Benefits of Owning Your Customer

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Now I know today’s time. It’s all about the benefits of owning your own customer in an, our incubator, we run a company called paw.com and we’ve done that actually norm we’ve actually set it up. So 95% of the sales that we make, we have a relationship with the customer, and I know that’s quite different than Amazon you’re in for a treat today.

Cause Norm is one of the top podcasters in the world when it comes to e-commerce and e-commerce techniques, tips, and tricks norms, the host take it away norm. Alright, thanks a lot column. Okay. We have a treat today because this is a topic that not a lot of people are [00:01:00] talking about. At least I haven’t seen it talked about on.

And that’s about owning your customer and different techniques that you can do this. But, uh, before I get to that, I just want to make a quick note or an announcement. My name’s . I have a podcast called lunch with norm the Amazon FBA e-commerce podcasts every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Um, the topic today is going to be great.

Please stay tuned. This will be recorded. If you have any questions, we will welcome you to the stage. Uh, if you don’t want to be recorded, please don’t raise your hand. We also want to provide. Pure content. We don’t want people pitching their courses or whatever. If you have a question or if you have a comment, great, but please don’t pitch.

Uh, just one other thing, like Colin said, if you want to have and hear more about great entrepreneurial ventures or rooms, checkout startup club at the top, click on the green house [00:02:00] and you’ll be notified as well. If you like what you hear from the speakers today, the panelists, please follow them. All right.

Today, we’re going to be learning about how to own your own customer, how you’re able to find these customers, um, who should be doing this, what you have to do to find them, uh, what are some mistakes? And we have an expert on this right now. Uh, Troy, Johnson’s going to be joining us. He has joined us now.

Hey Charlie. Welcome anymore. Great to be here. Thanks for. Yeah, it’s my pleasure. I know you were on the podcast recently and we just had a ton of downloads, so I thought, oh, perfect. This would be a great topic for today. So we’re Amazon sellers, we’re e-comm sellers. Um, what I really want to focus on is, you know, talking about different techniques, people can use to own the customer and what that journey looks like.

So before we get to that, uh, Troy, if you want to do a [00:03:00] brief introduction. Yeah, no, absolutely. So a little bit about me again. My name is Troy Johnston. Um, I started selling on Amazon in, uh, the mid let’s see, 2015, uh, approximately, uh, back in a different time and era of Amazon FBA, um, and had, uh, built a, uh, a brand in the health and beauty space ended up having that acquired and moved on from, uh, from that brand to, uh, consulting and advising, uh, brands in similar categories.

So health and beauty. A lot of the very fun, uh, sometimes competitive and quite saturated categories on Amazon and what I do today and what came after, uh, my time doing some consulting is, um, through our Amazon, uh, SAS platform, seller.tools, uh, where we offer a pretty wide array of solutions for, uh, optimization on Amazon unique data, um, and ultimately, uh, aim to help brands with their ranking efforts, getting more visible [00:04:00] and capturing more reviews, more social proof through things.

I’m sure that we’ll touch on today, engaging your customer, delivering an exceptional experience and, and trying to own that, that process as well. Okay. So why don’t we start right there when we talk about owning the customer, where does that journey even begin? Yeah, it’s a great question. I think, you know, in four for new, uh, Amazon sellers that are just coming online, You know, this is often the most, um, what I find to be the most intimidating and then what can happen with that intimidation factor?

Uh, the, the perception that it’s more complicated than it needs to be. Um, and so there is a, there is a little bit of, um, sentiment, I would say, uh, that I hear from sellers and brands when they think about even this idea of, oh man owning my customer, like I’m on Amazon and for, for the same reasons that we all are, it’s, it’s the, the largest commerce platform to [00:05:00] ever exist.

We’re on the other side of, you know, we’re on, uh, at the post COVID COVID, um, reality where e-commerce has accelerated 10 times. And so now you have, you have the biggest thing becoming even bigger and growing exponentially. And then it’s that question of what are you doing differently to give you a brand your, your business, a competitive advantage.

And so. With, again, some of that, that context, you know, the way that we think about this as Amazon brand owners, you know, there, there are some things that you just have to do to, to sell on Amazon. You have to have a product, you have to have it in a fulfillment center. You do the foundational optimization.

All of those core pieces are a mainstay. Every single brand that has a presence on Amazon has to complete those steps. So usually the lowest of low-hanging fruit, when we think about, uh, owning a customer is, well, if we already have to do those foundational pieces, what [00:06:00] happens once a customer transacts with our brand and our product on Amazon.

And is there a door that’s opened for continuing and furthering that relationship? So that takes us to thinking about and ironing out what would be our post-purchase strategies. This is, this is sort of the, uh, the easiest way to get into, okay. Somebody’s already found us where we’re wearing. On Amazon has voted with their dollars, maybe new to brand, maybe new to new to the product, but then what are we doing?

If anything, so is there a post-product post purchase strategy in place? And if not figuring out and sort of ironing out what is the, what is the value? And this is how I think of it strategically, uh, what value you want to deliver, where it makes sense. And it enriches the buying experience to where it’s a no brainer for the customer to where that continuity that door is effectively opened.

And then that responsibility, which again, can sometimes be [00:07:00] intimidating as well. Now you have a line of communication with your customer. What do you do next? Knowing that there is you’ve given value, but then there’s also value inherent in that engagement, in that communication you can now have with that customer, you know, I’d even start, I didn’t even back it up even further.

So it doesn’t matter if you’re, uh, Amazon e-com retail. Uh, you know, you could be selling on Walmart in using their fulfillment service. If the product does not come to have to get delivered and you open it up, and that is where like online, you can basically see the perceived value. This is what I want.

Uh, but when it comes to your door, I’ve had like horrible experiences. I’ve talked about where somebody gave me like this, uh, this beard kit. Okay. I’ve got a beard. They, I opened it up. It smelled like it just came up out of a bar and it came in a burlap bag. The, [00:08:00] the, the, the actual beard brush had pink particles all over it, where they spray painted it.

And it was a horrible customer experience, but I don’t care where you’re selling. If you can get that that’s for me, that’s the starting point. Make your product look. By your own product. A lot of people miss out on that, so they don’t see it, smell it, feel it, and see what the customer’s going to get. Um, I think that’s number one and then a simple thing to do a really simple thing.

Uh, other than exceptional customer service is having an insert in there and just either get the person to come over, uh, to a website and or a chat bot or something to, um, to either go into a loyalty program, give them something of added value. Uh, just, just something that you could provide and get them to come over to your website.

It could be a pop-up. Yeah. Let’s say you’re selling soap [00:09:00] well or shampoo. You might want to give a small sample pack of conditioner. These are all things that you can do to really enhance the customer experience. And then the person like brand, I have to say like Colin, I know you’re. And you guys over at pod, do a great job at this, getting in front of the customer and always being in front of the customer.

And I’m just gonna, uh, hopefully, um, you could talk about this or Troy, like, let’s talk about email marketing. You get the, first of all, you have to get the email address and I usually get it from an insert. And then from there, let’s talk a little bit about email marketing and owning a customer, you know, um, more than once on, uh, using email marketing or SMS.

And you do want me to just jump in here, but I don’t run the day-to-day email for paul.com. We have an expert who runs that I can [00:10:00] tell you, we have about 700,000 email addresses. And when we send out an email, it’s unbelievable, like the sales that. We know we’ll just book like $50,000 or whatever it is.

It might be 30, 40, 50,000, whatever it is when we send out an email, the power of those emails are absolutely incredible. It’s like the it’s almost like the value of our business is based on the number of emails we have. So we were really paranoid when we went into Amazon because we didn’t have that relationship.

We didn’t have the ability to continue to market additional products or new products. And so what we did is we, we held back a little bit. We, um, we didn’t put all of our products on Amazon. We only put some of our products. Now. I’m not saying we did the right Amazon move here. We may have, you know, we may not be doing the best on Amazon, but I will say this.

I will say that, um, we are not just trying to make a sale. We’re trying to capture and build a relationship. Whether it’s an [00:11:00] email, whether they log in and they set up their profile, their pet, whatever it is, we’re trying to build a relationship. So Troy I’m just really. Because I know you’re very Amazon centric as well.

I mean, just curious, like what is it that these e-commerce businesses can do to build that relationship, to get that email address? Yeah, it’s, it’s a, it’s a great question. And I, you know, I, I really always aimed to start at really understanding what pain points or potentially pleasure. And I know this may bring us into a little bit of the buyer psychology of really understanding your product and driving at what your, who, what and where your customer avatar is, is really finding you.

Right? And this is where Amazon is. You know, it can feel like a little bit of a black hole for a lot of brands that come online. And this is where you’ve got to bring in what data you can retrieve. Uh, you know, whether it’s on the PPC side, whether you use tools or other solutions to kind of paint this picture, but [00:12:00] that does inform what you do at the point of transaction, right?

With your product detail page. When somebody buys, if this is a new to brand customer, somebody who’s never seen your brand or product before your Amazon detail page is the entirety of what they see and understand before they vote with their dollars and effectively, effectively purchase your product. So you do want to do some of that heavy lifting initially.

And this another, another strong point here as well is making sure that if you’re selling on Amazon and you’re truly of the spirit that you’re brand building, you’re not, maybe it’s more of a cashflow type business. Are you doing, you know, strict white labeling, where it may be potentially more commoditized products, you sort of have to embrace what you’re bringing to the market.

Right. And that’s where, um, for most, you know, I, I do see some that more of an arbitrage play that they think about the white labeling, but on the other end of the spectrum, when you’re brand building, it’s that same point, Colin, where you’re thinking about the continuity, how do you build [00:13:00] interest and community.

To where there is continuity and beyond that, uh, beyond that transaction. And so really what you aim to do enrollment touched on some of the, the, the, uh, the tactics. And these are the things that we would do is inclusion of something like a product insert to really clarify the value. Um, and there’s, there’s specific things that we’ll do if we know our products.

So we know who’s, who’s buying it for what explicit purpose, how do we validate their purchase post-purchase and that can be with a warranty registration, some way that we can give them a piece of mind if our product is, you know, a little bit higher ticket, uh, maybe they’ve seen in our space or seen in the competitive landscape, that it can be prone to, to issues if they, if we can provide them relief and deliver that value that opens up the exchange to where we, we do capture their email, we do capture their phone number.

We, we really like to use SMS as well. Um, and so those are some of the, that are, the prerequisites is really drilling. [00:14:00] Your product, that value prop, that it, that it brings the avatar that you’re really speaking to with some emotional, uh, aspect. We, we again know that when we play to a play to emotions, we’re typically talking more about benefits getting away from features.

But then also, again, if it’s a brand new customer, they want to know they made a good decision. We’d like to know, we’d like to know we did the right thing right at the simplest level. And so if we can do that through an insert and we can clarify what we’re delivering to them, then it’s a matter of, you know, the email strategy, the SMS strategy, where, what are we communicating to sort of say in the way that you sort of link this together is still validate their Amazon purchase.

If that’s the point of contact, but then deliver ongoing value that can be, um, uh, brand and product aligned. So it really can, it really can depend. And that’s why I’m, I’m also very careful to say generally, oh, this strategy is really. It’s going through that [00:15:00] exercise of knowing that your product, putting yourself in your customer’s shoes and thinking about what would really enrich, whether it’s information, whether it’s a warranty, registration, a sample of a new product and accessory that supplements the purchase.

Um, what would really enhance this to where I can come back to that customer, you know, hit them with two or three content specific emails. Another promotional offer are run on the other side of it, but that door is then opened to, to create more of the community and more of the brand building. That would be a focus.

And those are great points. Try, you know, one of the things like I D I just wanted to bring out one of the big benefits about building this list as well. Um, some of the people on the line, I see Roz and, and Marcia, they’ve heard this story a million times. I sell high-end chef knives. And one of the things that, uh, [00:16:00] help us out, uh, we, we have one very expensive knife, but we were able to build our brand and build our brand based on the people who bought the products off of the website.

We have, I don’t know, it’s not a huge list. It might be 20,000, maybe 25,000 names, but we target them as we build out our products. So now we have a paring knife. Now we have, uh, a multi-purpose knife and there’s a variety of other products that we have started to build. And guess what it’s used through the, uh, through email marketing and by the way, for those of you who are listening and think that email marketing is dead, check out the podcast or the, a room that we had with Adrian.

Um, we took a couple of those points. I had no idea, but I took a couple of these points. I am not a huge email marketer. I have people that do that for me, but my son Kelsey took it and he started email marketing people. We took [00:17:00] our open rate from 20%, which I thought was good. Adrian said it sucked, but we’ve listened.

We just took a couple of his pointers. We had our highest open rate to date based on, oh, and this is over the last three months. We have a 71% open rate for our emails. I think that’s pretty good. And it’s all just based on, you know, people that want to engage with you. So that’s another thing they’re talking about building your customer base.

Don’t build junk if people aren’t engaging or if you can’t get them to engage in a Facebook community or even opening up your emails. What good are they, you know, they’re just numbers. So if you’ve got, you know, 50,000 emails and most people aren’t listening to them, just start targeting people that are opening them up.

And as that grows, start to just keep the people that are interested in your product. Uh, Troy calling, I don’t know [00:18:00] if you have anything to say on that.

Yeah. Normally we’re just going to add, I think we touched on this briefly on your podcast. Um, and my, my business partner seller tools, um, his is a fitness brand. They actually hold, uh, their licensed, the patent for foam rollers. And so they’re in a hyper competitive, um, hyper competitive, um, uh, category there and, uh, quite quite big on Amazon do a lot of volume, a lot of sales volume.

Um, but people are often surprised to find just how small but high quality his list is of highly engaged customers that are relative ready. You know, whether it’s content that they’re providing or detailed videos of how best to use the, you know, use the product or think about other, other products in the, in the line.

Um, it is a quality focus. It’s a sub 10,000, even though this, this brand is an eight figure brand, we think, oh, this the list has to be 20,000, 50,000 [00:19:00] people to really enrich the, uh, the relationship there. That quality focus is, is as important in many cases, more important than just a man, that raw number of that list sizes is so big.

Yeah. And I think we were guilty at.com, um, early on of just, you know, emailing everybody, everything all the time and too many times. And we, over time, we, we, we, we did hire somebody who was an expert in the area and, uh, over time now, it’s, everything’s very much more tailored based on the product you ordered in the past, whether you’d like a product in the future.

It’s based on, uh, just different elements of the customer, you know, the type of breed or, or, or when they actually purchased the product last or, you know, so there’s a lot of different parameters and intelligence that goes now into our, our emails. So they are much more effective and targeted than when we had originally started out.

Um, I did have a question though, about these inserts cause we do inserts as well. Um, like, so if you [00:20:00] are a product com product and one of our dog bed rugs on Amazon, you know, you’ll receive the product, you’ll come to your, your home and you open it up and you say, you know, join our email list. What’s the conversion rate on that.

And is there any techniques Troy, to increase the conversion rate that would suck? So yeah, they call, uh, Colin. Yeah, sure. People now. If you just put in, you know, drop your email or, or, or, you know, click the QR code to scan the QR code to come over. If you’re not providing something of value and it could be like, it could be some research, it could be something I don’t usually give out PDFs, but it might be a product that I don’t offer on Amazon that they can come in.

Let’s say it’s a bar of soap might be a scent that I’m not offering on Amazon, or it could be some sort of special, or it could [00:21:00] be a, um, a warranty or loyalty program. But with that would come a, like a really good discount code for a future purchase. So these are really important. One of the things I want to make sure that everybody does, if they’re doing.

Is a QR code with a link below it. So some people don’t know what a QR code is. They don’t know how to use them. There’s a link so people can type the link, they can get to the page. But if you use a QR code with a dynamic URL, so what you can do is if you having, um, let’s say you’re having a special for black Friday, uh, it could be mother’s day.

It could be Valentine’s day for the bars that are going out. Or like, for me, I’ve just seen bars of soap or knives or whatever it is. I can change that on the fly to a specific landing page that says something, you know, more holiday [00:22:00] oriented mother’s day oriented, and you can do it on the fly based on the.

Uh, when you think the sales are going to be, so that’s really cool, but there’s, um, there’s a variety of different, um, insert techniques, um, to get people to drop their email address. It does, it’s harder nowadays, but let’s say, let’s say it as a bar of soap. If I’m going to give away a free bar of soap, it might cost me a buck to manufacturer.

Uh, Mike cost me a few bucks to send out, but to acquire that person, especially with recurring income, if they like the bar of soap, they’re going to come back and want more or they’re going to come and get a subscription possibly. So, Troy, I don’t know if you have anything more to add. Yeah, no, those are really great points.

Um, often times too, for a product that may be maybe like a one-time purchase, where you buy, uh, you know, uh, as an example, as an example with the, uh, with the dog bed, you know, that may be a every three or four year purchase where a customer’s coming back and [00:23:00] revisiting, um, Uh, by more, I know my dog has like five dog beds.

Uh, she lives a great life. Um, but what we typically think about is, is there already in place, you know, a one-year warranty, uh, something that is implied, but could be made explicit. And at that point in time, you know, if we use, uh, as an example, a chat bot through many chat, we can capture the relevant customer information.

And that also opens up the door of, yeah, we just need simply your name, phone number, uh, an email that, uh, makes explicit the warranty, uh, that we, uh, we of course backup and act upon if there’s any manufacturer related issues. So that’s a really great, tried and true strategy where it’s just, maybe it’s implied on the listing or not made explicit to the customer, but we’ll capture that information.

Uh, the other, especially with a product like that is thinking about tying in some type of continuity it, so if you have a product that welcomes repeat purchase before. Um, there’s a [00:24:00] few different ways you could tie that in, um, a simple and easy way to do it would be a steep discount. Uh, usually at cost, if not a little bit over cost, to be able to get that into your customer’s hand.

And then, uh, further, uh, you know, further promote and educate on the usefulness and building that continuity. One of the other kinds of I’ll call this more of a, uh, Amazon, um, Amazon specific tactic let’s say is subscribe and save. We know dramatically increases customer LTV. So if you have a continuity product already on Amazon, if you can give that customer and say, Hey, for a limited time, we’re giving 10, 15, $15 Amazon gift cards for customers who subscribe and save to product X.

Well through the chat bot, we can ask them to provide a confirmation that they’ve signed up for subscribe and save, still get all the relevant information, deliver that, uh, deliver that value to the customer. We do that automatic. But then we have now [00:25:00] a new to new to brand pro customer who has product a now product B on a subscribe and save program.

And we’ve opened the door to own the customer. So usually if we can think about if in our, in our product line, we already have, uh, a potential, uh, continuous, a repeat purchase behavior. How can we, uh, it’s sometimes a dirty word, but how can we incentivize it to where we give a little bit more value on the front end, but realize if we can three and four X that customer’s LTV and open up that continuity.

That’s a really great way of making the most of that transaction by. You said a quick question normally, like where does it cross the line with Amazon? Like how far can you go to encourage your customers to get an email address set up? I understand insert seem to be okay. Um, you know, can you do it through the customer support?

Is there no, you know, how far can we go? Well, the, from what I understand, from what I understand and the way that we’ve always done. Is no matter where we’re selling our products. So if we [00:26:00] send out a knife and that knife goes into Amazon into the Amazon warehouse, or if he’s going to Walmart, or if it’s off of our, um, off of our web, our website, uh, as long as the insert is consistent and it should be fine.

The other thing is like, you don’t want to drive, uh, either through an email they’ll block it, but they have something called customer experience right now through the brand section of your seller central. And if you were to, to try to have a link or in Amazon post have a link to drive people away, they’ll just block it.

Um, you, you won’t have that access, uh, but you can go ahead and you can tell people to come to your site. It’s not, it’s not against tos to have an insert. Um, and from where I found the. The issue is, is as long as the insert is made for all retail, and you’re [00:27:00] not doing it just specifically for your Amazon products, then everything’s kosher.

So hopefully that clears that up. Colin. And now the other thing that go ahead. Oh, I, I think that does, I think that does cause you know, it’s so important to you owning the relationship with your customer is so important because that’s how you get the repeat business@paul.com. We have 95% of our customers go directly to pod.com and buy the products and services.

We have a 20 neighborhood, a 28% return rate, uh, which is low. But again, we don’t, we don’t sell a lot of continuity products, you know, monthly recurring products. We’re starting to get into that kind of stuff, but we have a 26% return rate on our customers. So we’re, and that’s grown dramatically year over year and we continue to see it grow very, very fast.

Um, so we’re pretty excited about that. But if we, I don’t think we would have had that if we didn’t have email addresses [00:28:00] right now, I bought your product before. And so I get the emails and they’re great, you know, uh, but one of the areas, another big area that I think you can start to own your client as well, or your customers as well is through building up communities.

And there’s two ways to do this, or two ways I’ll touch on. And then guys, if you want to come in, you know, by all means do so. But the first thing is, is on the Amazon site, Amazon has come out and said they want to build brand communities. They’ve given us the tools to do that. We can now, uh, and this has been for the last year, maybe a year plus, but build, um, on their social media.

So Amazon posts, they’ve given us the ability now, as long as you’ve posted 10 times to show those posts. Which looks kind of like an Instagram post on your product listing, which is really cool. So it’s just a [00:29:00] pattern interrupt that will probably get people to click. We’ve had a lot of success with that and, um, they have, they provide a brand feed page.

They have a follow button. You can go Amazon live, which ties into this. Every time you go live, people, get all your followers, get notifications, and then you have the ability to put the, um, not the follow. It comes automatically on your Amazon store. So you can drive traffic over, get them specifically to, uh, join.

And one of the tricks, I forget who was on my podcast, but they said, here’s my trick. I put a big red arrow on my storefront getting people to, so when they see it to follow and they said that they, they saw a huge upswing in people following. So why is that important? It’s it’s important because you can contact these people through the Amazon customer experience and your brand.

This [00:30:00] will allow you to, uh, contact repeat buyers and people that are following you for upcoming sales discounts, all these things that we couldn’t really do in the past. The second port point is that you can build your communities all over the place. So to give you an example, um, meowing tins is another, um, uh, uh, kind of company that paused well that, uh, Colin’s involved with and one of their Instagram pages, uh, I think, I think they have to, they have a million followers there and they’re, uh, Milton, the cat is, has been downloaded.

Their gift has been downloaded around 2.2 billion times, but it’s all about that. Following building that. And if you can do that, like build up a Facebook group, join other Facebook groups, add value and get them to come back to your page. That is just it’s printing [00:31:00] money. So if you have people of like minds that you’re showing value to, they’re coming back to your page and you hit them once in a while with a promo, it can’t get better than that guys.

What do you think?

Yeah, no, uh, um, Milton, the cat is heading to here and then a T near you. Uh, we actually are in talks, um, to produce some NFTs or Hilton the cat. So that’s an interesting business. I don’t, I’m not involved in day-to-day operations as you know that normal, not, uh, I’m just, uh, one of the key shareholders that own the company.

Um, but their strategy at now interns really was community first e-commerce sales sales. And we have, like for instance, we do a daily cartoon every day that that has hand drawn, you know, created and sent out on an email list, that notes in the cat.club, you can sign up [00:32:00] for it. But, uh, but it’s also posted on Facebook and we get about 20,000, 30,000 follows a post.

So you can see, we really built a community. Uh, and, uh, it’s, it’s quite something what they’ve done at me. Ellington’s, it’s quite, it’s a completely different approach than pod.com. And I should mention here it’s a bit confusing, but, um, I’m shareholder in both of them, but neither of the companies, they don’t work together.

Um, other than myself as the connection between them, there’s no, there’s no other connections between those two companies. Um, but it is fascinating to see that, you know, one is based more on a products, strategy and emails and gaining emails. And the other is more a build a community first and then try to, um, sell products to that.

All right, Troy, anything more to add? Yeah, I think the only thing I would, I would add in there too, is just, you know, this is where, uh, the change of Amazon and inherently in terms of a platform that [00:33:00] you can, um, let’s say, take advantage of, but if you know what Amazon rewards and you can, um, you can impact it disproportionately that’s where you have these exponential results on, on such a massive platform.

Um, but then as you mentioned, norm some of these other other tools where, you know, whether it’s creating more of a social, like, uh, experience on Amazon or we know mobile, uh, mobile first has now, you know, it’s kind of had its big rush to be, uh, the lion’s share of the activity that takes place on Amazon.

And now it’s even incrementally grown, um, videos, important images are important. All of those things that really can convey, um, what your product is, who it’s for. And then think about the community, uh, post-birth center we’ve been focused on post-purchase the pre-purchase side of things is where it can often get a little bit hairy too, because then it’s, where are you finding that?

Where are you finding existing communities or tapping into and creating new ones there, but, um, [00:34:00] I think, I think all, all great points. Oh, Shirley, how are you?

I am doing good today. How are you? My beard of knowledge. You and, well, thank you. I have a question for you. I’ve been listening. I do posts on Amazon and I done a lot of them. And I just heard, you mentioned that they can be, um, incorporated into a product listing. And can you tell us all how that’s. Sure.

Oh, uh, it was probably three, four weeks ago. Uh, Amazon announced that they have this new program for Amazon posts and they’re, if you, if you weren’t registered. So all you have to do is go to post.amazon.com. And if you have an Amazon, uh, pro seller account, a user login, create a profile, put your [00:35:00] logo, their brand name there, and they’ll just walk you through, you know, creating posts, which you already know, uh, 10 posts.

It, it, it should enable a program. Oh, you or enroll you into a program that when people are searching your posts, that you’ll be able to see a carousel of your post, uh, on your product list thing. So I have seen it on. But I have not seen it. Like it’s not, um, I, I think it’s random right now. I don’t know if Troy’s, um, seen it consistently.

I have not seen it on a consistent basis. And what I have seen is it’s your posts. It’s not your competition’s posts. You can, by the way. Um, if you’re not familiar with Amazon posts, when you do create posts and it can go into, what’s called a, um, a related feed, which is, um, if you scroll down, you’ll [00:36:00] see that I think it’s above questions or just below frequent or, uh, uh, questions.

And you’ll see either, you’ll see a bunch of competition. So you can actually show up on your competitors pages, which is kind of cool. So Marsha, if you’ve got more than 10, um, you might be like, check, check it out, check out, like go to a private browser maybe and check it out and see. If not, I don’t know why.

I don’t know if it’s category specific, but you should be able to see them. I know your product. And I think that, um, yeah, I think you should be able to see them. Troy, do you know any insights, any other insights? Um, I’m not as up on, uh, it’s on my list to, uh, to knock out even actually for one of our, one of our brands.

Um, but I I’ve heard that as well. I just couldn’t tell you exactly where, where to spot. And I know where related video shorts are and above the fold, but, um, placement, I couldn’t tell you once you’ve reached that threshold, I’ll see what I can [00:37:00] find out. I’m going to do some research. I followed your advice from one of, one of the places I heard you talking Norman.

I’m now doing Amazon posts three to five times a day. My following, I have quite a few followers might have a lot of impressions, but I don’t see them on my listings. Like, I’m not sure. Maybe if I I’ll see what I can find out and I’ll report. Fantastic. And watch those, watch your engagement grow and especially with customer experience and watch your increase, your conversions increase.

So it’s a little bit off topic, but if you put Amazon posts, Amazon’s made it very hard to purchase anything through Amazon posts. This comes back to e-commerce. If you go to a landing page and you click off of that, or you have to click to another page and then to another page, and then do another page.

Each time you do that, you lose 50 to 75% of your traffic. By the time you [00:38:00] get to buy anything on Amazon, um, through their posts, you’ve clicked four or five times, which leads you with a captivated audience who probably are going to buy your product. So the chances are, you’ve probably got, you’re going to increase your conversion rate, which looks good to Amazon, um, which helps you with promotion, which helps you with.

Uh, that as well, Marsha. Okay. And one other question for your norm, um, when you post, you get to put your image in, and then you get to write your very short little blurb and then you get to connect it to up to 10 ACEs. Do you always feel all 10 ASEN slots with your products? Or do you use some of your competitors products in there?

How do you use those 10 ASEN slots? Well, never really wanted to promote the competitors type. And I don’t know, like there might be a [00:39:00] strategy there, but I’ll what I’ll do. And this comes down to monitoring your. And just seeing what’s working. So I look at the image, I probably have four or five different styles of images that I’ll I’ll provide.

And then I’ll create a carousel and either be a, just one ASEN or it’ll be multiple agents and I’ll see what’s converting. So if certain images are converting, okay, great. If they’re converting on single images, better than multiple images, fine. What I’m finding right now is multiple images. Like for example, soap, you might have multiple scents.

So why not show the different soaps? Uh, you know, some people might not like lavender, but they like sandalwood. So that’s where it comes into effect. And also if you think about men sense or tropical. You could create a carousel for that, or it could just be a single promotion. And, um, and again, on your [00:40:00] brand feed, this is where all the posts kind of come together.

And I haven’t seen a lot of people marketing brand feed, but that’s kind of a cool landing page as well. I’m just going to ask Marshawn question about, um, you do send, you do three to five posts a day. So what kind of stuff are you posting? Is it, is it just informational content or is it product stuff?

I’m curious to what your pub, what you’re actually posting? Well, I post a little bit of everything, um, because I manufacture products. And we’re coming up to Thanksgiving. I had some pictures of a sick Turkey. Uh, someone had done a caricature of a Turkey with a thermometer in his mouth and an ice bag on his head.

So I did a post about how to stay well, so you don’t get sick. You know, those kinds of things. I try to keep a little bit of short information, little bit of short education about every fifth post, a little bit of a sales [00:41:00] pitch, but I do also try to add in some fun, uh characatures that I find that just to make people maybe say, what’s this about just to stop them for a moment.

Um, and you can repeat, what I have found is you can repeat the text that you write, but I am not able to use an image twice. So, uh, I happen to have a pretty vast image library and a lot of, um, Consumer shots that I can put in there that I have their permission to use, but I try to mix it up because I, it just can’t be all the buy me, buy me, buy me.

Yeah. Lifestyle. There are what I’m finding are probably the best right now. And if you can mix it up, so you, you can use your social media. So if you’re posting on Instagram or, okay, here’s another thing that you can do with the inserts on the insert. You can say, uh, Hey guys, when your product or something like that.

And then, [00:42:00] um, you can use an app like repost, download it, and then upload it to your, um, Amazon posts. Like I think a couple of us here and know Paul Barron, who is a, he’s been on the podcast a couple of times in this room a couple of times. And he got user generated content doing that. I think he’s at, I think he’s at 11,000 images this year.

This. By doing that, just tag us and he’s, and he also has an influencer network, but, um, it’s just a really great way to get content. I know what we’ve done is we’ve gone out to chefs and we’ve given them our knives. And we said, here here’s our knife. Use it, give it, like, show us using the knife and give posts, uh, with your recipe.

And we’ll publish that like on Monday recipe with a different, uh, chef using the knife or going to culinary schools and giving all the graduates, um, a knife and just have them pose with the knife, you know? So it’s kind of, kind of just, [00:43:00] you can do whatever you want.

All right. So we are about that time. It is, it is already 1 45. So please, if you liked what you heard today, Uh, please follow the panelists and speakers. Um, we’re here every Thursday at one o’clock e-comm weekly. We have new subjects all the time. We won’t be doing it next week because of Thanksgiving, but we’ll be back the next week with some really cool topics.

Uh, if you want to hear more about entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial journey, uh, w just startup.club click the green house. It’s the place to be. I’m listening to rooms that are just fantastic, that Colin and the team have put together. They’re, they’re awesome. And I think that’s about it. I just wanted to thank everybody for being part of the, uh, the room [00:44:00] today.

And what’s really cool guys is I’m just kind of scrolling through and I am seeing people that I recognized from last week and the week before. So thanks for being part of our community. We love seeing this and, we’ll see you after next week. Enjoy your Thanksgiving. Thanks everyone.