Category Archives: Tips

Amazon Prime Day 2019 – What You Need to Know

With just five days left until Amazon’s Prime Day 2019, here’s an outstanding article from bqool.com for third-party sellers (3Ps) on to take advantage of this highly unique mid-summer two-day sales event.

Amazon Prime Day 2019, one of the biggest ecommerce events of the year for both Amazon sellers and buyers, is making a return this summer 2019. The event creates plenty of opportunities for sellers to greatly boost sales and entice buyers to take advantage of many excellent deals on Amazon. Let’s see what we can do to get ready for Amazon Prime Day 2019.

What is Prime Day?

Amazon Prime Day is Amazon’s very own Black Friday, all the existing deals on Prime Day are available exclusively to Amazon Prime members, who can enjoy lightning deals, price cuts, and various types of promotions.

An official date for Prime Day has not been announced, but we can expect it to begin in mid-July this year based on the fact that it ran for 30 hours from July 16th through 17th in 2018.

Shoppers expect deeper-than-usual discounts and the best prices for products across nearly every category: electronics, home & outdoor, kitchen, TV and personal audio, smart home, and many Amazon’s house brands products such as Amazon Music, Amazon Fire TV Stick, Amazon Echo Spot, Amazon Echo. It’s never too early to start planning your shopping list by reviewing the best Amazon Prime Day deals of 2018.

How sellers can benefit from Amazon’s Prime Day?

According to a recent report, the amount of sales made on global Amazon Prime Day 2018 was nearly 4.19 billion U.S dollars, and more than 100 million products were sold during the event. Amazon Prime Day 2019 is no doubt a huge opportunity for all online retailers to maximize their sales.

amazon-prime-day-stastics

So how can sellers best prepare to convert Prime Day enthusiasm into sales?

  1. Inventory management

inventory-100

Make sure you are stocked up to meet massive demand on Amazon Prime Day 2019 to avoid going out of stock on popular items because this sales event will bring tons of traffic.

  1. Pricing and discounts

pricing and sales

Amazon Prime Day 2019 is all about deals, so if your pricing is not competitive enough, your Prime Day sales number may fall short of your expectations. Other than offering decent discounts or exclusive promotions, you can create a repricing strategy to adjust your prices based on your competitor’s prices with an automated repricer to protect your profit margins and beat the competition.

  1. Product bundling

The ultimate goal for many sellers on Prime Day is to increase total revenue. What better way to get more revenue than selling product bundles? Amazon sellers can encourage shoppers who have a hard time deciding what to purchase by offering product bundles as they are a good value for money.

Sellers can clear out slow-moving inventory by bundling less popular items with more sought after products. Most importantly, a product bundle can win the Buy Box easily because it is identified as a unique listing with its own ASIN. Your competition will have a difficult time listing against your product bundle so you can avoid falling into a price war with potential competitors.

  1. Promote your listing

You should also consider running your own promotion to make the most of Prime Day. Here are the three popular marketing strategies you should adapt to promote your listings to the top of the search results page.

  • Amazon Sponsored Products
    As Amazon’s Prime Day grows, so does the competition, and Amazon Sponsored Products is the best way to increase your product visibility and make your store rise above the crowd.
    Amazon Sponsored Products is a cost-per-click advertising program in the Advertising tab. If you are already using this program, you can consider increasing your advertising budgets to capitalize on the higher traffic in Prime Day.
  • Amazon SEO
    You should review and improve your product page for optimal product searchability and conversion to ensure your listing will rank in the top position on the search result page. Make sure you are using the right keywords for the product title, high-quality images, and clear yet informative product description. Here are some helpful tips for optimizing Amazon listings.
  • Off Amazon marketing measures
    Besides Amazon listing optimizations, you may want to drive external traffic to your Amazon product pages. Whether it is paid or non-paid channels, this approach can boost traffic, drive sales, improve your search ranking, and build a brand.

There is a number of options on how to drive external traffic. Some popular sources outside of Amazon are social media, emails, blog posts, coupon/deal sites, affiliate/influencer marketing, and even paid ads like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads, etc. Each channel has its own ways to communicate with the audience so you can create different ad campaigns to promote your Prime Day deals.

  1. Automate your review request emails

Automate your review request emails

The best time to get more product reviews is sending out review request emails during the biggest shopping event. While you are busy handling a high volume of orders during the event, sending a large number of review request emails to your buyers will likely overwhelm you. With the help of automated email software, you can save plenty of time on a review request routine.

  1. Offer Lightning Deals

lightning deals

Lightning Deal is a promotion that FBA sellers can participate to showcase their products with a limited quantity for a short time on Amazon. Since this is a limited-time offer that runs for up to six hours, it will urge shoppers to make an impulse purchase. Furthermore, Lightning Deals provide many benefits for sellers so that they can bring more exposure to their products or brands and clear out overstock and seasonal inventory. You will receive an email invitation if your products meet the criteria for a Lightning Deal.

Take advantage of Prime Day to drive sales and awareness

If you want to take advantage of Prime Day, the key to winning a Prime Day sale is preparation. We hope the above tips will work wonders on your preparation.

Good selling!

 

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The Art of a Great Sales Pitch

Occasionally, I come across a post that provides valuable insight. This blog post from Tenfold is exactly that. Read on and learn!

Today’s sales ‘pitches’ are no longer simply a stack of information thrown at prospects.

Instead, effective sales pitches today are two-way conversations.

Listening to a prospective buyer’s wants and needs is as important as providing information about products and services.

Furthermore, asking follow-up questions, pinpointing their pain, and offering a solution that meets their company’s challenges will be more effective and more successful for both parties. Even so, preparation is key to the best sales pitches. They show the business knows their products or services well, understands the prospect’s business, and respects the prospect’s time.

How to Prepare a Sales Pitch

While preparation is a must, the pitch shouldn’t be over-practiced or robotic.

After all, people do business with people they like. Friendly and professional will get a salesperson far further than stiff and formal. In fact, a great first sales pitch should begin with a top-notch first impression. This is where the sales team can shine by knowing their products and services and how they will benefit the prospect.

Additionally, it’s important to keep in mind the multitude of things vying for everyone’s attention nowadays, and understand that keeping the audience immersed in the message is critical. The only way to do that is by having information that is relevant to the buyer and actively engaging them in the discussion.  Preparation takes work.

Due diligence

It’s safe to say that most services or products will not sell themselves, so crafting a pitch that will be fruitful requires more than just regurgitating data. A good pitch requires an understanding of the customer, which requires some stealthy research beforehand.

It’s important to be know about their company, their competitors, and their industry in general and and any trends. It’s also important to ask questions during the initial contact so that the message is tailored to meet the challenges the company faces.

Eliminate extraneous chatter and keep the buyer focused. Showing that you understand their pain points and how they can be addressed is the goal.

Share Vital Details

The research done on the company and their challenges pays off when they realize how well the product pitch fits with their pain points, and can visualize it solving their problems.

Best-selling author Guy Kawasaki calls this enchantment, and says, “Enchantment is the purest form of sales. Enchantment is all about changing people’s hearts, minds and actions because you provide them a vision or a way to do things better.

The difference between enchantment and simple sales is that with enchantment you have the other person’s best interests at heart too.” Customers respond best to those services or products that directly address a current problem or need that they have, so every sales pitch should be geared toward unique needs of the business being pitched.

How to Address Objections

Respectfully addressing objections is part of a good sales professional’s repertoire. The best salespeople anticipate objections that might arise and have responses to those at the ready.

There are four basic types of objections that arise: budget, authority, need, and time, with the acronym BANT.

Being prepared to discuss all four is wise, with the goal being to show value to the prospect. Budget objections can be countered with the amount of money that a product or service can save a customer. If a customer is currently using a competing product, it’s important to point out what makes the new solution different and better.

Listen carefully:  A fantastic pitch is great, but really hearing a prospect is even better. Being overconfident or sticking too closely to a script can be a mistake. Always let the potential customer do most of the talking and listen carefully to what they are saying. Responding with thoughtful answers shows they are being heard. This will go no small distance toward making their buying decision easier.

Ask for the sale: Listening to the buyer is critical, but asking for the sale after the presentation is even more so. Sales professionals need to take the lead and offer a call to action that is the next step – whether that is signing on the dotted line today, offering a trial period, or following up in three days. Never wait for the customer to “get back to you”. Failing to proactively address the call to action will result in fewer sales and more frustration.

How to Make a Sales Pitch

Bringing the prospect to the table for a presentation is in itself no easy feat; it takes nurturing and endless rapport-building to get a potential buyer interested in a product they might not even have known existed.

Never waste an opportunity. Always keep the pitch on-message and clear to keep a buyer enthralled with the service or product offering. Review the pitch repeatedly and cut until it’s lean and concise, and — especially — free of buzzwords that sound insincere.

Always keep in mind that the buyer’s attention is at a premium, with many companies and products vying to get a piece of it. The best product in the world will not make a bit of difference if they do not know about it.

Everything boils down to painting the picture of a better solution in the prospect’s mind. If they are convinced your product or service will make their life easier or better, they will buy. Never leave things to chance; carefully construct and finely tune every pitch for maximum results.

Push where it hurts, but gently

Solving the right problem for the prospect makes for a good pitch, an almost guaranteed sale, and lots of success. The pitch needs to gently poke the prospect’s pain points, reminding them why they need this service of product offering, and then laying out the benefits it will give them.

Poke a little harder

What happens if they don’t address the problem they currently have? If they are using legacy computers and need to convert to the cloud, how can they be convinced to move? Do they understand the maintenance costs of delaying? What about security issues and hardware obsolescence?

Use the setup

Get prospects ready for the pitch by pointing out problems with other solutions. Why aren’t visitors buying or calling? Where do their existing products or services fall short? What better solutions are out there and available to them?

Final Thoughts

When working with prospects, it is crucial to know how to perform a great sales pitch.

Being prepared by doing appropriate and in-depth research on the company, the industry it belongs to, and trends in the industry is the first step. In the meantime, building rapport with the potential prospect and ensuring that the buying partner is at the table is another key. Figuring out the company’s pain points and how the products or services fit into their challenge is the key to closing sales. Always, always ask for the sale, and if the answer is no, follow up relentlessly.

What tips do you have for better sales presentations? 

Good Selling!

50 Mind Blowing Facts Most Digital Marketers Don’t Know

Marc Howard lives and breathes digital growth strategies and shows other digital entrepreneurs and small-medium sized business owners how to grow their online business, generate more traffic and turn visitors into leads. He shares the strategy and the mindset at http://whenyouliveinthenow.com. He published this insightful post about a year ago but it remains timeless.

50 Mind Blowing Facts Most Digital Marketers Don’t Know

Do you consider yourself to be one of those in-the-know digital marketers? Are you just starting as a freelancer or entrepreneur that’s looking for a bit of insight or do you consider yourself already an expert?

Well some of the facts below may be a major awakening. No matter what your area of expertise you may be amazed by some of the stats below.

The one thing that you will notice however in each of these facts is that they are full of opportunity to either improve your existing marketing strategy or seek out a new channel (hint: using a video to promote your product or service is on the rise this year like never before).

The Power of Video for Content Marketing

  1. The average human attention span is 8 seconds. The average attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds. Source: Wikipedia
  2. Our brains process images 60x faster than text. Change-up your text-to-image ratios and choose images that tell your story. Source:3M Corporation
  3. 80% of your online visitors will watch a video while 20% will actually read content. Source: Digital Sherpa
  4. 75% Of Users Visit The Marketer’s Website After Viewing A Video. Source: Digital Sherpa
  5. 45% Of Viewers Will Stop Watching A Video After 1 Minute & 60% By 2 Minutes. Source: Insivia
  6. Videos Increase People’s Understanding Of Your Product Or Service by 74%. Source: Digital Sherpa
  7. Using video on landing pages can increase conversions by 86%. Source: Unbounce.com
  8. Up to 60% of all email recipients regularly turn off images. Source: MarketingLand.com
  9. Your Website Is 50 Times More Likely To Appear On The First Page Of A Search Engine Results Page If It Includes Video. Source: Digital Sherpa
  10. Adding video to your email campaigns can increase click rate by 300%. Host your video online and create a thumbnail play button for your email. Source: Wistia
  11. Website visitors are 64% more likely to buy a product on an online retail site after watching a video. Source: Digital Sherpa

How To Leverage Social Media

  1. Facebook post with photos get 53% more likes, 104% more comments, and 84% more click-throughs. Source: KISSMetrics
  2. Facebook posts with questions get 100% more comments. Source: KISSMetrics
  3. Tweets that specifically ask followers to “retweet” receive 12x more retweet rates than those who do not. Source: BufferApp
  4. 16% of marketers plan to increase efforts on Pinterest in 2015. Source: Business2Community.com
  5. Twitter users follow a median of 6 brands on Twitter, looking for things like interesting and fun content, news and updates, discounts and promos and more. Source: BufferApp
  6. Content that is greater than 1500 words on average receives 68.1% more tweets. Source: QuickSprout
  7. By using just 3 hashtags, brands can gain a 110% increase in likes on their Instagram posts. Source: Pigora
  8. By using just 3 hashtags, brands can gain a 180% increase in likes on their Instagram posts. Source: Pigora

A Blog Is No Longer a “Nice to Have”

  1. Blogs give sites 434% more indexed pages and 97% more indexed links. Source: NewsCred.com
  2. Companies that blog 15+ times per month get 5x more traffic than companies that don’t blog. Source: Hubspot
  3. Companies with an active blog report 97% more leads. Source: Content+
  4. 70% of consumers prefer getting to know a company via articles over ads. Source: Content+
  5. Articles with images get 94% more views than those without.Source: Content+
  6. 57% of companies have acquired customers via their blog. Source: Content+
  7. Content creation ranked as the single most effective SEO tactic by 53%. Source: MarketingSherpa
  8. 33% of email recipients open email based on subject line alone. Source: convinceandconvert.com

If You’re Not Doing Mobile You Will Be Left Behind

  1. 71% of global users access social media through mobile devices. Source: Search Engine Journal
  2. 92% of mobile shopping app users want to be alerted if retailers are having sales. Source: Latitude Research
  3. About 60 percent of all Internet activity in the U.S. originates from mobile devices, and about half of total Internet traffic flows through mobile apps. Source: Internet Marketing Association
  4. Mobile revenue is projected to reach $700 billion by 2017, increasing by more than 300%. Source: VentureBeat
  5. By 2017, mobile devices will make up 87 percent of the total sales of Internet-enabled technology. Source: LanderApp

It Pays to Do Email Marketing–Literally

  1. The average open rate for welcome emails is a whopping 50% making them 86% more effective than email newsletters. (An automated welcome is a no brainer.) Source: Marketing Sherpa
  2. 51% of email is opened on a mobile device. (Design for the smallest screen first then you responsive design templates to ensure emails look great on any screen size.) Source: Litmus
  3. Nurtured leads make 47% more purchases than non-nurtured leads. (Create an automated series that delivers content to your subscriber over time and it will pay off.) Source: The Annuitas Group
  4. 58% of adults check email first thing in the morning. (Try sending your emails early in the day–you might see an uptick of opens). Source: Ezanga
  5. People check their email up to 150x a day. Make sure your call-to-action is clear. Source: kpcb.com
  6. Eye tracking data shows that viewers look to the same part of the screen where images of people are looking. That’s exactly where to want to put your call-to-action. Source: The Brain Lady Blog
  7. Email is nearly 40x better than Facebook or Twitter at acquiring customers. Source: McKinsey & Company
  8. You have just 3-4 seconds to grab your reader’s attention and interest them enough to open and read your email. Source: Litmus
  9. 64% of decision makers read emails via mobile device. Source: EmailExpert.org
  10. Using marketing automation can increase conversion rates by up to 50%. Source: Aberdeen Group
  11. If an email doesn’t display correctly, 71.2% will delete it immediately.Source: BlueHornet

Now That We “Google” Everything Search Engine Marketing Is Taking Over

  1. In 2015, search engine marketing (SEM) will continue to capture the largest share of online spend at 47%, or about 14% of the firm’s total marketing budget 2014. Source: Business2Community.com
  2. Mobile search ads will be $12.85 billion in 2015, over 50% of the search market. Source: Heidi Cohen
  3. 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Source: Imforza
  4. Search is the No. 1 driver of traffic to content sites, beating social media by more than 300 percent. Source: Search Engine Journal
  5. The average content length for a web page that ranks in the top 10 results for any keyword on Google has at least 2,000 words. The higher up you go on the search listings page, the more content each web page has. Source: QuickSprout
  6. 60% of all organic clicks go to the organic top 3 search results. Source: Business2Community.com
  7. 50% of all mobile searches are conducted in hopes of finding local results, and 61% of those searches result in a purchase. Source: Search Engine Watch

Of the tips above which one stood out the most and how might you tweak your digital marketing strategy based on it? Or do you have one even more mind blowing?

Good Selling!