Amazon is the biggest ecommerce marketplace in the world, and selling through the site has a lot of appeal. Buyers trust Amazon thanks to fast shipping, good customer service, and competitive prices.
With that said, if you’re planning on selling on this ecommerce juggernaut, you have a lot of competition. Almost two million sellers are actively leveraging Amazon, and this number is growing fast.
Over a million new sellers join the platform every year. As such, you need a strategy when it comes to attracting customers. One of the best ways to do so is by having excellent Amazon product listings that capture the buyers’ attention and inspire a purchase decision in one fell swoop.
We’ve compiled a list of fantastic ways you can improve your Amazon listings to attract buyers and keep the sales rolling in. You can use one or all of these product listing optimization ideas and enhance the success of your Amazon product offering.
1. Polish Your Titles
You can’t succeed at Amazon marketing without really great titles. Titles might sound basic, but there is an art to enhancing your product titles far beyond simply plugging in your product name.
Having a robust and “enhanced” product title will help your brand stand out and improve sales because they’re easier to find in relevant searches.
Titles don’t need to be overly difficult, but they do need to provide more answers than questions as it relates to a customer search. Amazon’s guidelines are a good starting point when enhancing your titles.
Keep the title shorter than 200 words; titles longer than this may be suppressed in search results. You should also capitalize each word in the title, but don’t make every letter in a word capitalized.
Your brand name should be the first part of your title, and important keywords should be present to describe the product well. It’s also a good idea to add descriptive elements such as size and color. If you have a technical product, be sure to include a part or model number in your titles as well.
2. A Picture Says a Thousand Words
On Amazon, high-quality images of products are essential to ensure that potential buyers know exactly what they’re getting into. The pictures that accompany your listings can be the greatest conversion factor when it comes to your products, so making them look great is important in Amazon marketing.
It’s highly recommended that you use a white background and ensure that the product takes up at least 80% of the image. If you have great promotional images full of people, you will need to rework these or take new photos that are purely focused on the product you are selling.
This image is of great quality and you can see finer details when zooming in.
For the image to be high quality, regardless of the device it’s viewed on, it should be at least 1,000 dots per inch (DPI). This allows the image to remain looking good when buyers zoom in.
Do not add promotional text to your images like “offer” or “sale.” Other Amazon best practices for images include not using watermarks or borders on images. You should also avoid using drawings or placeholder images.
3. Optimize Your Bullet Points
Much like your product description, bullet points are ideal for describing your products in a concise manner. When it comes to product listing optimization, your bullet points are a great place to start.
Many potential buyers are scrolling through different product pages and don’t want to scroll to find the information they’re looking for. Bullet points should tell them everything related to the product that can sway them into buying.
You can see the bullets being used to describe the benefits of the products to hook buyers who might be on the fence on which product they should purchase.
Save the details for your product descriptions. Make your bullet points short, easy to read, and focused on answering frequently asked questions from your customers. Avoid technical terms and filler language, but rather, you really want to hit those features that set your product apart from competitors. You can still use keywords but keep them relevant and to a minimum.
4. Optimize Your Product Descriptions
In successful Amazon marketing, the product descriptions play a vital role in how well your products fly off the ecommerce shelves. This is not a place for a sales pitch.
This is your chance to highlight those highest-value aspects of your product, like quality, sizing specs, safety certifications, etc. Remember your description is here to answer questions your product images can’t—so don’t be redundant.
The product description is creative but also factual and descriptive.
Use keywords strategically in your descriptions so that they’re natural and don’t seem forced. Grammar and spelling are important—people can quickly lose trust in a product listing (or brand page) with spelling and grammatical errors.
Amazon also allows you to use HTML formatting such as breaks between paragraphs to further clean up the look of your product listing. So if you have the know-how (or know someone that does), take full advantage of this feature to make your listings even more user-friendly.
5. Encourage Customer Reviews
Product reviews are vitally important in ecommerce and even more so when it comes to Amazon marketing. More than 78% of consumers between 18 and 34 trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations. Clearly, the value of good customer reviews cannot be overstated.
On a platform such as Amazon, a product that has many positive reviews will be trusted more than products with only a few. Customers debating which product to purchase (even for a second) will fall back on reviews to make a faster purchase decision.
Amazon will also give more (search) love to products that have robust and legitimate review scores—so they don’t just help you sell, they also help you get found on Amazon.
It can take time to gather enough positive feedback and reviews to make a good impression, but Amazon makes it easy by allowing you to ask for feedback from buyers. You can also make use of automatic feedback request tools that will speed things along.
6. Don’t Neglect SEO
Even ecommerce is powered by some good, old-fashioned SEO (search engine optimization), and the same goes for Amazon marketing.
Amazon doesn’t use the same algorithms as Google, so you should research how the platform operates. It uses A10, and works with decisions and influences unique to Amazon experiences.
A10 is more concerned with organic Google rankings than previous versions. To impress the algorithm, consider working with influencers and bloggers. Get them to link to your products and drive traffic.
Product availability is also important, so keep that in mind when you plan your Amazon marketing strategy. Products that are out of stock won’t show up in the search results.
7. Understand Your Customers
All these tips will be useless if they are not addressing the needs of your target audience. It is essential that you research your customers and don’t make assumptions.
It’s not about what YOU think is important, but rather, what THEY think is important—understanding the needs, solutions, and desires of the customers that you’re marketing to. You want to be able to speak directly to them in your product descriptions.
Here are a few questions you should ask about your target market:
– What features do your customers find most valuable?
– What features do you have that your competition does not?
– What “pain points” surround products like yours?
– How should you address these pain points?
– What do your customers want to read (in descriptions)?
Remember that ecommerce customers have limited attention spans, so they may not read everything you write. That’s why it’s crucial that you know your audience and put the information most relevant to them first. Make it “chunky and scannable.”
“Level-Up” Your Amazon Game
We have covered a LOT of ways to bring your Amazon product listings to the next level—but remember, you don’t need to do everything at once.
If your images are top notch, move on to your titles. Got your titles on point? Well, then you can move on to formulating your descriptions. Just take it one step at a time. And like everything else in marketing, remember to continuously be testing your changes so you can track your positive impact.
If you’re still a bit unsure how to make the most of your listings, we have an expert team that can help you. Call us at (877) 866-6699 or click here, and we will get back to you with advice and assistance.