Do you know that Amazon was founded in 1994 and wasn’t profitable until 2001 with revenue of $5 million on profit of $1 billion? For the last 20 years, Amazon gradually defines how we shop online and becomes one of the best online sales channels.
How does Amazon achieve that success? Here are some tips that you could learn from Amazon to increase your sales.
1. How Amazon uses up-sell to increase sales
Amazon has many tricks to up-sell that you could easily skip if you aren’t observant.
Firstly, delivering the right product picture. Customers often look at the picture before they look at the product title, partly because images are usually more attractive and partly because information collected through images delivers faster than text. Thanks to this trick, if you can come up with beautiful and informative pictures, you will sell faster and more effectively.
Here are some tips from Shopify and Ebay that you could use to take perfect product pictures from now on.
Secondly, Amazon gives customers more than they can expect. Amazon provides discounts, free shipping, and free return…for a lot of their products. Pictures from all directions, zoom in and zoom out freely; information is really detailed and there are a lot of recommendations just for you. This makes you feel like you have the best deal in the world and there is no elsewhere can bring you such a lot of treatments.
Amazon also shows customers the very few number of products left in stock, creating scarcity that urges customers to purchase right away. When this goes with an up-sell offer, customers are more determined to take offer so you can easily double your sales.
Moreover, Amazon usually suggests offers that customers can hardly refuse. For example, when a customer wants to buy a camera, he/she would then search for a memory card or a camera case, so why don’t you offer to sell both products at a lower price? He/She will not hesitate to buy because it’s all he/she has ever wanted. When you want to up-sell, try to do it right.
2. Email is necessary to grab customers
Try to create consistency, from content to form, and also between your emails and websites. You can use the same font, using similar colors and images. This will help customers easily identify you with your competitors, making you stand out from all others.
You shouldn’t just send discount or voucher to your customers. We guarantee that you do not reduce the price for all your products in store, so don’t do the same thing in your emails. The most important thing is that if you always send discount or voucher to customers, they will take it for granted and will not appreciate your discount or voucher anymore. Feel free to diversify, do not let yourself become too boring. You can send many things to your customers such as greetings, thank-you letters, letters of introduction, letters of invitation…
We notice that, online sellers often send one email to customers after customers abandon their carts but you can totally send them another email after 24h or more to remind them. This is quite simple but very effective. It can increase your conversion rate by 50% or more. Sale Nurturing app in Beeketing platform is an example. It helps online sellers automatically send personal emails to each customers to remind them of their abandon cart and bring them back to your store.
Last but not least, with each letter sent to customers, you should bear in mind one specific goal for it, don’t be too greedy. Many sellers just try to put as much information as possible in their emails, which makes customers fed up and refuse to receive more emails. For those who are aware of this problem, they try to make emails become lively, rich of photos, but there is one more thing to remember “Single call to action”. Amazon emails are often direct and specific. They usually ask customers to do one thing at a time so that customers don’t feel like they have been disturbed and comfortably to make responses. Try to learn this from them.
3. Personalize customer’s experience
To some extent, the best thing Amazon has done is personalizing customer’s experience. When customers shop at Amazon, they are surrounded by products that are “made for them” such as “Related to Items You’ve viewed”, “More Items to Consider”, “Inspired by Your Browsing History” “Inspired by Your Shopping Trends”, “Your Recently Viewed Items and Featured Recommendations “. There are endless of recommendations that customers would be interested in and hardly refuse to view. This is important to show that you care about them and make them feel comfortable to shop.
You can always learn from Amazon to increase customer’s personal experience. This is both easy and hard at the same time. “Try to be in customer’s shoes to understand what they want” is easier said than done. Here are some questions you must answer before doing anything:
- Who are your customers and what do they do?
- What do your customers need from you and what can you provide them?
- How and when customers buy your products?
- What customers expect from you and what can you do in return?
- What does customers think about you in comparison with your competitors?
4. Improve your searching system
The first step to buy anything is searching for them. When customers go to your website, you have to make sure that you provide customers the best and easiest way to find what they want. The searching system really makes a big deal in creating good impression for customers. The quicker and easier customers find a product, the better they feel. For an online store at a large scale like Amazon, it is necessary to have a great searching system in order to help customers find what they want, what they need, and Amazon did it well.
Moreover, Amazon continues to provide customers searching keywords by suggesting popular products or related categories in order to guide customers’ shopping flow and help them identify what they are more interested in. For example, when customers search for shoes then you can suggest them to specify what kind of shoes that they want, heels or flats, Converse or Nike…An excellent searching system saves customer’s time and makes good impression on your stores.
When customers get the searching results, Amazon continues to let them short it into what really important to them by refining it by brand, price, customer’s review…or all of them. For customers who doesn’t have a specific definition of what they want, it saves a lot of time.
5. Customer’s reviews
Customer’s reviews can increase conversion rate and boost sales. Amazon successfully encourages customers to rate the product, and leave a review after purchasing; using reviews as a way to build trust for customers. When customers trust a product or a brand, they are more likely to buy that product than others. Thanks to that, the sellers can sell out all their products more quickly. They don’t need to convince customers when they have already earned customers’ trust. The more good reviews they have, the higher their conversion rate. Remember that “people trust other people more than they trust retailers”.
Amazon has been very successful in developing online sales. Do not hesitate to learn good things from them to develop your own.
Still find it difficult to implement?
How do you think about a platform that can execute all sales strategies from Amazon on your store, increase sales for you automatically?
Yes, sound-like-impossible thing does exist. Check out Beeketing – the first e-marketing apps that give every sellers the POWER to sell effectively like Amazon
Amazon shows you how, Beeketing does it for you!
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