A 5 Step Plan for Launching New Products on Amazon
A product launch is the “make or break” moment for an Amazon business. It’s a chance to generate momentum and start ranking for your target keywords, which will ideally bring in a lot of organic traffic and sales.
Get it wrong, and you’re constantly going to feel like you’re a step behind the competition, needing to overpay on PPC and external ads just to make sales.
One of the best ways to build a successful and profitable Amazon business is to figure out a launch plan that works and can be replicated for each new product launch – whether it’s launching a brand new product, or on a new marketplace.
Luckily, launching is not overly complicated. You just need to:
- Optimize your product for high volume keywords
- Generate sales
- Maintain your sales
If you keep these points as the focus of your launch, more often than not, you’ll be successful.
First: Understand What a Launch Is
Before you start to plan your product launch, first you should understand what your goal is, and how you’re going to achieve it.
Your goal is to rank high in the Amazon search engine and get organic sales. Sales that come from organic search results are extremely valuable, as you don’t need to spend any marketing dollars, thus you get a higher profit back.
Your product launch should “launch” your product to the first page of the search results, where customers will see it and, ideally, some will buy it.
How you’re going to get there is by making your product look good for the Amazon search engine’s ranking algorithm.
The search engine is a piece of software, developed by Amazon, to show the best and most popular products to Amazon shoppers.
Understanding the purpose of the ranking is vital since this will help you know what you need to do to get your product to rank high.
To help you craft your launch strategy, here is a 5-point plan to follow for each new product launch on Amazon.
Step One: Optimize Your Listing for SEO
First, before you start thinking about getting sales for your product, you need to optimize for Amazon SEO.
Most of SEO is keyword-based. Keywords are how Amazon’s search engine knows what your product is, and how the search engine matches and chooses products to show for Amazon customer searches.
You need to come up with all the terms that customers are searching for, that are relevant to your product, and put these terms in the content on your product listing.
Your main, big-money keywords should be in the most prominent places. Your title is number one: put the best keyword that describes your product here.
Use a software tool to find different keywords people are searching for, as well as the estimated search volume, so you can focus on the terms that will bring the most traffic to your product.
Go through the keyword research and optimization process in depth before you kick off your product launch. Doing this will help you see movement in your rankings much quicker than if you drive traffic to an unoptimized listing.
Step Two: Drive External Traffic to Your Product
Keywords alone aren’t enough to get your product showing up in the search results. Amazon is only interested in showing best-selling products to shoppers. So you need to generate sales to show the search engine your product is worth giving visibility to.
While much of the value in selling on Amazon is the ability to get organic sales – sales through the search engine – you don’t have that luxury when you first launch. That’s why you’ll want to use channels outside of Amazon to get the first sales for your product.
With Facebook Ads – or an email launch list, if you have one – you can control the flow of traffic to your product and get sales before you have any presence in the search rankings.
Facebook Ads are the best option for product launches out of all online paid ads, for a few reasons:
- User base: almost everyone in the world is on Facebook
- Targeting: Facebook gives you deep and powerful targeting tools, to help you reach your target customers
- Scalability: Facebook Ads are quite simple to control how many people your ads are shown to. If you need to get more traffic to your product, you can just invest more into your ads. This is why Facebook Ads are preferable to Google Ads for launches.
There is a cost to Facebook Ads, which you should consider as part of your product launch plan.
The best way to cut down the cost of launching is to build an email launch list. This lets you drive people to your products essentially for free – a huge saving over Facebook Ads, which can be expensive.
If you don’t have an email list already, start building one by driving traffic from your Facebook Ads to a landing page, where you can offer a small discount code for people who enter their email address.
You’ll be surprised how many emails you get through this, and how valuable they are in the future for promoting your product, or new product launches.
Step Three: Generate Reviews
As we said earlier, Amazon wants to show best-sellers in the search results. A high number of sales is one way to show this. Another way is through reviews.
Reviews – good ones – show Amazon that people like your product. If people are happy with what they get from Amazon, they’re more likely to come back and shop on Amazon again.
That’s a win for Amazon. So that means they’re more likely to give visibility to these products with good reviews.
Reviews are also important to run PPC campaigns to get additional sales, as we’ll talk about soon.
So, with the importance of reviews, as a ranking factor, a necessity for Amazon PPC Ads, and also to help convince shoppers to buy your product, a strategy to get reviews should be part of your launch plan.
The easiest thing you can do is use the “request a review” button to send an automated review request email to people who buy your product. This is done through Amazon, so it’s 100% safe, and it’s easy for people to click on the stars in the email to rate your product.
An email launch list is particularly valuable for getting your first reviews as well since you can follow up with people who visited your product to ask them to review it.
Just be aware when asking for reviews of what is and isn’t allowed by Amazon’s terms of service.
If you’re offering anything in return for people who leave a review (like a discount, or a free product), or doing anything to influence how their review turns out, you could get in a lot of trouble.
Check the Amazon seller policies related to reviews, and make sure you don’t do anything that could get you suspended.
Step Four: Run PPC to Boost Sales
One of the most important parts about launching, which many people overlook, is maintaining your sales.
A big boost in sales early on from Facebook Ads or email marketing is great, but to continue ranking, those sales need to remain consistent for a significant period of time.
That’s part of being a “best seller” in the eyes of the search ranking algorithm. Amazon doesn’t want to promote products that have a short spike in popularity that drops off after a week or a few days.
A great way to get a sustained boost in sales is Amazon pay-per-click ads or PPC. These are the sponsored listings that show in the search results, or on other listings.
These ads convert into sales very well, because you’re targeting people with high buying intent – they’re already on Amazon, searching for someone to buy, so your ad is reaching them just at the right time.
One caveat with PPC Ads is that you really need a few reviews before you can even think of running ads. Without reviews, your listing will stand out like a sore thumb against those that do have reviews – and you won’t get many (if any) sales.
That’s why it’s not best to go for PPC straight away. First, send traffic from your Facebook Ads or email list. Get a few reviews from your early buyers, and THEN you can move into PPC Ads.
Step Five: Maintain Traffic & Rankings
Finally, you want to plan how you’re going to maintain your sales, as well as your rankings.
If you stop all paid traffic and rely totally on organic sales after your initial launch period, you’re likely to see a slow drop in rankings, until you fall off the first page and sales drop off dramatically.
That’s why it’s a great idea to move into an evergreen traffic strategy once you begin to rank, relying on channels that are lower cost and more sustainable than Facebook Ads.
This is where Google Ads are perfect. In particular, Google Search Ads.
Google Search Ads are great because they use targeting based on keywords – so if you’ve been running Amazon PPC Ads, you’ll already have a lot of the knowledge you need to run your Google Ads campaigns.
They’re also a good source of evergreen traffic, meaning you can run these ads continuously. Unlike Facebook Ads, which are hard to maintain a large profit margin, Google Ads can be profitable, while also extremely beneficial for your rankings.
Amazon’s search engine particularly likes traffic that originates from outside of Amazon, such as from Google or Facebook. This shows that you’re driving new customers to their site, which they reward with more power for ranking. So by driving a steady amount of traffic from Google Ads, you should see your rankings continue to rise over time.
Summing Up: Your 5-Step Launch Plan
There are more details you’ll need to learn to get your launch just right – for example, you need to find the right keywords to target, you need to get your Facebook Ads right, and you obviously need a high-quality product too.
But this plan gives you an overview of how to launch your product, which can be repeated every time you bring a new product to Amazon or enter a new marketplace.
Summing up, the five steps are:
- Optimize your listing for keywords and Amazon SEO
- Drive traffic to your product page using Facebook Ads and/or email marketing to generate your first sales
- Put a plan into place to get reviews from some of the people who buy your product
- Get an extra boost in sales by running Amazon PPC Ads
- Maintain your sales and rankings long-term with Google Search Ads
Unless there are big changes in how Amazon’s ranking algorithm works, this plan should be enough to rank just about any product on Amazon.
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