types and Targeting Types
Oftentimes, the lowest-hanging fruit is just doing more of what already works. In the case of selling on Amazon, this usually means reusing performing keywords in new match types and ad types to improve Amazon sales.
As you can see in the illustration above, a set of 10 exact match keywords can be used to create new broad match and phrase match campaigns as well as 3 sponsored brand campaigns, which can effectively double your clicks on the keywords you know already work.
This can also be done the other way around, where you start with sponsored brand campaigns or broad match keywords and you set up everything else from there.
Once you’re done setting this up, you can also harvest the search terms from the broad and phrase campaigns and put them as keywords in your exact campaigns and repeat this entire cycle again and again.
Split Test Your Main Images
One of the best-kept Amazon secrets is that you can double your sales by changing your main image. The reason this works is that your main image controls your sessions indirectly, and having a really good main image can double your sessions in a very short period of time.
To understand how this works you need to know the formula behind sessions:
Sessions = the number of people who see my product * the percentage of people who click on it (CTR)
The average CTR falls between 0.3% - 0.7%, if you change your main image and your CTR goes from 0.3% to 0.6% you can effectively double the number of clicks you get. With 2 times more clicks and everything else being constant, your revenue will also double.
Now, if you want to make a good main image you need to stand out from the other search results. If all your competitors' main images use the same colors, are taken at the same angle, and follow the same overall look, start by testing the exact opposite.
A good example of a strong main image would be this one made by the pet odor cleaning brand Angry Orange
The colors they use help them stand out from the SERP and they purposefully took the picture of their bottle facing the right rather than the left to grab people’s attention. This resulted in a much higher CTR and contributed to the 11x growth they saw between 2019-2021.
Fix Your Campaign Structure
Nothing hurts PPC performance more than bad campaign structure. Too many keywords, too many match types, and too many ad groups in one campaign can limit sales potential by up to 30%, and come with a set of pretty terrible ACoS-related side effects as well.
When you have too much going on in your campaigns, you’ll usually have one of two things happen. Either you lose control over your ad spend, meaning that your $100/day budget will end up going to random keywords which aren’t necessarily performing that well. Or, you’ll limit how many clicks you’re able to get, simply because Amazon’s algorithm wasn’t designed to split your budget evenly across 200 keywords in a single campaign.
That’s why our recommended structure is always 1 ASIN, 1 ad group, 1 match type, and 5-10 keywords per campaign. Or If you have what we call a hero keyword, which is essentially a high-performing keyword that spends a lot of money, you can even give it its own single-keyword campaign to get the most out of it.
By making these simple changes to your campaigns, you’ll start to see noticeable improvements in performance within 4-10 days, and major improvements down the line as you adjust your bids more.
Make The Best Product Listings Possible
Driving traffic to your product listings can cost an arm and a leg, which is why many sellers are starting to look at listing optimization as a more viable long-term option.
The aim of listing optimization is to increase your conversion rate. Your conversion rate is the percentage of people who visit your listing and end up buying and can be calculated as total orders/total visitors.
If you currently have 4000 people visiting your listing with a conversion rate of 10% you’ll sell 400 units. If you revamp that same listing and manage to get your conversion rate up to 13% your revenue will jump 30% with the same number of visitors.
This also means that even if you plan to invest in ads and SEO, it might make more sense to fix your listings first to get the most out of your investment.
Now, for the money question: What makes a good listing?
Mostly these 4 things:
Talk Benefits, Not Features
Instead of telling me your eye cream contains vitamin E, tell me it will make me look 10 years younger. Instead of saying your reusable bottle is plastic-free, tell me it can save the environment.
Use The Right Images
There are several images every listing should have at minimum to be effective. You’ll need enticing product pictures, easy-to-read feature images, clear infographics, and realistic lifestyle images to convert visitors.
Know Your Customer Better Than Anyone
The sellers who do the most research write the best listings. Good research usually starts with taking a deep look at your reviews, watching youtube videos about your product, and reading information about competing products. Basically, you need to be consuming anything that will allow you to truly understand your ideal customer and why they buy from you.
Use All The Tools at Your Disposal
Don’t settle for anything less than perfect. Make sure you use all your image slots effectively, write 2 or 3 lines for every bullet point, and make the most out of your A+ content. The more effort you put the more people will convert.
Use The Power of Social Proof
Having a good number of reviews has become table stakes to compete in today's world. That’s why sellers need to be intentional about getting more reviews instead of just leaving it up to chance.
There are countless methods out there to increase review count, but at the end of the day, most of it comes down to sales volume. This is why step one in our review playbook is always to drive more sales. Especially if we're dealing with a new ASIN.
If your ASIN has under 20 reviews, we usually recommend you drop your price so it's at least 30% under market then press on the PPC gas pedal for no less than 2 months to bring more customers in. The more happy customers you have the better chance you have at getting reviews.
Another viable option is using the Amazon Vine program. This program lets you give your product away for free to Amazon-approved reviewers who are obliged to leave you a rating. While this can be the fastest way to get to 30 reviews, it carries higher risk because Vine reviewers are known to be more critical than most, which might leave you with a few 3-star ratings.
Your least risky option for getting reviews would be to use an auto-request tool, like the one that comes with AiHello (shown in the image above) , that automatically messages customers asking for reviews after their purchase. This can increase the percentage of shoppers who leave reviews from 0.8% to 4% which helps amplify your review-building efforts.
Expand Your Reach
The most obvious, and probably most effective, way to get more sales on Amazon is to just reach more people, and reaching more people means showing up on more keywords. This can be done by adding new keywords to your old campaigns or setting up new campaigns from scratch.
In the screenshots below, you can see one of our accounts here at AiHello before and after we added 1734 new keywords in.
There are a few ways to find high-impact keywords that you can use to increase your sales on Amazon. The most common one is using keyword research tools like Cerebro by Helium10 which help you identify the searches that are being made to reach your competitors’ products and use that as inspiration for your own keyword list.
Another option is using the brand analytics page on Amazon and pulling keywords from the search query performance report directly. This method can be more accurate than traditional research tools because you can see how well you perform on each keyword compared to the market before investing any money in it. The only caveat though is you’ll usually find fewer keywords than you could with Helium10.
Finally, the easiest way to expand reach is to use an automatic campaign creation tool like the one we’ve built at AiHello. A campaign creation tool will automatically find relevant keywords you aren’t using already and add them to new campaigns that they make for you through the Amazon API. With this tool, you can easily create 40+ campaigns with hundreds of new keywords in under 10 minutes. All you have to do is select your ASIN, your budget, and what type of campaigns you want to set up and the software does the rest.
Run Coupons Regularly
Coupons can be a low-effort way to increase sales on Amazon in both the short and long term. The benefits you get from coupons include higher traffic, better CTR, and an improved conversion rate. You may also experience the Coupon Halo Effect after you stop running them because the increased sales velocity they cause will have increased both your organic rank and review count, which is when the long-term benefits start to kick in.
Amazon coupons work like real-life coupons. They come as either a dollar-off or a percentage-off coupon that buyers have to manually clip to redeem. Coupons on Amazon can be made to last anywhere between 1 and 90 days and the discount amount is determined by the seller.
Once created, your coupon will show up in the ads that you run, your product detail page, and in the organic results your product shows up in. This helps you stand out and incentivizes shoppers to check your products, even if they're not familiar with your brand and you don’t have that many reviews.
The best thing about coupons is that they require no upfront investment which makes them almost risk-free. The only thing you’ll have to budget for is the $0.60 fee Amazon gets every time someone clips one of your coupons and the effect the discount has on your margins.
Play Around With Pricing
Alongside reviews, price is one of the biggest decision-making factors for shoppers on Amazon. Lower prices tend to bring more orders and higher prices get you a more substantial average order value and better profit margins.
Most people will tell you to price your product just under what your competitors are selling it for. And while that might be sound advice in some cases, it really only scratches the surface of what you can achieve with real price testing.
Real price testing focuses on optimizing revenue per visitor, which is a metric that tracks how much money you make every time someone looks at your product.
If you have 1000 visitors and sell 100 units at $20 each, your revenue per visitor is $2. Now, if you raise your prices to $22 and sell 94 units instead, your revenue per visitor becomes $2.068. Which effectively means you’re making more money out of the traffic you’re already getting.
You might think that this $0.068 difference doesn’t matter much, but in reality, it has a far bigger impact than most would imagine. For starters, you just made more revenue with fewer units, meaning that your inventory will last you longer. On top of that, if your COGs in this scenario were $14 and your initial contribution margin was $6, this price change bumps your margin to $8/unit. Lastly, changing your prices is a 3-minute task, which means any return you get is always going to be worth the time investment.
Test New Variations
Testing new variations is one of the best ways to milk the most out of your star ASINs. Variations can take various forms but they’ll usually be either size-based, color/design based or feature-based.
Each variation you add will have a different conversion rate, and maybe even a different price, which means performance can be wildly different. New variations can become so popular that they outsell your original product several times over or they can fall flat and never really sell that much.
However, testing new variations comes with many benefits, because you’re building off the foundation of an already successful product. This decreases the risk you assume and lets you benefit from the momentum you already have. And If your new variation doesn’t work out, you can also stop running ads for it and let it sell out naturally over time from the traffic your listing currently gets.
This minimized risk doesn’t mean the potential rewards are any lower though. Launching a new successful variation can be as fruitful, if not more fruitful than launching a new product. In the image above, you can see an example of a size variation that was launched for this olive oil ASIN. The size variation in the image has a 4.3x
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