#343 – Ridiculously Easy And Proven Ways To Capture Attention On Amazon And Sell More With Matt Kostan
In episode 343 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Matt discuss:
02:00 – Matt’s Backstory And How He Got Started In E-commerce
07:15 – Why Is Pattern Interruption On Amazon Important?
08:30 – Application Examples Of Pattern Interruptions
13:30 – Killer Main Image Strategies That Convert
17:40 – Amazon Search Simulation Inside Productpinion
19:00 – Main Image Hacks For Food Products Or Supplements
21:30 – The Sun Spot Packaging Technique
23:15 – Testing Shorter Titles For Amazon Listings
26:45 – Using Pattern Interruption Techniques In Your Titles
29:50 – Cool Strategy From Fast Food Restaurants
31:30 – On Getting Reviews: Give Something People To Talk About
33:30 – More Actionable Tips From Matt
35:50 – How To Contact Matt Kostan
37:00 – Golden Nugget Tip From Kevin King
Transcript
Kevin King:
Welcome back everybody to episode 343 of the AM/PM podcast. This week, we’re gonna be talking about ways to actually boost your listing and increase those conversion rates. I’ve got Matt Kostan here. Matt is an expert when it comes to testing your main image, which put in your second image some other tricks and tips on actually boosting your sales. We’ve got some really great actionable stuff this week for you. I think you’re gonna really enjoy this episode. And don’t forget, it’s less than a month now until the Billion Dollar Seller Summit in Puerto Rico. If you haven’t gotten your ticket, you can go to billion dollar seller summit.com, and hopefully you can join us in San Juan, Puerto Rico from June 11th to the 15th. Enjoy this episode. Matt Kostan. Welcome to the AM/PM podcast. I hear that we’re gonna try to make this more of the most downloaded podcast ever. Is that right? That’s what you told me right before we started, right?
Matt:
Absolutely. We’re gonna, yeah. I got my coffee, so we’re gonna do it. We’re gonna make it super valuable.
Kevin King:
A awesome you recently presented on the Helium 10 Elite a few months ago, back in I think it was in March or something. And that went over really, really well. A lot of people really liked your presentation. It was awesome. So if you’re a Helium 10 Elite member and listening to this podcast, be sure to go back and check out Matt’s presentation from the March helium 10 Elite. But I’ve got Matt here on the podcast for everybody, whether you’re a Helium 10 Elite member or not now. And Matt for the people that don’t actually know who you are, let’s just give a little backstory what you’ve been selling for quite some time, right?
Matt:
Yeah. So I’ve been selling on Amazon. I like to say before it was cool, so like maybe, you know, like eight, nine years ago. But I’ve been involved with software and also just e-commerce in general for well over 10 years.
Kevin King:
So where did you get your start? So over 10 years ago, if it wasn’t Amazon, were you, did you start on eBay or on Etsy or on Craigslist or something like that? Or where’d you get your start?
Matt:
Yeah, so the very first e-commerce thing that I, that I started working on was actually when I worked for a pharmaceutical company. They were a wholesaler and they would sell to you know, other shops. But I figured, hey, like, why not start selling direct to the consumer? So back then, at least in Canada, Amazon wasn’t like a big channel for pharma products, so just did a lot of Googling on how to figure out how to make like an e-commerce site using WordPress and that sort of thing. And interestingly enough, it took off in a year. It did six figures, and that kind of is really what got me hooked. It was like, wow, this is cool. This actually works.
Kevin King:
So where did that evolve from there?
Matt:
Yeah, so then after seeing how well that worked, I was like, well, hey, if I can sell somebody else’s product, then I want to do it for myself. And at the time, back then Groupon was actually a big thing and ended up starting a distribution company for Groupon. And we were one of the bigger distributors for Groupon for their products in, in Canada. And actually a pretty big one, I think, excuse me, a big one for the products in the US. And what was super interesting with that is that, I mean, that was like the best kind of playground you could ever have. You had immediate access to like thousands of shoppers and you could put deals on multiple times. And it really got me thinking and got me you know, trying to learn and figure out like, you know, if I did this, I did that, like what the sales would would happen.
Matt:
So just for example, one of the ones that was interesting, we sold a watch, so it was an interesting looking watch and you know, the first time we did the deal with Groupon, it sold maybe about $7,000 worth. And being in marketing, being, you know, that being my background on like, you know, how can I make things stand out? How can I make things different? You know, most of the products on group one at the time were just generic. There wasn’t much to them. So I made that extra effort of trying to just come up with a brand name and, you know, switch out the main product image cuz that’s what everyone would get when they got their email. And you know, the second time we did the deal, it did over $20,000. So it was kind of a really cool playground of just testing products and it was all drop shipped, so it was able to do like multiple deals per week, just figuring out which products would kind of click.
Matt:
And then eventually that led to Amazon after figuring out what, you know, products worked well with Groupon, it was like, well, hey, maybe some of these would actually work on Amazon where it was reoccurring revenue. You didn’t have to do these one time off. Sort of deals. I like to approach things differently. So obviously there’s a lot of tools that you can use with Amazon, but I used to like, just, just talking to shoppers. So there’s a site called usertesting.com. They basically let you do kind of like video interviews with shoppers. You pay $50 per video, at least back then. And I was doing this for for my Amazon listings. I was just asking people like, Hey, what do you think of my listing? How can it be done better? Do you see any images like, or sorry, do you see any issues with the images? Do you trust the brand? And it was that data that basically helped, you know, steer how it, I would improve the listings to to get more more sales.
Kevin King:
In these videos, it’s like kinda like you’re looking over their shoulder or something. So they’re, they’re just scrolling your listing. You have maybe a set list of questions and they’re just scrolling through your listing and just talking out loud and you’re just kind of falling, seeing one of their mouse is clicking and seeing what they’re thinking as they look at different things. As, you know, it was $50 per person to do that?
Matt:
Yeah. So with UserTesting at the time, yeah, it was $50 per person, you basically give a URL. So I was giving you know, my Amazon listing url, and they could speak for it. It was $50 per person, but they could speak for up to like 20, 30 minutes or something like that, which was like a really long time for someone to look over an Amazon listing. But what I got from that. So even for, you know, a, there’s a very generic product category that I sell in like super generic, and doing those kind of user tests is actually what led me to get a patentable idea on something that’s a very much a commodity. So after that experience, that’s what kind of led me to developing product Pinion to be able to share that with other Amazon sellers and have them be able to do user tests where it doesn’t necessarily have to cost $50 per per person.
Kevin King:
I mean, one of the big things you’re into is like pattern interruption, right? I know that was, you talked about that in your talk on the Helium 10 Elite. Why is that so important? A lot of people don’t understand why that’s so important and actually how to do that. Can you talk about that a a little bit?
Matt:
Yeah, totally. So I’ve always been into marketing and, and marketing in a nutshell is basically you know, figuring out how to do something different, right? Because people like are creatures of, of doing the same things and expecting the same things. But when you can kind of get someone to pause and actually take notice, that’s when they become highly influenceable. So pattern interruption on Amazon is basically trying to figure out what is it that everybody else is doing, and do something unexpected, do something that gets people to to take notice, to take pause. And after watching, you know, how people shop on Amazon, there’s a few very very interesting ideas and interesting things that that any seller can apply to their listings to get that attention and get yeah, and get people get people clicking and buying.
Kevin King:
Can you give a couple examples of that? Just try to paint a picture here for people listening. I know they can’t see, but try to paint a picture of a couple of examples of how you would do that.
Matt:
Yeah, totally. I mean, first things I wanted to mention too is like this whole idea of like talking to shoppers you know, it’s not foreign to the big boys, right? All of the big companies, they do this, they do the focus groups, they figure, figure out how, you know, what makes people tick. And that’s how they, they steer their, their marketing plans and their, their campaigns. One good example of this is actually Mattel created Barbie. We all know Barbie out of doing, doing focus groups. So figuring out what is it that people demand? And, you know, just creating it and bringing it to market based based on that. So yeah, there’s a ton of things that we can go over. One of the key ones that typically has an impact right away is when you make what I like to call an index image. So an index image is like a secondary, secondary image on your, your Amazon listing, where you basically outline the top five reasons of why this product is the best in the world. And what’s important for this is to actually number them. So sequence them like one through five. If you have more, maybe six, if you have less, that’s okay too.
Kevin King:
This is all in one image. Like the number’s, like five points on one image.
Matt:
Yeah.
Kevin King:
It’s not comparing, it’s not comparing it to something else. It’s just saying why yours is the best, not why you’re better than the competition, just why yours is the best.
Matt:
Yeah. Yeah. So basically, and you still can do that comparison chart as well too, as another image, that sort of thing. But this is basically like your go-to main table of contents image of all the main points that you’re trying to get across. You want to keep it simple, right? So simple always wins you know, when you’re doing when you’re doing a test, but the idea behind this is basically like you’re answering a question in, in someone’s mind, right? So when they’re looking at your listing, the thing running through their mind is why should I buy this one? There’s a thousand of other other searches or other results in the search. What makes this one special? What makes it unique? And if you have a hard time coming up with the these five reasons, that’s an indicator too, right?
Matt:
You kind of want to have to have some good reasons why someone would pick yours versus versus the others. And we can talk about some of the common ones that people use that work really well. The other aspect of it that’s really important is you, you wanna number it because people, again, they really like following a when people see a number one, they know that’s where to start. So their eyes go there, they’re like, okay, boom, number one, I’m gonna read that one. And then if it’s numbered, they have to complete it. If you start a number–
Kevin King:
Does the order matter in these numbers? Should you have the most important thing first and then go down? Or does it, or are you trying to tell a story in these numbers or what Yeah. Is there any,
Matt:
So the flow, the flow of information is just as important. So that’s something you can test as well too. For example, my, my number five reason is typically around you know, you’re supporting local. So if you’re a US based, I mean, most of our products are from overseas, and that’s okay, but if your company’s based in the US or Canada, you can say like, Hey, you’re help supporting a US based company. That’s one of the big ones that I would say, because people on Amazon shopping, they see these generic, you know international listings that you know, don’t really, you’ve, everyone’s seen them, everyone’s seen those kind of listings. You’re telling ’em straight up like, Hey, I’m a local small business that might check a point in their head to, Hey, this is why I’m buying this one.
Matt:
And the order matters too. Like, obviously the biggest main differentiator should be number one, to get them to keep reading. But what I’ve also seen watching people ingest these images is they have to finish it. If they read number one, they’re going to number two, they’re going to number three. And the name of the game is, you know, having them take in that information. The more information they take in, the more likely they are to the more likely they are to, to actually purchase. Right? And keep in mind too, even though you list these five items on this index image, you’re still gonna repeat these items throughout the listing as well. It’s not like just, Hey, there’s five items here, and then that’s it. You might have another image about you know, if you talk about you have a crazy awesome guarantee as your point number four, you might have another secondary image that goes a little bit more in detail on that, on that guarantee as well. So you’re basically creating a table of contents for your listing and hammering down those five points so people get it right, because it’s when people get it that they’ll actually that they’ll actually purchase.
Kevin King:
That should be your second, you’re recommending this as your second image in your image stack.
Matt:
For me that’s what I do. Yeah most people will make it literally the second image. Yeah.
Kevin King:
So if it’s the second image, the most important image, or as you, I think say it’s the Million Dollar image, is that very first image, and this is where a lot of people, they don’t spend enough time. What are some really good strategies that people listing can take away from this to actually just kill it with their main image?
Matt:
Oh, I love this. Yeah, so I mean, your main image is pretty much the everything, right? It gets you the clicks, it gets you people into the listing, right? So what we talked about previously is basically how to get conversion rate. Now we’re talking about how to get like a clickthrough rate, like how to get the clicks when, when someone’s looking at you in the results. And it’s obviously super mission, critically important as well, when you’re spending a boatload of money on PPC, so if your main image isn’t optimized and you’re spending tons of money on PPC, you’re throwing a lot of money out the door. There are tons of things that you can do, but the, what I would recommend for your specific category, you know, look what all your competitors are, are doing, and don’t do that, and it sounds very simple, and I’ll give you some examples here.
Matt:
So with the, one of the products that did over a million dollars for me was a simple mosquito repellent bracelet. If you do a search for mosquito repellent bracelets, you’ll see a whole bunch of, you know, super colorful bracelets that comes in five different colors. You name the color, it, it’s one of the bracelets, and it’s just like this smorgasborg of colors coming at your face. So I was very intentional to making the product just one color, one solid color. Beyond that you know, most of the images are just of the product itself, not necessarily on somebody’s wrist. So the million dollar image for me was basically putting that, that mosquito pellet bracelet on somebody’s wrist with the thumbs up, right? And doing that caught all the attention. And with that particular product, and I have a side story with it too, but that particular product ended up selling so well in the category. It was beating, you know, big Fortune 500 companies that make SKU repellent to the point where they I don’t know for sure, but they, they actually did a hostile buyout of the factory that was producing these to make it harder for us to make them. But
Kevin King:
Yeah, I’m looking here right now. You shared a little bit of this in your Helium 10 Elite presentation. I just I just pulled that up here. I’m looking at it like a screenshot where you show, like, you’re right, there’s, everybody else has got like a stack of these bracelets and they’re showing that there’s a bunch of ’em, they’re like stacked up, and there are all these rainbows of colors and some of ’em showing ’em the packaging. And then you did a test where you actually took, like you said, a mono color. Yours is like a kind of a teal greenish color. And you just put like three of ’em, you know, stack three of ’em, so it doesn’t look like these big ring stacks of rings like everybody else is doing. And so that stood out, but then that definitely stood out and that’s where a lot of people would stop.
Kevin King:
Yep. But you didn’t stop there. You, you like, I gotta keep coming up with ideas of ways to, to test this. And then you did a test with Product Pinion where you actually took those three, and then you had the one like you just described with a thumbs up and it’s just on the wrist, and you put that in, and that just stood out like a sore. Th no, no pun intended, like a sore thumb on the listing. And I’m looking at it right now, and that’s what I recommend a lot of people do is, I don’t know if Product Pinion does this or PickFu or any of the others, but what I often do is I take my image and I drop it in. I think most of the tools can actually do this. I drop it in, I take a screenshot of my competition, I drop mine in somewhere, you know, and not in the top left or top right, not where the eye goes first, but somewhere like around in the middle. And then I put that out and I say, which one of these is your only drawn to? Or where the top three? Or you can do, like you said, the video where you watch people and you watch their mouse and you see the hotspots and you see what they’re drawn to and test it see it in context not, not just once you have it live, but do it in advance.
Matt:
And something else I wanted to mention too, with Product Pinion, you can actually do an Amazon search simulation. So you can do what you just mentioned by throwing in some ASINs, and we’ll actually create what looks like an Amazon search result for you. And people can actually decide with context which one stands out better than better than the next.
Kevin King:
Awesome. So I know what some other things that I’ve done in the past is I’ve actually spelled out things like I had dog treats. And so a lot of people would just show a package of here’s the dog treats, and you can maybe see through the package and you can see some of the treats in there. Or they might put like one treat outside of the package, but what I would do is I would actually turn the package and make it look like it’s spilled. Yeah. And so, and then I would take, instead of just spilled, it’s just a stack of dog treats that spilled out, you know, kind of randomly, I would actually take that and spell out the word dog with those treats. You know, I would actually, you know, in Photoshop you just take one treat, duplicate the layer, make the, make it like you’re taking a bunch of pencils on a, on a, on a table or something and spelling something with all those pencils and, and spell out a, a word like dog or treat or woof or something like that. And that’s all within the TOC because I’m using the product, it’s actually, it’s the actual product. I’m not adding anything to it. And it would just make it your eyes go right to it.
Matt:
Another super simple one too is if you have like a food product, so you’re in packaging, everything is square, just tilt it, tilt the image slightly, right? So people are like Amazon’s typically laid out in a grid. So anything you can do to break that grid tilt the image, make it like a 3D kind of picture where it’s off to the side, that sort of thing. Love the idea of like writing out the words with the product itself. That’s actually a really good one. Another one that Steven Pope actually mentioned if you can actually put your main keyword on say the product label. So for example, if you were selling supplements, and another nice or an easy thing to do with supplements is yeah, like take the bottle off, right? And show the bottle cap on there. But if you can also put what your main keyword is right on the packaging. So if you’re selling fish oil and then all of a sudden the top of the bottle cap says fish oil, then you’re golden. And it works because, you know, if people are searching for that and then they see that keyword right on your, your product image, they’re gonna be drawn to it there. That’s gonna be something that they’ll see and they’ll, they’ll click. So yeah, there’s a lot of interesting things that you can, you can do with that main image to to get, to get the clicks.
Kevin King:
We’re, we’re actually doing that. I’m helping my trainer with his, his planner, and we’re actually doing, his planner just comes, you know, it’s like a leather type of cover and that, that, that’s how it just comes. But I’m telling him on his main image, we’re actually sh putting like a little strap, like a little, almost like if it was in the store, there’d be like a little paper paper hang tag, paper band, not a hang tag, but like a paper band that goes around it. That’s where you’d put the UPC or you’d put something. But we’re doing exactly what you just said, putting the main keywords on that really big so that it immediately identifies with what people are looking for when they search. Even though the product doesn’t come with that technically we’re adding that as a little strap around and most people aren’t gonna care.
Kevin King:
Yeah. you know, when they get it, where’s the little piece of paper? That, that wraps around? You know, it’s just like a thin little band that wraps that’s shown in the picture. Those kinds of things can make a, make a huge difference. What are some other things that people should be testing that maybe they’re, besides their main image and creating this second image with the top five and making sure you number ’em, like you said, what are some other key things that people just overlook that they don’t really test? I know we can talk about price and some of that, but like, when it comes to images or your listing, what are some other things?
Matt:
Yeah, so another big one actually. Along the same lines for the main image. If you’re if you’re a very package heavy kind of product where you, you have to show it in packaging. Exactly what Kevin was saying too, like, you can make slight changes to your product. And the shopper’s not necessarily gonna complain if it doesn’t come with certain, you know, certain little packaging differences. One interesting one that works really well, we call it the sunspot packaging technique, where basically you know, when you’re shopping in store or if you’re shopping on, on Amazon, you’re, you’re looking at the sun. There’s just like so many different products, but there’s things called sunspots where it’s like a condensed little area that draws your, your attention. And obviously that’s what you want to be. And the best way to be that attention is, you know, if you can make your, say if you’re doing this works really well in any kind of bottle product if you can make your bottle like a solid color, including the cap, right?
Matt:
So don’t necessarily have just a white cap that’s standard. If you can Photoshop it in to be a different color or even just ask your supplier, a lot of times it’s, it’s surprisingly easy to get them to change it to to be something that’s you know, more of a solid color. Like that test always always wins when you have a solid, dark kind of packaging. Typically it’s, it’s darker, but the, the idea behind it is to be more of a solid color and that grabs the attention versus something that has, you know, a lot of white in the mix. Cuz with Amazon, you’re dealing with a lot of white space on the on the page. That’s another one that you could be testing if you’re a really product package like centric kind of kind of product.
Matt:
In terms of another thing to test a shorter title is a big one. Amazon actually highly recommends this. So this is in their this is in their docs with something that they recommend to to test. And we’ve seen this time and time again by you know, watching how people, how people shop so everyone knows the best practice, you know, put in all the keywords that you can in the title. There’s obviously character limits and that sort of thing, but what we’ve seen shoppers actually do is when they’re looking at these titles, they’ll say out loud, they’re like, oh, this one looks super spammy. Even though like, you know, we don’t keyword stuff anymore. That was old school. We write, you know, decent titles. But when they see, like, they know people are smart these days, they know what you’re doing with all those keywords in there.
Matt:
But we’ve actually seen shoppers kind of like go. They’ll look at those listings, they’ll be like, ah, you know what? This one looks a little too spammy for me and go to the next one. Amazon probably knows this too. They probably, you know, obviously they have all the data in the world. So specifically from Amazon’s docs, they’ll say try reducing your pro product title length to under a hundred characters to reduce noise and encourage more customers to visit your detail page. Holy crap, Amazon is telling us that our titles are too, too spammy. Now obviously there’s, you know, your keywords have to be there and you have to put your keywords in in the listing, but that’s a test that that I would, I would do if Amazon’s recommending it. It’s definitely something I would, I would want to I would wanna play with.
Kevin King:
That’s something that I’ve been watching for seven or eight years I’ve noticed back when, you know, back in 2015, 2016, 2017 ish the titles were paragraphs. They were like 500, 600, you know, words. It was characters long, it was crazy. You know, you, you, it would take up the half the listing pages with the title cuz people were keyboard stuffing. And then Amazon came and said, okay, no more of this. In some categories it got limited. Two 50 other ones, you know, you would say 50 or a hundred. But I always noticed that the best sellers in almost every category had shorts to the point titles. So I started recommending to people, like in the freedom ticket and everything, like, okay, if you need to come out, because there is some some gain to having different keywords in your title, it gives you that relevancy.
Kevin King:
It can help you with a number of things. So I would say, what I tell people and what I do is I start with a longer title. When I first launch, when I’m doing my honeymoon period, when I’m doing my heavy PPC, when I’m doing my launching, I actually put, try to make that title as long as I can. And that way I can try to start getting some relevancy. Cuz every cell that comes in, whether they search for the keyword and the title or not, Amazon gives you a little bit of love for, you get, you know, you score a few little points for that. And so after a period of time, usually a month to three months, then I will start actually shortening the title and then I’ll actually go in and like I know which keywords are converting the best, you know, from my ppc I have, I have some data from Amazon, from, you know, the brand analytics and, and, and search the other reports that are in there. And I can actually fine tune that title to like our, and, and get that thing short into the punch. And that usually usually works. But I know you’re also a big fan when it comes to reducing titles or in your listing of using what you call speed bump words. What’s that?
Matt:
Yeah, so so again, you have to think how how people are are shopping, right? On Amazon and everyone, everyone shops on Amazon. But if you take a second, you know, when you’re looking for something and you’re on your phone, you’re scrolling through the listings really quick or on even on your desktop, you’re kind of like skimming to kind of see, you know, which one is the one that I wanna look into which one’s worth vesting my time into. So another way to pattern disrupt when someone’s searching is to use a word that’s a little bit more that’s different, right? That’s, that’s not typical and this is it, it works based on your industry, right? But you want to use an a an interesting kind of adjective, a non-typical adjective that will make people take pause. So for example, you might use the word original luxury, modern forged, I really like using indestructible, right? So basically a word that kind of catches the eye. And it might even be a word you put as the first word in your title. So I know obviously the, the words that are closer to the beginning of the title Amazon puts more of an emphasis on. But it is worth testing to put one of these interesting words at the front. Cuz the whole idea is when they’re scrolling, that’s the first thing they’re gonna read. And hopefully it makes them take take pause and get attention to your, to your listing.
Kevin King:
Do you use those just in the title or do you use those elsewhere? Like in bullet points or in any of your images as well?
Matt:
You can use it. I mean, yeah, by all means you can use the interesting words all over the all over the listing. I like it best in the title because that’s where it’ll have the most impact. I feel like the bullets, that’s where you’re trying to make more of that kind of emotional connection. Something else that I’d say too is, you know, keep in mind shoppers don’t buy because of features and sometimes they don’t even buy because of benefits, right? I mean, obviously we illustrate the benefits, but people in general are irrational and they buy because they want a certain feeling, right? So if you can write copy that that kind of evokes a certain emotion, that’s where you’ll win. That’s where, you know, if you’ve already convinced somebody to get the click because of your main image, you’ve already convinced somebody you know, in your secondary images of why they should continue reading, the next step is, you know, then they’ll go into your bullets to kind of find out a little bit more information.
Matt:
And your bullets is where you can seal the deal, right? You can get the purchase there by kind of evoking that emotional response. Another cool test that I was working with, with a bunch of different sellers so you can put emojis in bullets and I’ve always been curious about like, does that work? I mean, it kind of gets attention. And what’s interesting with doing that test is basically don’t put emojis in your bullets. The feedback from shoppers is that it kind of devalues the brand and there’s different ways of using emojis and it might be different for different categories, but overwhelmingly it’s a negative response when there’s emojis in the paragraph text on your, on your listing. So that’s another quick tip. Another question don’t necessarily use, use the emojis <laugh>.
Kevin King:
You know, another thing that’s a cool strategy, and I think you talked about, you’ve talked about this before, and it’s something that I’ve done but it can be very effective is, you know, sometimes when I go through the Tim Horton’s or the Krispy Kreme or here in Austin, it’s Round Rock Donuts. So the best donuts in the world, round rock donuts, lion’s always like 25, 30 cars deep no matter what time of day you go there. But anyway I go through it, I get some don you know, occasionally I’ll go and treat myself and I’ll get some donut holes and it’s supposed to be like 12 donut holes in the bag. And I take ’em and then you know, drive away. And as I’m driving back to the house, you know, I might stick my hand in there and sample one or two while they’re hot.
Kevin King:
And later on, you know, as I’m eating these things, I’m like, man, I feel like I’ve eaten more than 12 of these. I wonder, you know, did they put like 15 or 16 or something in here instead of 12? And sure as they did, you know, they put some ones in. Or if you go to five guys, the burger joint, you know, and you go in there and you order, you don’t need to order a large fry at five guys. You go in there and just order the small fry because they’re gonna put the fry into the paper bag, and then they’re gonna dump like a whole scoop of extra fries just loose in there. Those kinds of things when it comes to product sales, why not take those same principles and use that for when you’re selling products? And can you talk about, you do that with some great success, I think you even did it maybe with your mosquito band. Talk to me about that.
Matt:
Yeah, totally. And it’s always the fries in the package at the bottom of the package that taste the best too, right? Like
Kevin King:
Exactly. They’re the greasiest ones that’s soaking in that grease.
Matt:
Yeah. But five guys, that’s their sop. That’s, that’s the standard. It’s not by mistake that they’re, that they’re doing that. So it’s all about like, you know, so for me how to get reviews on Amazon is give something people to talk about straight up, right? So if you can offer an extra bonus, if you can give something that people aren’t expecting it gives them, it gives them a pleasant feeling. You buy those dozen donuts and you get an extra two, three, you’re feeling good like you just won today, you know, that makes your day right. Similar on Amazon. So yeah, with the mosquito repellent bracelets, I mean, you know, cost on them are obviously negligible. But we would sell fair, for example, a five pack and then rate on the package. We’d write surprise, you got the six pack. So we gave them an extra item.
Kevin King:
You don’t show that on Amazon, right? You didn’t, you don’t, the package that they see on Amazon doesn’t say surprise. You got the six pack, it just shows five pack. So that’s what they’re expecting. When they get it, they open up their, open up their Amazon box or their the bag or whatever the Amazon sent in, then it says something slightly different on there. A
Matt:
Hundred percent, yeah. And that’s the key, right? That that is the key of it. They can’t be expecting it. Cuz then if they are expecting it, it’s not no longer a surprise. And what worked really well too was just a little message. Like we didn’t we didn’t say like, Hey, you have to leave a review on Amazon or anything like that. But we’d actually mention like, Hey, kind of keep this between us. Like if you happen to do a product review you know, don’t mention this so that we can keep it a surprise for other other people. And you know, the psychology behind that is now like, oh geez, yeah, like I should probably do a product review. I feel good now that I got this. And we’re not asking for the review, but it’s kind of like, it’s the reciprocity. Like we just did something positive for you. They’re in them in turn will do something for us. So that was a really good strategy to get reviews on a product and something that cost almost nothing to to do.
Kevin King:
What’s something, what are a couple other tricks before we just before we go here, that you could share that people should be, should be doing along these same lines?
Matt:
Totally. Yeah. So and again surprise and delight. Do stuff that’s different, right? It’s very rare when you buy an Amazon product that they give you something extra. That’s almost never the experience. You buy something on Amazon, you, you’re hoping that if it’s a brand name that you’ve never heard of, which is like, you know, most of the time you’re just hoping that it works. You’re hoping that it’s, it’s a, it was a good deal. The other point that, you know, to really grow the Amazon business, you, you need to be getting customer details. It’s a must. Most people have, you know, insert cards for registering a warranty or an ebook or something like that. Don’t do that. Do something different. Actually give them another product. And the way to do that is if the extra complimentary product can fit in an envelope cost you maybe a buck to ship another buck for the product itself.
Matt:
Doesn’t have to be anything crazy. So for example, there was someone that was selling children’s shoes and the free up sell, you know, put in your name details, address we’ll send you a pair of children’s flip flops absolutely free. The flip flops cost under a buck, they could ship them in the envelope. That gets you data, that gets you, that gets you an email list of shoppers, right? So you’re not now you’re not just getting like an email list from people opting in from like cold advertising. You’re getting a list of people that have actually bought from you. And we all know this. The people that have actually bought from you the are the easiest people to convert to buy something else from you. So now that you’re developing your email list, if you wanted to go to Kickstarter and launch one of those vessel like products where you have the patent, you’re getting a patent for it and that sort of thing, you have that audience to do it and the Kickstarter becomes easier as well. So the name of the game is, yeah, is customer details when you’re selling on, on Amazon. And it’s also something the offer that you make is something that you can test and split test as as well.
Kevin King:
Awesome, Matt. Well, this has been great. I know we could keep going on this probably for quite some time, but I think we’ve shared some really good tips. Hopefully this’ll become one of the most downloaded episodes. If you like this episode, be here to be sure to hit this subscribe button or to share it to other people. If you wanna share these tips or maybe you just wanna keep ’em to yourself have a competitive advantage. I don’t know but I think there’s been some great stuff shared. Matt, if people wanna know more about you or to reach out to you how, how would they go about doing that? Yeah,
Matt:
Easiest way is check us out, productpinion.com. My direct email is Matt with two T’s, so matt@productpinion.com. And yeah, happy to share with you some ideas for yourself on yeah, on how to set up some tests and how to win on Amazon.
Kevin King:
Awesome. Appreciate it, Matt. This has been great.
Matt:
Thank you so much for having me on and yeah, had a good time.
Kevin King:
I think you may need to go back and listen to this episode again, there’s a lot of actionable stuff that you can implement right away in your business right now, whether you’re selling on Amazon or Walmart or any other e-commerce, some really good stuff that Matt and I talked about. So hopefully you gained some advantage by listening to this episode. Don’t forget, we’ll be back again next week with another incredible episode. Also, remember, the Billion Dollar Seller Summit is coming up in less than a month in Port Rico, and go to billiondollarsellersummit.com for more information on that. And before we leave today, I’ve got just some words of wisdom for you. Just a nice little short one. Build your business around your life, not your life around your business. Build your business around your life, not your life around your business. We’ll see you again next week.
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