Looking to learn how to increase sales on Amazon? 

Truth is, being an Amazon seller isn't as easy as it used to be. The algorithm is constantly changing and the competition is fiercer than ever - but some brands are still killing it. 

How are they doing this? By using the right strategies…

In this article, we’ll reveal our 19 favorite strategies that we used to sell over $2 billion on Amazon and we’ll break down the advice for both new and seasoned sellers.

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 extra 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.

For Seasoned Sellers: Start by downloading a list of all the keywords you already use and make sure that every keyword you have is being advertised in all 3 match types in SP and SB. Then, use the methods above to create your own keyword list and compare it to the ones you already have to see if you can spot new ones.

For New Sellers: While this same advice applies for all stages, I wanted to include a reminder for new sellers specifically because many of them seem to only use 10 keywords, or only use auto campaigns. Your first order of business should be to find as many good keywords and set up as many good campaigns as possible. Going slow and steady with advertising will put your product launch at a disadvantage.

Improve the Right Metrics

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’ tab.

Now, if you want to grow your Amazon sales for any particular ASIN, you’ll need to improve at least one of those numbers.

This means the answer to the “how to improve Amazon sales” question is always 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 one of 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 instance, take a look at the ASIN in the screenshot below. We increased sessions 10x from 5,000 per month to 50,000 per month and consequently, product sales went up 10x as well, from 20,000 to 200,000.

For Seasoned Sellers: You want to focus on what the lowest-hanging fruit is. For example, If your product is already top 5 in its niche, increasing sessions is going to be both difficult and expensive. So you might want to launch new variations to try to increase your CVR or AOV, or you can try to negotiate lower COGS so you can drop your prices and increase CVR. On the flip side, if your sessions are low, it's better to get those up first before launching new variations or doing anything high effort.

For New Sellers: Your newly launched products are always going to lack sessions and have a poor CVR. When looking for how to increase sales on Amazon, your very first move should be increasing sessions using ads while trying to increase CVR by dropping your prices at the beginning of your launch or by enrolling into Vine to get reviews.

Get in The Habit of Launching New ASINs

The biggest difference between the sellers we’ve observed hit 8 figures and the sellers who could never scale past 6 figures is the pace at which they launched ASINs. The world’s most successful sellers have a system for continually testing and launching new products every quarter and even commit to a minimum amount, usually in the range of 5 – 40.

In the example below, you can see how continuous ASIN launches 20x’d a small account in 12 months.

The logic behind this is simple, the more shots you take the more shots you make. If you launch 40 ASINs a quarter and only half of them work out, you increase the number of profit-generating products you have by 20. If the average successful product sells just $10,000 a month, you’ll be adding an extra $200,000 in monthly revenue every quarter. Now, do this for 7 years in a row, hit a few home runs in between, and you can easily scale to 8-9 figures in sales.

A good example of this is the story of Angry Orange, a brand that sells pet odor removers on Amazon. Before launching new ASINs, they were doing $2 million a year selling their massively popular cleaning liquid concentrates. They were able to grow Amazon profits and had a cult following but they hit a ceiling with their sales and decided to sell to an Amazon aggregator called Thrasio. 

Using a similar growth playbook to the one in this article, Thrasio came to the conclusion that going forward, launching new ASINs for the Angry Orange brand was the best strategy for how to increase its Amazon sales. So they started by launching a ready-to-use product line then introduced a spray bottle, and a bathroom cleaning spray as well. These new ASINs ended up adding another $22 million in annual sales in 2 years, effectively growing the brand 1000%.

Hitting home runs like this isn’t the only path to growth though. Having a bigger catalog also makes scaling easier. $1 million per month in revenue with a 500 ASIN catalog only requires you to maintain very average performance levels across your products. 1 million per month on a 10 ASIN catalog requires you to have several best-selling products, which is a lot harder to achieve and maintain.

Having more ASINs also helps spread the risk. At 500 ASINs, a good chunk of your listings can get suspended or several products could die off and you’d still be fine. At 10 ASINs, any sudden change or drop in sales on a few ASINs can kill your entire business.

For Seasoned Sellers: It’s important to not rest on your laurels. Even if you have a few good ASINs under your belt you need to be launching every quarter, or better yet, every month. You have the cash flow to support these launches and they’ll be the reason your business continues to grow.

For New Sellers: Unless you have a source of financing or other off-Amazon revenue streams, you’re most likely cash-poor at the stage you’re in. This means that launching a lot of ASINs is not only a bad idea, but also completely impossible. We recommend new sellers have as many ASINs as they can support with their cash flow then focus on growing these first to generate enough profit to finance new launches.

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 increase your Amazon sales? 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 almost 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 without being the market leader.

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 actually 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 find a high-performance ASIN with good room for growth, start investing more and more money into it so you can scale up and grow total sales.

In this next screenshot, you can see the difference in monthly sales on an individual ASIN after we identified it as high potential and started funneling more money into it.

For Seasoned Sellers: Once you have a big enough catalog, you’ll have some clear winners and some clear losers in your product lines. Most sellers at this stage are reluctant to invest more into their winners and even more reluctant to cut their losers. You need to be doing the opposite of that.

For New Sellers: You likely don’t have many ASINs at this stage, so my best advice for you is to focus on anything that shows early signs of success and to cut anything that isn’t profitable on month 3.

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 will 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.

For Seasoned Sellers: Make a list of your top ASINs and use the SQPR in brand analytics to tell whether or not you underperform on CTR on any of them. If you find any ASINs with below-average performance, start running A/B tests to try to fix that. If all your ASINs are at the average levels or above it I’d probably focus on another strategy first.

For New Sellers: Your CTR, in the beginning, is always going to be below average because you have no reviews. I wouldn’t really be worried about how you perform against the “benchmarks”, just try to launch with the best main image you can come up with using split testing tools like Pickfu.

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. 

With this campaign setup, you’ll generally bring in 4-5 figures in sales each month at a 1-15% 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 their search terms are more accurate.

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.

For Seasoned Sellers: If you have a large catalog, catch-all campaigns and other similar strategies like the waterfall campaign can be very effective for you. I’ve seen sellers increase Amazon listing sales by 7 figures using them.

For New Sellers: Catch-all type strategies won’t be super effective for you, so focus more on getting your set up right with your regular auto campaigns.

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 to take for you to grow your Amazon sales is 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 month and ultimately grow your sales. 

This is what a search term report looks like:

You can manually download your search term reports every week to find new keywords, 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.

For Seasoned Sellers: If you haven’t been harvesting at all, you might find thousands of potential new keywords in your search term reports. Make sure you download your ST report today for the last 2 months and spend an hour going through it.

For New Sellers: You likely don’t have many search terms yet, but what you can do is set up auto campaigns for every new product launch and use them as “research campaigns” to find new keywords for you to advertise on.

Test New Ad Types and Targeting Types

Oftentimes, the lowest-hanging fruit is just is to simply do more of what already works. This usually means reusing performing keywords in new match types and ad types to improve Amazon sales.

In the example below, you can see how one of our accounts grew after adding both broad match keywords and sponsored brand campaigns.

In the graph below, you can see how a set of 10 exact match keywords can be used to create new broad and phrase match campaigns as well as 3 sponsored brand campaigns.

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.

For Seasoned Sellers: You’re most likely not doing this for your entire catalog. Hire someone from Upwork to go through all your campaigns and provide a list of what's missing on a keyword, ad type, and match type level for each ASIN then get to work fixing everything.

For New Sellers: Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking you only need one campaign and a couple of keywords to launch because “you’re still learning”. Launch with a full campaign set up on day 1 to give yourself the best chance at success.

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 come with a set of pretty terrible ACoS-related side effects and limit your chances to increase Amazon sales by up to 30%.

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 that 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.

In the image below, you can see how poor campaign structure led to bad-performing keywords spending more than good-performing ones.

For Seasoned Sellers: It’s better to use bulk sheets to create your campaigns instead of doing them manually through the campaign creator on Amazon. We understand that creating poorly structured campaigns is a lot easier and faster, but using bulk sheets makes your job a little better and prevents you from falling into the habit of making bad campaigns.

For New Sellers: You likely don’t have many campaigns at this point so it’s a good idea to start right and make your first few campaigns using the proper structure instead of having to go back and remake them later.

Make The Best Product Listings Possible

Driving traffic to your product listings is key to increasing product sales on Amazon, but it can cost an arm and a leg, which is why many sellers are starting to look at Amazon listing optimization as a more viable long-term option.

The aim of listing optimization is to increase your conversion rate, which is the rate at which people who visit your listing convert into customers, 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.

Here’s an example of a similar situation in real life:

Now, for the money question: What makes a listing high converting?

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.
https://www.aihello.com/resources/blog/increase-sales-on-amazon/

Popular posts from this blog

Guide to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)

Kindle Direct Publishing: How to Make Real Money on Amazon.

E-Commerce has no borders: Myth or reality?