Discover the insider strategies to elevate your Amazon brand and create raving fans. Rachel Greer, an Amazon brand expert, shares her extensive experience and insights on utilizing Amazon tools, storefronts, and live streaming to boost your brand’s success.
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Summary of the Episode
Building an Engaging Amazon Storefront
Rachel Greer emphasizes the importance of treating your Amazon storefront like your website. She explains how to effectively use the follow button and Amazon Live to enhance customer engagement and drive sales. Learn how to design your storefront as a collection of advertising landing pages to cater to different customer personas and increase conversion rates.
Leveraging Amazon Live for Higher Conversions
Rachel discusses the power of Amazon Live and how pre-recorded live streams can be used to showcase products effectively. By demonstrating products with clear visuals and engaging content, brands can significantly boost their conversion rates. Rachel shares tips on creating compelling live streams and using OBS software to stream pre-recorded videos.
Optimizing Ads and Conversion Rates
Rachel and Todd explore the strategies for optimizing ad campaigns on Amazon. Learn how to drive traffic to specific storefront tabs and the benefits of targeting niche markets through dedicated landing pages. Rachel shares insights on balancing different customer personas and keywords to maximize your ad spend and improve overall conversion rates.
Effective A/B Testing and Analyzing Data
Rachel explains the importance of A/B testing on Amazon and how to interpret the results to make data-driven decisions. She highlights the need for holistic thinking when analyzing customer behavior and using Amazon’s tools to refine your product listings and ad campaigns. Discover the best practices for conducting A/B tests and leveraging Amazon-produced data for accurate insights.
Resources From This Episode
- Rachel Greer on LinkedIn: Rachel Johnson Greer
- Azama Brands: azamabrands.com
- OBS Studio: obsproject.com
- Amazon Live: Amazon Live Creator
- Trovares: https://troveres.com/
- Business Amazon Account Settings: Amazon Business
- Rivly: https://www.rivly.com/
In Conclusion
Building a successful brand on Amazon requires a strategic approach to customer engagement, ad optimization, and data analysis. Rachel Greer’s insights provide a valuable roadmap for Amazon sellers looking to elevate their brand and create loyal customers. By leveraging the tools and techniques discussed in this episode, you can transform your Amazon storefront into a powerful sales engine and build raving fans for your brand.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Amazon gives us a lot of tools to be able to interact with the customers who are going to be interested in our product. And I think a lot of times people feel like Amazon’s a big black box because it doesn’t give you the same level of information as say Google analytics. And that’s just like so much data that I think some of these people get overwhelmed in a different way.
[00:00:19] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: All right, what’s going on everybody? Today we have Rachel Greer with us and she is super experienced in the Amazon world. So she worked literally directly for Amazon in helping to build their private label products. She’s been selling on Amazon for over a decade. She built a seven figure Amazon agency in three years and then sold that. And now she has Two different businesses that she’s a part of, one of them is Trovares, which is a, essentially a white glove, like fractional vice president of Amazon for large companies, if they don’t want to have that position inside their business. And then Azama Brands, which is, uh, uh, Conversion rate optimization for your ads on Amazon. So, Rachel, extremely impressive resume. I appreciate you coming on the show.
[00:01:20] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Yeah, I’m so excited to be here and talk about what we do.
[00:01:23] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Anything I missed there that, uh, people would be interested in knowing about your background?
[00:01:29] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: I think the, the only thing is that as someone who’s both sold and advised on Amazon, I always thought it was important to be a seller and a consultant and not just a consultant. And this has been borne out so many times where I was on a call with a SaaS rep or on a call with an ads rep, like, Hey, we have this new thing. And I was like, Oh yeah, I’ve been using that for about a month. Whenever something new comes out, you know, we get the notifications first with Sellers and a lot of the brands that are on Amazon. Aren’t paying attention to those notifications or aren’t always looking in seller central like, Hey, look, there’s a new venue item. What’s this? So, uh, I think that’s a really big part of being successful as a consultant is actually, you know, doing it yourself.
[00:02:12] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: A hundred percent. That’s, that’s one thing I enjoy about doing the podcast. And then the weekly newsletter that I put out, you know, it keeps you in touch with what’s going on and all the new stuff on Amazon. So you can take advantage of it before everybody else.
[00:02:28] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Absolutely. And there’s so much new stuff, every month, something new.
[00:02:32] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Oh, yes. All the time. Sometimes good, sometimes not so good. But in any case, we’re going to be diving in today, how to build raving fans for your brand on Amazon. And before we started recording, we talked about a couple of really cool ones that we’re going to dive into. And I’m sure there’ll be a lot more, but some pretty cool stuff that you can do with your, uh, Brand a storefront and take advantage of that a lot more than most people don’t really do. And then also doing Amazon lives without actually having to be live, which is really cool idea as well. So where do you want to start and dive into this?
[00:03:12] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Yeah, yeah, let’s, let’s just start with the whole concept of the storefront because I think that’s a area where a lot of brands who even are pretty good at Amazon and they have premium A plus or they have really well built out image carousels or they have videos on their pages and they’re doing video ads. A lot of them still don’t have very good stores. And, uh, you know, it’s, it’s weird to me because sometimes I’ll look at their store and then I’ll go look at their website. I’m like, but your website’s gorgeous. Like what’s, what’s going on with your Amazon store? And it could just be because the person who’s responsible with the Amazon store didn’t talk to the website person who knows. Um, but you really do want to think that in your stores on Amazon, the same way that you think of your website, just with a lot crappier tools, that’s that the main challenge with the stores is you basically get squares and rectangles and various configurations, and that’s all you get for the store. But the whole concept of the store, the thing that I like about the store is that it makes it possible to have. A whole bunch of different benefits all in one on Amazon. First, your whole product catalog is in one place to make it easy for someone who landed on one item, but they’re like, Oh, I love the brand. I love the concept, but maybe do they have something with a higher waters? Do they have something with more storage space? Do they have something a little bit longer? Maybe it’s a dress I like, but maybe I want to see if they have it in midi or in maxi length instead of the length that I’m looking at. So that was the first thing you can show people your whole brand. And what you’re offering on the store, but. A lot of people stop there and they don’t do anything else with their store. So the next thing that it does is at the very top, um, you have two things that are built into the store. The first one is the follow button. And I’m a huge fan of that follow button. The more you can get people to follow you, the more, um, promotions you can run, the more push notifications you get through the app, um, the more Amazon will push those products to the followers of the brand. So the more you can be able to follow you, the better. So the follow button, we always tell you to follow us. Hi, press the button, try to get them to sign up as a follower. And then right below that, if you’re running a live, that’s where that shows your, your live stream will show right there. And so those are the first two things that I think many people, um, many brands on Amazon certainly miss those two things, like specifically getting people to try to follow and then using live. And the other thing that I like to remind people of it as a store, it is the landing page for about half of the ads that you can make on Amazon. Now you can do store storefront ads that land fully on the stores like store spotlight ads go straight to the store no matter where you click. Then there’s product collections, video ads. Those ones will land on the store. If someone clicks on the brand name, um, or if they click on the picture versus one of the products that are also with the app, and then you can also do sponsored display straight to a store now too. And so the third way that you want to think of your store, um, first is as a brand catalog, second is as a way to reach your customers directly to talk to your customers directly. Reach out to them directly as followers. The third one is thinking of your storefront as a collection of advertising landing pages. And so when I’m thinking of it that way, what I’m really thinking about is who are my customer avatars? My buyer personas is what some people call them. They’ll call them avatars. Doesn’t really matter. It’s the same thing. Is on Amazon, who’s buying my stuff and how do they find my stuff? Uh, say something, uh, I have carpal tunnel and there’s various different things that I use. If I, if I have been working too long on the weekend, I’m taking a break and my, my carpal tunnel flares up. I have these little gloves. They, um, go up to about here and they’re compression gloves basically. And they go down to about here. And they just compress the wrist to where you can get that, that relief from some of the carpal tunnel pain. And if it’s really bad, then I’ve got a wrist brace. And these products, when you look at them as a customer, you can see that they talk not just about carpal tunnel, but they’ll often also talk about like arthritis, or they’ll talk about, um, different kinds of edema that people are using these gloves or braces for, or recovery from some sort of wrist surgery and so on. So on the detail page, what you end up having to do. Is you end up having to have, um, a whole bunch of different customer personas on one page because anybody could land on that page, right? You could have the carpal tunnel person land. You could have the arthritis person land. And so you need to have in your images and your, your a class, a whole bunch of different potential personas. Whereas on the store, you can design it in such a way that the ad keywords that they’re clicking on are all carpal tunnel related. And when they land on that page on the store, you’ve designed a page with a video of a customer talking about how it helped their carpal tunnel. You can then have a graphic showing the nerves that goes through here and how the gloves help and all of the content on the page is carpal tunnel relating. You can put your two add to cart buttons. So if it’s convincing, just with the video alone, they can add the cart right there. And then a little bit below you have some more information, another add to cart. Um, and then if you are also selling, say a wrist brace, you can put a cross on the bottom of that page. So if they really liked the, um, the gloves and they can also then add the wrist brace. They happen to know they need it so you can think of that as a keyword landing page where instead of having carpal tunnel keywords go to your detail page that only maybe mentions carpal tunnel once or twice amidst all the other things that it has to mention, you can send it to a storefront landing page that’s fully focused on carpal tunnel and so you end up getting way better conversion rates on those landing pages than you do with the same keywords on your detail page.
[00:08:59] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Yeah, yeah, it’s a really cool idea that I hadn’t actually thought of myself and doing that, because usually the brand pages, most of the time people are using them to, you know, make different pages for their various product categories and stuff like that.
[00:09:16] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: An online catalog.
[00:09:18] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Yeah. Yeah. But instead of doing that, taking those tabs and creating tabs for maybe each of your major, uh, keywords or key phrases that you’re targeting, or even, you know, maybe more niche, uh, keywords and phrases that you’re targeting that you don’t want to make your full product about that, but you do want to try to get that market as much as possible.
[00:09:44] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Exactly. And there’s only so much you can do on a page, right? Exactly. It’s very limited and you only get the one.
[00:09:49] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Now I’m curious though, you’re running ads and sending people to that specific tab on the brand store. Do you see a drop off in conversion rate at all by driving people to the brand store versus driving people directly to a product listing? Thanks.
[00:10:09] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Yeah, absolutely. You do. So you end up having a little bit lower conversion rate coming into the store with these kind of keywords, because a lot of people who are coming into the detail page, they’re often ready to buy. Um, a lot of times when someone clicks on a store ad, the way that banner ads work in the placements of the store, they’re often more shopping and kind of clicking around and trying to make their buying decision. So the customer that you end up attracting with store ads is often not quite ready to buy. And so the conversion rates are lower. One of the reasons I still am a huge fan of sending people to the store anyway. Is any purchase you get through the store, like if they click add to cart in the store and they never went to the detail page that actually can artificially increase your conversion rate unit session percentage on your detail page because you have a sale without the corresponding detail page view and so you can get somewhat lower depending on the kind of keyword and the kind of funnel you’re building, you can sometimes get somewhat lower or very much lower conversion on your store. That still ends up helping your overall conversion rate because they checked out at your store instead of going to the detail page. So you do have to think of this holistically. Like, what am I trying to accomplish here? It’s the same reason I like sending influencer traffic straight to the store as well. Um, because influencer traffic, Google traffic is always worse than bottom of funnel Amazon traffic. And so I like sending that to the store and you can have as poor of a conversion rate as you want. It doesn’t really matter on the store as long as the few people check out that boosts your conversion rate overall.
[00:11:38] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Okay. So let’s use an example that, uh, it’s, it’s actually a product that we’re working on. Um, and it can be used in for various different, uh, categories. It can be used by. Tennis players, pickleball players, construction people, semi drivers, and it helps them all uh, in different ways, uh, but it’s the same product. How would you see, or how do you think you would see the ad driving traffic directly to the product page versus the ad driving to the, uh, brand store in conversion rate?
[00:12:18] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: There’s two things to think about. The first thing to think about is who is the customer. Do I have a broad variety of customers buying it? And the second thing to think about is how are they searching? Because I may have a broad variety of customers who are buying, you know, kitchen cooking sheet, but they’ll call it a cookie sheet or a baking sheet. And so they’re all searching for the same thing, even though they might be buying it for different purposes. And so you have to have both of those things. You have to have both a different set of buyers and a different set of search terms. So with the example with the little gloves, they’re searching for carpal tunnel, or they’re searching for arc bariase of the same product. So you have a different customer plus different search term. If you have different customer plus same search term, send it to the detail page, and then make sure that you’ve got. A few of those people in picture somewhere, um, or a reference somewhere. So the customer sees themselves, people buy most Nordic first, and then they validate afterwards that it worked for them. And so you want them to see a picture of themselves or connect to the page in some way. So if you’re, if you’re just having different customers, but the same search term, then it’s really a de scale page question. Most of the time, like you’re just trying to say, okay, do I have a construction worker picture? Do I have a woman over 50 picture? Do I have someone with a dog? Like, you know, what, what is it that is the customer that you’re trying to reach and make sure that on there somehow. If it’s different customer plus different keyword. Then you’ve got to start thinking about, okay, how do I attract these people differently than what’s happening on my, my detail page? And usually then you’d have your detail page focused on the most successful customer avatar and most successful keywords. And when you would have your less successful ones, but still making money up on the store. And so if I knew that, um, pickleball players are my number one target demo, and they’re searching for a pickleball related keyword for this product, and that’s the thing that’s going to get me the most sales in great, I’m going to try it in. Optimize my page for that and I’m going to try to optimize my sponsored products for that. Then what I’m going to do is if there is a tennis or construction use for this, then I’m going to have different pages for that on my store and then change Where I’m sending money, where I’m sending those ads straight to the store pages, as opposed to sending them to the detail page. I also really like doing this for audience and contextual on sponsor display, because audience and contextual artists lower performance in general, and you can get just some amazing engagement rates on sponsor display. Absolutely amazing. I have the kind of level that you just don’t get anywhere else, but. But conversion rates are so low that sometimes it can actually tank your listing to spend too much on those kinds of ads. And so those ones, I’m like, off to the store you go, head over to the store, check out my nice little page here. Um, so just trying to think about it from a, okay, how is this going to affect my listing and who am I trying to attract? And if this person is maybe not always my customer, but I can get five, 6 percent of these people to be interested, great, send them to the store.
[00:15:06] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Okay. All right. So, uh, so it sounds like then maybe it works the best, even for niche markets that you don’t want to target. Uh, exclusively or directly on your product page?
[00:15:21] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Yeah, you have a couple of options when you have very different niche markets on your page. You can either, uh, be a little bit schizophrenic on your page and try to cover everything in one page. Or you can just take it out and try to really win on that one customer avatar. That you think is your winner. And I usually do the second, if you try to do everything to everyone, you’re nothing to no one. And so picking the best avatar and making your page about that is going to make your page the best possible conversion rate page, which then makes Amazon’s AI like it more, right? Because Amazon’s AI only cares about products that give it a commission. So the better your conversion rate is, the more it likes you. It’s fairly simple,
[00:16:00] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: really simple math. Do you make Amazon money? They like you. And so focusing on those best avatars on the detail page is what I like to do. And then for the rest of it, then park it somewhere else instead of doing it. You, you have one more option. This is what I don’t usually do, which is to basically take the same product and make two different pages for it. I don’t like that one as much because then you’ve got to have reviews on both pages. You’ve got to rank on both pages. You have to send ads to both pages. And sometimes that is the best choice, uh, but often it’s not.
[00:16:30] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Okay. Yeah, perfect. That was the, the next thing that I was going to ask you about creating separate product pages versus doing the store route. But you think the store route in most cases is probably the best solution because then you’re kind of putting all those sales in one basket.
[00:16:46] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Exactly. It helps to get the reviews in one place that helps to get the traffic in one place. It helps to get the sales in one place. And so if you get sales from these other lead shows and you get your inversion rate up. Then you can actually rank better because your conversion rate is better on those top selling keywords. And so by using the store to kind of supplement or boost your top sellers, you can actually even improve those top sellers even more.
[00:17:12] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Yeah. Like you said, of course, it depends on what the market is. So let’s say you have a product that works both for ballet dancers and bodybuilders might not be able to, uh, merge those two into one listing. You might have to make separate. Maybe boxes, at least packaging for each one of those. But if they’re relatively similar, you can probably get away with it.
[00:17:37] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Yeah. And sometimes you just have to test. Um, one of the things that we also use the storefront pages for list of tests, concepts like this, where we weren’t sure what the most convincing argument was, say for selling a particular product ever, one that we did. The client was absolutely convinced it was the eco friendliness of the product that was going to sell it. And I was kind of waffling, I was like, well, that’s why I like it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s why any given customer would like it. So our options were eco friendliness, saving money, or basically being more clean. So, reducing the ick factor. I mean, those are the three reasons why someone would buy this product. And so, what we did is we made a store page that focused on each one of these. And so, one of them really focused on the ick. Like, with them, like, removing the ick. One of them really focused on how you are being so eco-friendly by avoiding plastic and avoiding, um, nasty chemicals, whatever. And the third page was all about how much money you’ll save by using this product and all the different ways that it helps you be more frugal. And so we ran the exact same keywords to each. They’re basically the generic keywords for the product. And so it was basically anyone who would be interested in this product type would be brought in by those keywords. Ran it to each of the pageants, um, same bids, same keywords, same. Day it was set up, but just to different pages for the landing page. And then we waited to see how the sales went. And funny thing was, it was saving money, then it very close and then by far left in the dust was eco friendly people were interested in saving money. Second, most interested in not having things be icky. And then. Way in the dust was the, you know, being good for the environment.
[00:19:19] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Yeah. Yeah. I eco friendly obviously is good, but I think it’s one of those things. It’s like a feel good thing.
[00:19:26] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Exactly. You know, if you decided you want this product and you’re like, oh, it’s eco friendly. So now I feel good about it too.
[00:19:34] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Exactly. It was not a thing that was getting them to buy at all. And we actually used that to reorder and reframe the premium e class on the page. So the first thing we started talking about was how much money they’d save. And then we put the eco friendly thing at the very bottom because the client really loved it. We were like, Hey, we’ve got seven spots. We can put it in spot seven. And that’s where the eco friendly diet went.
[00:19:54] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: I’m, I’m curious. Uh, and maybe you haven’t, but have you ever seen a test like that on, uh, made in the USA featuring made in the USA versus not, if that makes any kind of difference,
[00:20:07] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: it actually makes a huge difference in two places. First is the click through rate. So what I see a lot of times people do is they put the made in the USA too far into their title for people to see on mobile devices. And so on other devices, you maybe get eight words before you run out of space. And so you actually have to put just the like two or three, your brand, maybe two or three product words, maybe the USA, rest of the words, otherwise they won’t see it on mobile and that’s how you get the click through rate on mobile. And the second thing that it really helps with is on the detail page, which Usually we ended up in spot two or three for eight bucks. I’m talking about being made in the USA, but if you, if you’re trying to attract that made in the USA purchasing contingent, that has to be way further up in the title. A lot of people make that mistake where it’s way too far and they don’t even see it in the title.
[00:20:57] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Okay. Well, it’s good to know that it is a deciding factor for people.
[00:21:03] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: It really increases the click through rate. The impact on conversion rate is much lower. So in terms of buying, people are still pretty price sensitive, but in terms of the click through rate, it really gets you engaged.
[00:21:16] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Yeah, it’ll, it’ll probably never happen, but I really wish Amazon would add a button to check, you know, USA or USA seller. Those two options would be nice.
[00:21:27] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: I would love it to be USA seller. And the reason I say that USA seller versus made in the USA is because it’s so difficult to make these in the USA. That it just, in some ways, um, so I, I owned a cut and sew for three years in Tennessee and we couldn’t make a t shirt, just a shirt, a nice solid little t shirt and we ordered everything in the USA as well. So it was U. S. made materials. Um, the thread was made in Georgia. The fabric was made in New York and the elastic, I believe it was North Carolina. So like you can buy most of this stuff in the U. S., but when you’re actually making it, Um, the labor costs are so significant here that all of the costs go up. And so our costs are between 45 and 55 retail for just a shirt. And people were like, why are you charging so much for a shirt? This is such a ripoff because they have no idea how much it costs to make things in the U. S and we ended up closing in 4. 1. And now with all of the increase in inflation and other costs, I’m sure it would be closer to 70 to make just a shirt, a pair of jeans would be closer on one 15, one 20. And consumers just don’t get that. And so then they’ll see some price and then they’ll be, they’ll actually give you three star reviews for not knowing anything about your supply chain, not knowing anything about your situation. And so made in the USA often can actually have. That’s a reason why it just doesn’t exist. Um, for a lot of, for a lot of categories. And so I would like to see made in us seller. Um, like you have a business in the U S and you exist in the U S you can be sued in the U S which means you give a crap about your, your customers in the U S. I would care about that. Um, I actually look at who’s selling stuff. And if they’re based in Hong Kong or mainland China, I often won’t buy from them, uh, other countries too, but that’s the majority of the ones that I see. Because if anything goes wrong, what’s going to happen, like I can’t do anything about it, right?
[00:23:14] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Yeah, I’m the same way and I know neither of us are normal Amazon shoppers. Right, most people don’t even know where to look.
[00:23:21] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: I’m always clicking on the seller and seeing where they’re from. And yeah, if they’re from China and I can find another option from a U. S. based seller, I’m buying that one instead. Assuming everything else is similar.
[00:23:33] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Yeah, I think the last thing that I bought from a Chinese based seller where I was like, yeah, it’s fine, was a paint by numbers. Because there’s no US seller of paying by numbers. And I was like, I don’t really care that much anyway. I’m not gonna eat the paint. I’m fine.
[00:23:47] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Yeah. Yeah. There’s some things that are tough, but uh, a lot of times you can find it. And one thing that’s cool too that, uh, you know, a tip is if you have an a business Amazon account, you can actually go in there and set specific or preferences for your organization. And, uh, one of them is a US based seller. Or a local seller, and I’m sorry, not U. S. based, but local. And so then at the top, it’ll say, Oh, these are your preferences for your company. And then that’ll be all like the local U. S. sellers up there, which is kind of cool.
[00:24:19] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: I think they also let you do like women owned business certifications and other ones like that. All those different
[00:24:24] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: options. Yep. Yeah, minority owned, women owned, local seller, lots of different things that you can select in there, which is cool. The only downside that I’ve found is that if you put in the buy box, sometimes the seller, that’s a way higher price than all the other sellers. Like if you have a lot of sellers turned on and the local seller is selling it for 50, but Amazon themselves is selling it for 20, it’ll put the 50 one in the buy box.
[00:24:52] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Right. Cause that’s what you said. That’s interesting. No, I, I totally agree. That would be amazing if customers, not just business customers, but regular customers, because they always talk about it, right? They’re like, we would love to celebrate me from the U S and then it’s so hard to find. I was trying to buy, I’m dating the USA leather belt. I didn’t want some cheap bonded leather belt in China. I wanted a nice leather belt that would last me for a while. And I spent about 20 minutes searching like different keywords going through like page five, six, seven, until I finally found. A company in Texas that was making leather belts in the U. S. It was tanned in the U. S., they were gray in the U. S. I was like, thank you, 70 belt, no problem.
[00:25:30] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Yeah, it, it would definitely be nice. That’s, that’s why I’m rooting for a company named Rivley. Rivley. com, the, the guys are, uh, that are behind it. They’re building the site. It’s going to be an e commerce store like Amazon, but strictly for USA sellers. So obviously they’ve got a giant mountain to climb, but, uh, it’d be really cool to see something like that. Take off.
[00:25:54] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Oh, I agree. I agree. And it’s, it’s not just because of, you know, I live here. I pay taxes here. I want it to be nice here. Right. So, um, I want people to spend a minute here with people who pay taxes here. Okay. But it’s also, uh, you know, anytime something goes wrong, I’ve spoken a lot on this in various venues about product safety and part of the reason why the foreign sellers can afford to undercut us so badly is because they’re cutting corners all over the place and cleaning safety. And a lot of customers just don’t realize that they don’t understand that their stuff may or may not include lead. And there’s no warning for that. There’s no warning for this particular lithium ion battery wasn’t produced to spec. So it might explode and burn your house down. Who knows? And it just doesn’t, it’s not, the warning isn’t there. If it were there, I feel like consumers would actually make an effort to find somebody else, but often they don’t understand.
[00:26:43] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Yeah. Yeah. There’s some things you don’t necessarily care about, like a spray water bottle or something. Right. But when it comes to buying toys for kids or baby products and stuff, it just becomes super important because there’s so many chemicals and stuff that can go into that stuff that can harm people.
[00:27:02] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Yeah. I have no sense of humor about baby stuff at all.
[00:27:06] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: For sure. All right. Very good. So let’s move into the Amazon lives and talk about that. What are you guys doing there and how you making that work for, for you?
[00:27:18] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: So this is quite possibly one of my favorite tools. I actually spoke at the prosper show on live a couple of years ago, and they have improved the tools significantly since then they keep trying to compete with, um, young, let’s get surprised. They keep trying to compete with three people. So when they first launched live. Their concept was that it was like QVC and they were going to make it to be like a live demo thing. They have the whole Amazon live studio in New York, and they’re really trying to see the online QVC, but what Amazon vendor is doing for Amazon live. So people think about live, they’re often thinking of that, that QVC model. The problem was that when you’re actually a customer online, we usually aren’t watching that, right? You’re seeing some sort of viral clip or you’re on YouTube and seeing a short, or you’re on Facebook and seeing, I think they’re called reels on Facebook. Like everyone’s got their own team for this thing. Right. And so they launched inspire last year, the Amazon app for this. And they started out with influencers and they’ve started including like brand coats. And it looks like they may be starting to include live clips at some point. And so the other side of what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to build this app that can also compete with TikTok. So again, with this schizophrenic, like, like they don’t want to pick a lane. They want to try to make it awesome for everybody. But what I’ve found work with live is that because it shows up on the store. That you use it as basically an unboxing demo video, and it really increases your conversion rates on your store. Uh, so if you have, for example, one of the companies I work with is a flameless candle company. Then it’s hard to tell exactly what the sizes of the product that you’re working with, with just the pictures. Even a lifestyle picture sometimes is hard to see, because it’ll be like, on a mantle. You don’t know how big the mantle is, you don’t know how deep the mantle, you know, shelf is. And so it can be hard to visualize like how big is this thing actually. So you click on it cause you like it. Um, my favorite was yesterday. I was looking at one. I was super pleased how it turned out. It was a conversation hearts, you know, like the, the ones from when you’re like a kid that say like kiss me and be mine and all those ones. And so they’re in, in candle form, which is amazing. They’re so cute. But you can’t tell what size they are until you actually see the live video or until you see like some sort of UGC content. And so what we’ve done is during the Valentine’s Day period, we had a bunch of little clips that we had our client record. And so it all needs to be unique content. I think that’s the thing that people sometimes get tripped up on, um, with live as you can replay recordings, but you can’t just replay the same recording over and over again, because that’s boring. And Amazon doesn’t want that. They want you to create fresh, interesting, new content for the channel. So what we have our clients do is just dedicate like a day out of the month where literally they start in the morning and the end of the evening with, okay, now let’s do a two minute demo of this. Now we’re going to do another two minute demo. Now we’re going to do another two minute demo. And then by the end I have maybe 10 to 12 two minute demos of a product that I can then space out and be able to put on live and have different demos, different content, but hopefully still engaging. And the idea is that when someone sees it. They see a person, and then they see the product in front of them, either opening it or they’re interacting with it in some way, and it’s hands. That’s the main thing. If you can see someone’s hands and you can see the size of person they are in relationship to the product, it immediately increases conversion. I know it seems really simple and obvious, but people just don’t seem to be very good at understanding what six inches tall is, or three inches wide, or whatever, like they just don’t seem to be able to visualize it very well. And so if you just show them, here I am turning on the candle and you’re holding it and you’re turning, and then they can just see it. You don’t have to make them think, yeah, if we can do homework, they can just see it. And it immediately improves conversion rate on the detail pages. Um, so during the live, the live is actually on the detail page. Um, based on how the lives go, like which live demonstration got the best performance. We’ll actually put a clip from that live on the detail page as well so that people can see the demo video on the detail page. And then on the storefront, it hangs out there until you do your next live. They do expire, but I don’t think they fire very quickly. They used to expire every 24 hours. Now the longest we’ve seen it hang out at about two weeks on your store. And so if you’re. If you’re trying to sell a product and you’re really stuck, like, why are people understanding it? Just do a demo. Like, what was that kid in Tech Prince who made like 16 million in a year, a couple of years ago, just like unwrapping products? Fuck camera, it’s crazy. Like people want this for sure. Yeah. So, so essentially you’re recording videos, just short ones. It sounds like it doesn’t have to be anything.
[00:31:58] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: No more than five minutes. Nobody sticks around longer than five minutes.
[00:32:00] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Does it matter if you’re in front of the camera or can you be kind of behind the camera but your hands are visible? Yeah, yeah. We do like a top down
[00:32:10] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: approach. So we actually do this for cooking demonstrations for another client. They sell cookware. And so what we have is a top down video of actually like, Cooking and so you can see the product and then there’s a voiceover that’s like, and now we’re cooking the egg and you can see the egg being cracked into the pan and so on. So it’s really about is this content going to be engaging to the customer? Is this content going to be something that helps them understand what you’re selling and how you’re selling it? And if so, then do it. Uh, it doesn’t help actually very much to be straight on when someone’s doing a cooking demonstration, because you can’t see what’s happening in the pan. And so either you need to be at a 45 degree angle or vertical. So you can see what’s actually happening in the thing you’re selling. The, the star isn’t the person talking, the star is the product. So the, you can see hands when, you know, you’re doing the top down, the hands go in and they’re, they’re flipping the eggs or whatever, but that’s not the star, the star is the pan. Um, and so it just really needs to be some sort of demo, some sort of unboxing. It does not have to be focused on you at all, although it can be, um, our best videos alternate. So you have one video that’s straight ahead and one video that’s like top down or an angle looking at the product up close. And then you have an editor put those together.
[00:33:23] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Okay. And do you have data on where the videos are working? The best. So for example, if you uploaded, uh, well, you did a live video, right? It would be the first one. And then you maybe upload that video directly to the listing, or you upload that video as a user generated con content as the influencer side of it. Do you see a one that works a lot better than the others in terms of helping conversions?
[00:33:56] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Yeah. So for conversions, we see it on the video carousel towards the bottom. Um, it’s like, uh, right below last year’s like right above the store spotlight ads, and then right below that is the reviews. Um, so way down there is where the videos, like the demo videos, you can put in there, customer reviews, go in there. You’re listing views, go listing videos, go in there. All the videos go in that one place. That’s where you’d upload one of the clips is in that section. But interestingly, where we’ve actually had the best results. is in vertical ads. So the vertical ads are running on phones, right? And so if you have a really good demo, um, nice and short, don’t make it too long because people will give you maybe a couple seconds. So whatever the most impactful bit is from your live, and you can usually tell while you’re running it, if someone comments or they like it, or there’s some sort of engagement that happens, um, when certain things occur during your live. So You can see, are people excited about this? Cool. Uh, then, or you can just clip out different bits and then run ads to see which ones are the most exciting that way too. But we did one for the candle company. It was like a outdoor, uh, color changing candle. And so we did a short vertical clip for ads right when the color was changing from pink to blue and it was being put inside of an outdoor lantern. And so you can immediately see the color changing part, the size, cause it was being put in it with a hand and it was in the lantern. So you can imagine, Oh, this is how it would look if I put it on my porch. And so it had all of the emotional cues in one short little clip. And that thing had amazing click through rate. I don’t remember what it was. It was around 4. 25%, something like that. I remember the exact number, but it was just insanely good. And so you can get some of the best results from these live demos, actually in your ads.
[00:35:39] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Okay. Very good. So now how are you doing the lives that kind of actually live?
[00:35:45] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Yeah. So there’s a ton of different options. You can do an actual live, but it is so complicated. You need a capture card. You’ve got to have a camera that can connect to a computer that’s fast enough to do the streaming. It’s a lot of work to do streaming. And it’s a lot easier to do a recording. Okay. There are a bunch of different types of software that can stream with a recording and Amazon actually recommended OBS and that’s the one that we use. And so, um, we just use OBS to stream and they do notice if you use the same content more than once. So just be aware of that. And so you do need to be careful about repeat content, but as far as the live streaming aspect of it, as long as you have the app on your phone and you’ve got all of your connectors set up with your streaming software. Then you’ll be able to stream a recording from the streaming software.
[00:36:34] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Okay. So OBS has an app for your phone as well. I’ve used it on a window.
[00:36:39] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: So you have to be the line. You have to be signed into the Amazon live app. Which then can connect to OBS on your desktop.
[00:36:47] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Okay, so you’re in the Amazon Live app on your phone and you have the OBS software running on your desktop that is streaming the pre recorded video. How are you connecting the two?
[00:37:00] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Exactly, that’s the thing that’s tricky about it and I actually have this whole like step by step and it’s kind of complicated. Where you have to start the live on your phone and run it through the streaming software. Do any like pop ups or anything, because you can do cool pop ups and pop outs, um, with the software as well. Like, blah, blah, I was on sale or whatever, like there’s certain things that you can’t do, but a lot of it you can do. And then once that’s done running in the streaming software, then you have to cancel the, like close out the streaming, um, uh, event on your phone. And so there’s just like, you just have to kind of, it’s just a timing thing. that’s it. Um, the other thing that I love about lives is that it’s one of the only places on Amazon that you can, um, tag other people’s products in your live. So if you wanted to do a product demonstration where you were showing off the features of say three different mice and one of them was your brand and two were your top competitors. You can do that on live and you can’t do that almost anywhere else. The only caveats are you can’t say mine is the best and they’re stuck. That’s not allowed. You do have to compare the actual features. Like here’s what mine does. It has a little, little thing. These also have early things, but here’s the difference between these two early things. And here’s the way that it fits on this hand. And so you have to like really focus on the actual features of the product when you compare it. But while you’re live, Danina, your live shows up on their pages. And if you want to, you can try to upload your recording onto their pages as you’ve generated content. I actually have been passing that out to folks the last couple of years because live is so overwhelming. It’s this mix of both Amazon confusion and then also social confusion with that mixed together to be a giant ball of confusion.
[00:38:42] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. If you want, we can put it in the show notes, either a link or I can upload it on our site, whatever you prefer.
[00:38:49] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Yeah, absolutely. Happy to share that.
[00:38:51] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Okay. Awesome. Well, that’s definitely something I am going to have to try out. I haven’t really done any lives because going live is a pain, but if you can pre record it and then just stream it to it, that will be very helpful.
[00:39:08] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Yeah. We, the first time we set up the live stream, we thought we had to be live. And got the capture card set up and it took us probably about four hours and my studio director is actually good at this stuff and understands technology. And we both were so frustrated by the time that we finally got it all working. They were like, it’s time to take a break and have lunch because it was so frustrating and challenging. So. 100 percent recording and then streaming is so much less stress in terms of the technology side of it.
[00:39:37] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Very good. All right. Well, we have a few more minutes here. Anything else, uh, to help create raving fans for your brand on Amazon?
[00:39:46] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Yeah, I think that it really comes back to just like, Big picture, Amazon gives us a lot of tools to be able to interact with the customers who are going to be interested in our product. And I think a lot of times people feel like Amazon is a big black box because it doesn’t give you the same level of information as, say, Google Analytics. And that’s just like so much data that I think sometimes people get overwhelmed in a different way because there’s so much information that you don’t even know where to start sometimes. For Amazon, we get so little information and so people are like, Oh, I just don’t have it. And I disagree because there are ways that you can figure out who your customer is, how they’re behaving. You just have to be a lot more thoughtful about how you use these tools and how you measure the results. So one example of that is like the A B testing. We do A B testing for BMA class and brand stories. So you can’t just be guilty about the A B test itself. A B tests are set up to evaluate reversion rates only. And if you were to do an A B test on a title that then tells you version A converted better, How is that helpful? It’s not actually very helpful at all because changing your title, what that does more than anything else is get you a different click through rate. And so instead of using the A B test to evaluate your title, which you certainly can still do to see if it impacts how people behave, also make sure that you’re doing an advertising based test when you change that title, because you want to see if your click through rate changed. You can also look at your brand analytics and see if your click through rate has changed. And so be thinking about how you use the witty tools that Amazon gives you to validate that customer journey. Who is my customer? Where are they at when they’re coming to Amazon to buy? Sometimes people are coming, well, they want to buy it. They want to leave. Fine. Okay. So how do you approach those people? Sometimes they’re on Amazon because they’re buying something else. And you know that this is the customer that you want. And so now you’re getting in front of them, that audience with a particular ad to say, hi, I exist, come check me out. And so you’re getting that customer that you’re looking for at a different stage in their, in their journey, their buying journey. So all of these things can work together, but what I, what I often see brands missing, what I often see e com managers missing is they aren’t thinking holistically about here’s my customer list. And here are all the places that I interact with those customers. And here are the kinds of ads that I can use to get in front of them. And then once they land, wherever I’m sending them from that ad, here is the content that I’m using to convince them that this is the right product for them. And here’s how I’m using it to convince the right customer and repel the wrong customer. And they’re not thinking of it in that very, like, logical way. I feel like a lot of times creatives are very creative. And ad people are like, well, it’s my, that’s the page I have to work with. I guess that’s what I got. And so they’re not thinking of this in a really holistic, like, let’s merge the data with the creative and come up with our our holistic approach to the customer journey so that the customers are like, yes, add to cart and I’m not going to return it. That’s an important one too. You don’t want returns.
[00:42:46] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Yeah. Yeah. That’s the, uh, the age old, uh, battle between creative and, you know, the logical, uh, PPC people and things like that. They just, you see it, it in such different ways. People have a logical mind versus a creative mind. Bringing them together is a never ending battle.
[00:43:10] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Oh, it’s so hard. I can’t feel good.
[00:43:13] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Absolutely. Uh, so I’m curious real quick though, on the A B testing, uh, do you prefer to do that A B testing in Amazon or do you like using a tool like PICFU where usually you can do it a lot quicker?
[00:43:27] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Yeah, so I’m actually a big fan of using as much Amazon data, Amazon produced data as possible. Cool. I will use third party tools if I have no other choice, but most of the time I prefer to use Amazon produced data. And the main reason is it’s going to be the most accurate. And so if it takes me a little bit longer to get the results from Amazon’s own AB test. As long as it’s the right kind of A B test, then that’s what I’m going to do. Um, the other thing is that sometimes, uh, you have to set up your hypothesis and what you’re trying to test in a way that makes sense for what you’re trying to test. So we made a new pre made plus page for one of our clients, and the change was, um, around the comparison chart plus hotspot, um, having one versus not. So a hotspot that connected to a comparison chart, basically. And so the comparison chart wasn’t so much a comparison chart as a quick way to add to cart. And so the idea was that instead of having that tiny little image in the comparison chart and then the features to convince a customer, you’re using the hotspot to convince the customer and then making it easy for them to add to cart right below the hotspot. And when we compared the two, the one where we made the hotspot did worse in conversion on that particular ASIN. And so when we checked our ad before, so the purchase product report, instead of the advertised product report, what we found is that the purchase product report showed a significant increase in other products being purchased. So what had happened is we’d actually decreased our conversion on the page itself, because people were finding the other items that they thought were better. For their particular use case, we bought those instead. So the overall sales went up, but the sales on that particular page, the conversion rate went down. So you have to be really careful to know what you’re actually trying to achieve, because if we had gone with just the Aden test, that was one that won, then we would have actually decreased our overall sales because we were getting more sales for the rest of the catalog than just that one particular page.
[00:45:25] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Interesting. Yeah, you definitely got to look at it from all the different angles and know how to pull and find that data is important.
[00:45:33] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Yeah, and they don’t make it easy. That’s for sure.
[00:45:37] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: No, for sure. The interface a lot of times is, uh, leaves something to be desired.
[00:45:42] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Yes, definitely.
[00:45:46] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Well, Rachel, this has been fantastic. How can people best reach out to you if they want to connect or maybe find out more about your VP of Amazon services or ad services?
[00:45:58] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Yeah. So the best way to connect is probably on LinkedIn. And so, um, you just search for Rachel Johnson Greer, Amazon on LinkedIn, and you find me very quickly, or just my name, Rachel Johnson Greer. And then you can also go to, um, my website. Um, the best one to go to is azamabrands.com and Azama, A Z A method on Amazon. You know where you are, you know, where you want to be, and then you work backwards to find how to get there. Working backwards is a very Amazon thing.
[00:46:29] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: All right. Awesome, Rachel. I appreciate it.
[00:46:32] Rachel Greer | Amazon Brand Expert: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:46:34] Todd Welch | CEO & Founder of Welch Products LLC: Thank you.
