#212: Owning Your Customer - The Secret to Amazon Success

Episode: 212

Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Troy Johnston – Seller.Tools co-founder

Subtitle: “Owning Your Customer – The Secret to Amazon Success”

Final Show Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1Fy0hZdxgI&list=PLVIz0IewRSqDUVXG_IAXsVx9ZWE8_Vanz&index=6

Back on Lunch with Norm…Co-founder of Seller.Tools Troy Johnston joins today’s Lunch with norm to talk about how ‘Owning’ your customers can impact ranking and reviews on Amazon. We go over things to avoid when engaging with Amazon customers, and advice for building that all important customer VIP list. Troy is obsessed with creating data-driven solutions for Seller.Tools clients by empowering sellers with the best data, superior optimization and easy to set up automations. Seller.Tools is an all-in-one suite of more than a dozen Amazon tools.

If you are a new listener to Lunch With Norm… we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Facebook Page and join in on episode discussion or simply let us know what you think of the episode!

In this episode, we discuss:

• 0:00 Intro/Housekeeping
• 4:00 Welcome Troy Johnston
• 6:52  What Is Owning Your Customer on Amazon?
• 8:38 Reaching Out to Customers Without Breaking TOS?
• 12:14 Tips to Get Customers to Review your Product
• 16:41 Ways to Make Business Communication With Customers
• 22:09 Product Launch Strategies
• 27:50 Tips For Successful Email Campaign
• 28:57 Ways To Attract and Own Your Customers
• 33:01 Ways to Promote your Amazon Listings
• 38:09 Dealing with Customer Service
• 42:00 Building the VIP List; Engaging With the Customers

Follow our PodcastLunch With Norm…Website

• Lunch With Norm…Facebook Group
• Lunch With Norm…Youtube
• Lunch With Norm…Instagram
• Lunch With Norm…Twitter
• Lunch With Norm…Apple Podcast

Follow our Host

• https://normanfarrar.com/
• https://www.facebook.com/lunchwithnorm
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/normanfarrar?originalSubdomain=ca
• https://twitter.com/normfarrarjr?lang=en
• https://www.tiktok.com/@normanfarrar/ 
• https://www.pinterest.ca/officialnormanfarrar/ 

Join the Conversation

Our favorite part of recording a live podcast each week is participating in the great conversations that happen on our live chat, on social media, and in our comments section.  

Explore these Resources

In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

• for EVERYONE today you can receive a 15% off on HelloTax by using this link (we do not receive any commission for this) https://hellotax.com/?_get=norm
• eCom Holiday Growth Hack Summit https://cs980.isrefer.com/go/holidaysummit/amzclub/
• Miami Pow Wow Event https://www.eventbrite.com/e/amazon-powwow-miami-2021-tickets-170796445767

Join our PLN

Join our discussion network here!:

• Lunch With Norm…Facebook

Check Out More Lunch With Norm…. Programming

• lunchwithnorm.com/ 

Need a Presenter?

• normanfarrar.com

Norman Ferrar   0:02  

Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, aka the beard guy here and welcome to another lunch with Norm, the Amazon FBA and Ecommerce podcast entre entre.

Norman Ferrar   0:22  

Oh, okay, so today we’re gonna be talking about owning your customer the secret to Amazon success. And our guest today is a co-founder of sellers tools. He’s a friend of mine who got to know him over the last couple of years. And he has an all in one suite of I believe it’s more than a dozen Amazon tools. And he sold his flagship brand for more than seven figures. And he also has consulted with eight and nine figure brands on Amazon. The other thing you can do is he’s got a community, a very successful community, a Facebook group called FBA kings. So we’re going to be talking to Troy Johnston shortly. But just before we get to that, we wanted to welcome and thank our sponsor, Zee.co. So let’s talk about z for a second. So if you are a private label seller and you’re looking to expand into a larger international market Zee can help Zee make selling your Amazon products abroad easy with excellent import knowledge door to door solutions, customer service and scalability. That’s right, you can sit back and enjoy lunch with Norm with peace of mind. And they’ll take they’ll handle the rest. How’s that? I flubbed it, I’m sorry, Z, but they will handle it for you. Ready to expand your ecommerce empire and take advantage of z.co? That’s zet I almost said it again. I’m from Toronto, zee.co. Or if you’re from Toronto, the UK Zed.co. All right. Where are you?

Kelsey  2:05  

Hello, Happy Wednesday.

Norman Ferrar  2:07  

Happy. Happy, Happy.

Kelsey  2:08  

Happy. Happy happy. We’ve got a great crew joining us in the comment section already. Welcome Terry. All the way from North Carolina. Marina, Simon, we have Manny from Germany. We got Rad toilet action. Nathan, Ems Elites, Dr. Cas. We met Jessica Rabbit from Miami. We got a great crew. And yeah, it’s gonna be a great episode and I can’t wait for it. Also want to remind everyone that the seller poll is happening right now. So if you want to give us a vote for your favorite podcast, go over to cellar poll.com. I’m going to make a little banner link here. There it is. Go here vote for lunch with Norm podcast. Let’s get our beard nation together and get the word out. It’d be really appreciated. We’d really appreciate you.

Norman Ferrar  3:02  

Are you on your knees right now? Are you groveling or?

Kelsey  3:05  

I’m begging but we also have a great giveaway today. It’s gonna be great. And if you’re new to the show, we go live every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we’re usually fashionably late,

Norman Ferrar  3:22  

fashionable arm. Fabulous.

Kelsey  3:26  

But uh, yeah, that’s a 12 o’clock pm Eastern time. We do giveaways everything, every episode as well. So that’s pretty exciting. And, yeah, this is a channel where you can ask your questions. And over in the comment section, so

Norman Ferrar  3:41  

and this is slowly when Kelsey, it’s

Kelsey  3:44  

my time to get

Norman Ferrar  3:46  

off the screen. Very good. He gets the message. It’s subtle, but he gets the message. All right. So if you have any questions, throw it over into the comment section. And Now sit back, relax. Grab a cup of coffee, and enjoy the episode. Where are you Troy? Hey, you know? Nice to see you, sir.

Troy Johnston   4:04  

Good to see you too. Good to see you.

Norman Ferrar  4:07  

I think the last time I saw you was at a roadhouse in Florida.

Troy Johnston  4:10  

Yeah, yeah. That sounds about right. And

Norman Ferrar  4:14  

his wife you mean? Yep.

Troy Johnston   4:16  

Mm hmm. Yeah. So guys, I think had a long day that day. But yeah,

Norman Ferrar   4:19  

it was. So for those of us who don’t know you are what you do. Can you just give us a brief explanation?

Troy Johnston   4:28  

Yeah, absolutely. So as you mentioned, I was an Amazon seller myself still am to a degree to this day, but started way back in late 15, Hurley 16. Building a building a brand in the beauty space. So always kind of gravitated towards these really fun, hyper competitive, very saturated space as a seller and a brand owner. But I think it’s really served me to get to the point where I’m at today because after selling my brand, did move on. To consulting advising for other brands, other folks that were in my network, kind of seeking out always looking for, hey, what’s, what’s an edge? What can we be doing differently? What ranking strategies are working now. And through that, and again, back back to my network, came in contact with my now partners, also just kind of a team of brand owners at seller tools. And so really, what we aim to do, you know, at seller toes is just kind of scratch our own itch, what do we want as brand owners that will give us an advantage? What kind of data do we want to see what kind of optimization we want to see, or even automation, that’s kind of like a, it’s like a level up, when you can use tools to really to be able to fill what you may need to hire for or what will give you a competitive advantage. So so it takes up all my time, effort and energy now, and and that’s, you know, that’s That’s our vision, that’s our goal with with what we offer in the platform and Chrome extension, all that good stuff,

Norman Ferrar  6:03  

right. And for those of us who don’t know, the platform name, it is seller tools. We talked about that on the podcast. You know, when we’re talking about interest, especially this one app, I and I want to get to it later on, because it does help it if you know, and I’ve said this a million times about seller tools. If you do one thing with seller tools, you’ve got this one option that can just make your life easy on Amazon. And that’s basically telling you how many, what keyword regardless of the search volume, should you go after or not. And I don’t know of really any other tools that do that. And we’ll talk about that more towards the end today. Right, right. Now, I want to talk about what do you mean by owning the customer on Amazon?

Troy Johnston   6:56  

Yeah, it’s a it’s a really good question. And this is where sometimes we are working together with, with Amazon, but also sometimes cross purposes, right? Amazon sort of says, hey, there is only certain ways that you can engage with a customer that kind of puts some some guardrails around what’s, what’s available to you as a brand owner. But there’s been these major recent updates, where Amazon has sort of said, Hey, external traffic matters, you know, we have the brand referral program, we’re looking at different ways of sort of rewarding you owning the what is considered the pre purchase side of things, of engaging a customer reaching them externally bringing them into the Amazon ecosystem. And what we would aim to do when it comes to owning that customer is capture customer relevant information. And we can do that practically through landing pages, we can do that through something like many chat, the execution always doesn’t really matter. What matters is our objective is, how do we have continuity with that customer by owning the most relevant information that allows us to do that, notably things like email, SMS, for phone numbers for SMS, these these outlets that allow us to engage a customer to support a customer? And then also think about, you know, promotional activities? How can we reliably launch rank for our most important keywords? Or when we add additional products? If we’re starting from scratch? Do we have a mechanism? Do we have an audience? Do we have customer ownership in such a way that we can reach out to them, facilitate that offer that promotion, and be able to, you know, reliably, reliably rank our products?

Norman Ferrar  8:38  

So you just mentioned some reach out to the customer? Who Amazon owns? How do you do that without breaking? TLS?

Troy Johnston  8:48  

Yeah, that’s a that’s, you know, this is the other part where as a brand owner, you’ve kind of got to decide, ultimately, what your personal philosophy, and then how that, you know, impacts your business? How okay, you are with the interpretation of Amazon to us, you know, as as it stated, manipulating rank? Well, someone would say, if you’re optimizing your listing, you’re probably going to rank better. Is that a manipulation? Is that a subjective, you know, are you are you optimizing, in the same way that you optimize for Google SEO, and that’s, that’s also left to interpretation. So when we if we just focus on let’s say, the pre purchase side of things, so this is before somebody is even, you know, seen our product, our brand on Amazon, that leaves the door open for us to sort of say, that’s not an Amazon customer yet. That’s, that can be our customer, because again, we could drag them to our Shopify site, we can send them to our Walmart presence. That’s not an Amazon customer. It’s the post purchase side of things where I think that conversation gets to be even more nuanced. But those are the different ways and almost the different buckets you sort of have to think about customer ownership is am I paying too Get in front and get visible to this customer to then have them go through again, let’s say our mini chat flow where they first time they’re seeing our product first time, they’re seeing amazon link to our product. And so we’re owning the customer for Amazon’s really in the conversation. And there’s, there’s a little bit more safety there. But obviously, there’s a more investment, you may have to present that ad pay for the ad, you know, you have to monitor and optimize the performance there. So that’s where it’s a little bit of a nuance of thinking pre and post purchase, were pre purchase, you’re sort of in Amazon’s to us, well, that’s not even Amazon’s customer, they haven’t, they haven’t transacted post purchase, then you start thinking more about the execution, right? Because that is somebody who’s bought on Amazon, they have, you know, voted with their dollars, they bought your product via Amazon, you know, amazon.com. And now, it’s a question of, how are you treating that relationship? Are you leaving an outlet for them to to further that conversation or that engagement with you? And we still like to do that, again, as as brand owners sellers ourselves in terms of what we facilitate with solo tools. But in truth, I mean, the the, the honest truth is, brands have to look at that and say, Hey, what is my What am I okay with, you know, if I look in, if I buy up a bunch of products on Amazon, I bought, I bought a shift as an example, a shift. Fish oil is a company that does $150 million a year, and they have a loyalty program, they have a post purchase product insert, where they want me to take part be part of some of their rewards program effectively. Well, I’m starting to become their customer as a matter of furthering the engagement with their brand. But obviously, they’ve decided, hey, that is worth part of extending and owning me as a customer by leaving that, that door open. So it’s a nuanced conversation. I always try to lead with that, too. It’s not so black and white. But that’s, that’s also the sandbox that we play in the vague language that Amazon uses. And ultimately, as each individual brand owner sort of looks at that and says, okay, I’m okay with this. This is something that, you know, I’m okay. folding into my overall strategy

Norman Ferrar  12:10  

is your risk tolerance. Exactly, no. So Tim, and I, Tim Jordan, you know, Tim, we were on a legion live yesterday. And I think it was the night before some he got a packaging. And it had an insert card. Right. And so he hid the QR code. And where did it go to a landing page that said, leave a review, you know, and if you don’t like it did exactly. like Amazon like 2017. Right? If you did this, you were okay. November 2017. If you did this, you were dead in the water. You know, no incentivized reviews. I’m not good with that. I’m very careful. I can ask for a review, no problem. But I’ve even stopped asking for reviews. I don’t want to have that. You know, like where they say you can do that. There’s nothing wrong. As long as it’s on a level playing field, ask all day long. No problem. Amazon asked for a review, I buy an Amazon Basics t shirt, it’ll ask you to leave a review. Not. I mean, a lot of people think that’s against TLS. It’s not asking it to go to a specific length for review. And then over if you’re not satisfied to go to a link, that’s a problem. But that’s just a tolerance that we’ve decided as a company, we’re not even going to ask, we’re going to let our listing, do the speaking for us, we’re going to let the customer journey, like when they receive our product, they’re gonna go wow, because of the packaging, or, you know, whatever expense, if it shows up smashed, then they leave a bad review. Like, we’ll try to make that right for them. But that’s where we’re going to get the good bad, you know, reviews, I mean, and hopefully it’s more good than bad. But it’s it’s the quality of the product caught up in the listing. And we’re finding that if we’re letting it go, typically, it’s between a round 4% If we’re not doing anything to promote reviews, you know, four to maybe 7% I and it’s not more than that. And the other thing is, you know, just hitting that review request the review button on Amazon, that’s just a generic, but I don’t know if like, I know, this is kind of going down a different rabbit hole. But on that note, do you have any thoughts on being able to get reviews onto the site without going out there? Breaking TLS

Troy Johnston  14:40  

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And you normally bring up a few great points because this is again, where the execution matters, right? We’re in that example where the queer incentivization it’s it’s a huge we know it when we see it, you know, as we’ve sold and we can kind of say, Hey, this is exactly what Amazon is against is to for tat you do this, I’m going to give you you know, do X, I’m going to give you why that is. We discourage that completely. And it’s immensely problematic when it comes to review capture strategies, and this again, you know, my personal stance, and I’ve sort of arrived at this over time as Amazon changes. And, you know, a fact of effective strategies change too, is that the review request button, or if you can automate that button, that is the cleanest, widest sort of purest way to request reviews. But what we would then aim to do is, if that’s an Amazon branded email, and ideally, again, if we can automate that, so we have as many eligible orders getting that review request, is we build the we build as an example on our post purchase strategy. A lot of follow ups, a lot of ways in which we can engage that customer, give them an outlet, let’s say, to mitigate negative reviews, as important as getting reviews is saying, Hey, this is where we’re reachable. This is how our support can engage you support you address your buying experience, make sure it’s optimal. That’s as equally as important as then also sending as an example, one of our one of our favorite and easiest strategies is a single text message that will go out right around the same time that you send out that TLS compliant review request. So what that allows us to do is Amazon sending you the email, will then text that customer and say, Hey, we noticed Amazon sent you a request for feedback. Did you have a chance to do so? That’s not a request for review? Yep, that’s not Oh, go ahead.

Norman Ferrarr  16:40  

No, I was just gonna say, Where are you getting the phone number from.

Troy Johnston   16:44  

So in our post purchase flow in the setlist, same example, let’s say Tim, same example where if he scans a QR code, now we like to use many chat, you can use a you can use a landing pages example, what we like to do as a starting place for a post purchase strategies, it’s deliver some type of value. And that value really should be dialed into whether it’s an offer, or something unique to your product. So is that an e book that has all the FAQs, you know, if your product has a lot of different uses a lot of different benefits, that ebook could be really powerful is a warranty or registration makes sense for a product that maybe in that category, product qualities of the question, people want to see that you back it up with something tangible? Well, that registration could simply be name, email and phone number. And hence, that’s where we capture that phone number. Yes, retain that we stand behind our warranty and registration. But we’ll also use that to time that just alongside because as we know, and this is this is kind of the beauty of SMS and text messages is that you’re getting at 90% open rates. And if you can do that with a really soft touch, that’s a great way to not use any problematic language to refer to essentially what’s happening Amazon is send a request for feedback. And you’re not, you know, you’re not using star ratings, you’re not doing anything that is you know, it’s all on the up and up. But you’re tying in these really great open rates and the most effective communication channel with that TLS compliant review request. And that one text message alone can really it can really impact. And we see this again, across across categories, positive increase on the whole for review acquisition.

Norman Ferrar   18:26  

So I like to ask any of the listeners, have they used text messaging, SMS messaging? And what have your results been? You know, I don’t do it enough. And, you know, we taught we actually we talked about it yesterday, on on the Legion live that I did with Tim. And that was one of the ways to retain customers. It Again, another rabbit hole today. But we’re no actually is not it is owning the customer. One of the things that I mentioned was creating an SMS, that will give a fact or one line sentence, and you post something every day or once a week. But that allows you to get in front of the client. And with the SMS. At least the way that I mentioned it was don’t promote. This is just strictly a brand awareness tool. Have it work because if you start to see promotions, you just might get blocked. But if it’s tips, tricks, hacks, you know, benefits, features, instructions. These are things that people will like depending on the product. But yeah, I love what you said about that. Now, one of the things I forgot about is we do have a giveaway today. We got a great giveaway from Troy. Do you want to just talk a little bit about that?

Troy Johnston  19:53  

Yeah, absolutely. And it will kind of dovetail into this strategy as well. So we wanted to do something special where right now we’re We’re gonna give away a month of our starter level plan, which really unlocks across those dozen features, access to pretty much everything. So you’ll have a chance to try out whether it’s you know, keywords listing optimization, competitive analysis, PPC tool, or our API. If you’re starting to look at some of these strategies, things like many chat and automating some of the specific Amazon activities, but we wanted to offer that a full month free, so you can really try everything out, see, what’s what works best for you and your, your, your business, but tap into pretty much a whole suite of tools.

Norman Ferrar   20:34  

Okay? And what’s the value of that?

Troy Johnston  20:37  

It’s $117.

Norman Ferrar  20:39  

Very good. Alright. So if you want to unleash and see these tools, that seller tools offers, check it out. And even if you’re, even if you don’t win the giveaway, check it out, because they offer so many tools. And one of the things you and your partner are very good at automation. Yeah, you blow me away with you know, when when, when we first started looking at solar tools is you went a different route than a lot of other service providers in the in the niche. And automation was something that if you can, if you can automate something, it just saves time, it saves money, it saves everything, and you have those abilities. So it is unique seller dot tools, check it out, and I don’t have anything to do with it. I don’t have an affiliate, I don’t have anything. You know, just I know it’s a good tool. I know that PR reach uses the tool. So you know, it’s it’s great. Now, before we go any further to I do want to give a quick shout out to seller eyes. And I didn’t I just see somebody mentioned solarize here. But solarize is your comprehensive solution for your everyday business needs. It’s everything you need to grow and scale your Amazon business. And it’s just one click away. For more information, contact demon, his team over at solarized calm and that’s solarize just with one our solarized calm. Okay, so let’s get back to something owning your clients. When I was prepping for this meeting, one of the things I was thinking about is pre launch. A lot of people don’t think about that. So the start to owning your business like you started off right at the beginning, talking about getting exposure. Well, what better way than to either start spending a little bit of money on Facebook or doing some ads, Google ads, if you’ve got Google My Business, launched Google My Business, get your content up there. But get the buzz going. Write a really good press release. Like when I talk about really good. Like, don’t go for a social media press release, go for a traditional press release, where it cost a bit more money. But you’re going to get better ranking and with with the distribution report that you’ll see you’ll see where you’re ranking for. And then you can target that. But there’s so many different outlets that you can go and get this pre launch, which now if they drive traffic, and especially if you’re if you’re driving pre launch over to announcing that you’re launching this product onto your web page, you have this pop up that comes up. And let’s say it’s maybe you’re selling bully sticks, and so you’ve got your discount, but you also get a value added for free for your first order. Now you get their email or their you know, their their phone number. Guess whose customer it is? Yeah, and I love that. And we don’t talk enough about it. We always talk Amazon and we’ve got our lunch. What the heck are you doing pre launch, you’re missing out on a ton of possible sales. So let’s talk a little bit about that pre launch. Any suggestions of what you do? Or how you can set up your pre launch?

Troy Johnston 24:05  

Yeah, and I mean, to your point, and when it comes to things like press releases ways that you’re already more visible through some of those types of activities. We really don’t have to complicate it any more than hey, if that’s the way that you’re doing your outreach, is there a mechanism in that process to capture customer information? There are a few other favorites that I really like, you know, one that that has been a tried and true and recently he’s kind of getting shaken up with some of the privacy updates. And some of the the targeting is Facebook ads. And Facebook ads are really great where you can segment the targeting, you can take if you have existing audiences or you’re starting from starting from scratch, you can take some of the some of the other resources, the segmentation that it allows you to utilize to sort of test what type of offers what what offers are going to work best for starting to build that audience. Google ads is another one, it’s gotten to be very popular because We of course know how effective things like Google links are. But Google ads on both fronts are really great for just driving direct to purchase. So for just getting the rank benefit, but then also to build this audience, so to sort of invest in the longer term, sort of the equity of building that, that audience as an asset, you can also use Google ads for the other one, I would, I would throw in there and this has started to start to get even more prominence is the use of influencers.

Norman Ferrar  25:36  

I was just gonna say,

Troy Johnston  25:39  

it’s, it’s a great and this is very similar, where the effectiveness of influencers, I think that has become more commonplace and better understood. But similarly, thinking about when you execute on that type of if you’ve got an influencer, he’s excited. And he’s they’re going to send 500,000, you know, 2000 people to a landing page or again, a mini chat flow. Think about, again, how you’re trying to own that interaction, potentially only that customer pre purchase, you want to do that, typically, for the ranking benefit you’re owning, however, you’re you know, however, you’re driving that in terms of performance. But also think about the list building, these are brand, they could be new to brand, they could be new to your product. And that’s that’s just thinking about, okay, when I execute this, let me think about what meaningful information I can capture, add to my CRM to add to my Klaviyo, add to many chat, however, I’m going to reengage with that customer, in many cases, I see sellers gravitating to some of these strategies, the external traffic strategies, but just not thinking about the continuity, just thinking instead of oh, this is a one off promotion, I’m going to have these folks by purchase. But then I’m not thinking about, hey, I can actually have them come back a second time, a third time. Fourth time. They can inform product feedback, they can leave, you know, they could leave. They can they can inform, you know, new new product ideas, all from one opportunity. So oftentimes, it’s just thinking about what’s the mechanism? What data is relevant to me what tool maybe am I going to use to own that customer. And then build out those drip campaigns, build out those email sequences, follow up with that text message, to where, and I think your point is really strong here to norm, you’re just delivering value, at some points to you know, you don’t always have, it doesn’t have to be here’s a 25% off or, you know, a BOGO offer sure you can sprinkle those in there. But when you’re speaking to a customer, highly interested customer, and engage customer, there’s all kinds of relevant content value you can deliver, that goes beyond just the transaction.

Norman Ferrar  27:49  

Right? What about email? Are you doing anything with email campaigns? Once you get the once you get the email address? That’s what I’m trying to say?

Troy Johnston  28:01  

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. No emails, you know, it’s it is sort of the tried and true, but often you’ll see unless you or you have a subject matter expert that’s really helping you on the email side, you’re looking at little bit lower open rates. And that’s where for us especially as you’re you have new new signups. If you’re building your subscriber list, think about potential virality or sharing, especially as you’re building that initial seed list, is there something that you can share with them that they would want to share in their, you know, fate on their Facebook, on Instagram, other social outlets that can broaden the message, and you can take that one subscriber and maybe turn them into three have a nice exponential impact of now that that person’s in market is a buyer is a customer you own? Is there a quick win while you’re top of mind to have them share, you know, your message or your product?

Norman Ferrar   28:57  

Right? We had a and this is goes it’s worth every penny to pay somebody who’s an expert in the field. So if I go and I create a, I’m not a copywriter. If I go and write an email campaign, and I’m blasting it out there, I’m probably going to get very low open rates. We had you know Adrian savage.

Troy Johnston  29:20  

name sounds familiar. Oh, you

Norman Ferrar  29:21  

got to meet him. Anyways, he was on this podcast and we thought we were doing really well with our email. Okay, we were getting a 20% open rate and I thought, wow, this is really good. Kelsey is doing a great job. He comes on and we find out Kelsey is really not doing a good job. No, Kelsey, you’re doing a good job. So anyways, he just gave a couple of points on the podcast. We took those points from the podcast, and now we’ve got it up. This is no kidding. This is brand new. I mentioned this to any of the listeners. They’re gonna see this as higher it’s up 60% open right now. And, you know, we, we think that’s incorrect. And this is just taking a few pointers from a guy that was on the podcast that I went, I had no idea, we, you know, you can do that. And then the copy, that’s other, that’s a whole other thing, it’s the same copy that we’re using or, like, it’s the same style and format that we’re using. But all we did is just change the system around a little bit. And no longer I don’t even know, the last time we saw it 20% and went up to 40. Now it’s at 60. And I’m expecting, he was telling us after the podcast that, you know, you could probably target 60 to 80%, open rate. Now, those those rates are 8% is something I’m hearing from many chat, you know, or the text messages, not from email. And like, this is old school marketing, and he’s just killing it. The other thing is, I talked about Google for a second Google My Business, but ranking on Google with content. If you can put out high quality content, and not just put it onto your website. So you, you publish it on your website, Google’s gonna pick it up, it’s education and knowledge base, you’re not promoting a lot, you’re just, you know, quality, you’ve got to be the best blog out there. But then you syndicate it, nobody’s nobody syndicates their stuff, like if I take a look at it, get it bloody syndicated. And you’re gonna just kill it on a bunch of keywords, as long as it’s quality. And that’s another way of just owning your client, right, you’re going to be able to or customer, you’re going to be, you’re going to be able to drive people over from Google searches. And that’s another way of owning your client. Kind of keep saying client customer, because you are the authority. Right? If you are the authority in something, you will own that customer, whether it’s on Amazon, off Amazon, wherever. So, any thoughts on that?

Troy Johnston   32:04  

Yeah, no, it’s a great point is thinking about it on both sides. Again, pre purchasers, you know, if that’s the first exposure, that type of content, that type of value, helps to reinforce your trust and authority. And the same goes post purchase, right? Where a customer, you know, many of us, you know, I’m an Amazon Amazon buyer shopper, I’m sure you are as well, Norm, it’s like, you start to compare some of your buying experiences. Well, that product, that buying experience that has a way for me to get even more value, unexpected value post purchase, through the packaging, through the insert, where it clearly conveys how I get that value. That can that can really level up, you know, maybe not as much on the authority, but it can just embolden and really elevate the buying experience.

Norman Ferrar   32:47  

Right. And just to let everybody know that we will be getting to the questions in probably about another 10 minutes or so. So just hold on, we’re not avoiding the questions, we’ll answer them in a sec. Let’s talk about some of the big nose. What have you experienced?

Troy Johnston  33:07  

Yeah, when it comes to this is, um, it’s so timely, because we have been shaken up. A lot of Amazon changes were here and you know, q4, and there has been a lot that we have seen, whether it is what we’re paying for the brand referral program, you know, the the perspective that we can read into that Amazon, how they’re treating external traffic, what that implies. So I mean, we have to, we have to drive that external traffic, everything we’ve touched on is a means with which we can, we can we can do that. But as a negative, but something to keep, you know, keep it in mind as a seller is we have seen Amazon treat the quality of the buyer. how that impacts a brand has become more and more of a focal point, whether it’s the ranking impact, or for those that maybe have seen some of the the notices that Amazon has sent out, they’ve sort of said as much that they are diminishing product visibility, based on some of the review activity. Well, what’s what are the variables that are linked to reviews? Right? So it’s a customer leaving a review? Well, the reviews are pretty benign thing. It’s the customer, that’s the most important part, most important variable in that equation. And so, when it comes to, in this, this sort of is a no, no, it’s almost more how you can think about how to how to own the customer, but then start thinking about this type of reality that Amazon’s sort of alluding to, and how you can treat it for potentially kind of cleaning up your list. We’ve touched on phone numbers, phone numbers are a great way it’s a high confidence metric to know. I’m telling you know, when when I get a phone number, and I see okay, that’s that’s norm. I can I can clearly understand hey, this is probably the phone number he’s had for 10 years. It’s he’s not giving me a fake email, where this is just you know, there’s there’s no no follow up or potential follow up for, for you as a customer. And so there’s different things that we are doing with with that information with buyer quality on the seller tool side versus individual sellers, just sort of use that information to make sure are we supporting a customer that Amazon sees makes, you know, regular purchase activity maybe isn’t drawn too much to promotion, prone to returns and cancellations has a regular review activity. And make sure that we know as vendors but also seller tools in forming, forming our customers. So that’s a really, really big and important point. But the the other really big nose, and we touched on this is a lot of the things that we know the landmines, right, it’s the incentivization, it is the leaving a hate, in that many chat flow, I’m giving a customer you can pick five stars, four stars, three stars, where I’m sort of implying, I’m not going to let you you know, I’m not going to give you a review link, a direct link to leave a review on my product until you tell me what your intention is of the of the quality of your review. So those are the big the big landmines to avoid. And it really just part of the execution where as I as I genuinely feel that review requests that Amazon email is really the cleanest, best way, it’s the olive branch that Amazon is extended to us to say, hey, here’s a way in which you can use our system because I can’t customize the messaging, I can’t alter that email. So all of us as sellers and brand owners get the same exact message, same exact email, it just changes our product, title and then the image. But it’s it stays static, and exactly the same. And we just use that and build some resources around it, build some engagement, whether it’s outlets, whether it’s, you know, very subtle reminders, and really put that at the height. And then understanding as you go further down, it’s more incentivization you want to stay away from an other type of landmines where and we see this, again, a lot norm where where a lot of people say, hey, oh, you run post purchase strategies. So you must be on the incentivization end of the spectrum. And it’s like, no, we actually want to open the door, deliver that ebook, deliver that founder video to, you know, confirm a warranty or registration, send a free product sample accessory as part of the as part of the purchase. But then we let Amazon do the heavy lifting on the review request. And then we just tie in that nice and subtle text message as an example, to make sure that there’s no no no’s in it, we’re just creating a really great buying experience, let Amazon ask for the review. And then just do a nice soft touch on the backside of that.

Norman Ferrar  37:42  

You know, I’d like to add one point to that. And you might not really think about it, but it’s when somebody leaves you, or has a problem. I’ve seen people I’ve seen some sellers that go very defensive. Instead of absorbing it and trying to spin it into a positive, they spit back. And you know, they become defensive, when you’re dealing with a lot of clients. Or, you know what if I say clients one more time, just alright, I’ll get Kelsey to finish the podcast, which would probably be much better. But anyways, dealing with customer service is just a whole other way of owning that. That customer we’ve been, we’ve been talked about this at the beginning of the podcast, but being able to control that being able to check your ego at the door. And also, when you receive these types of issues that come up. Well, we’ve already I mean, I think we kind of joined Amazon around the same time, but we were always told to give back more so either don’t ask any questions, get them a refund. And, you know, the the course I went through originally, which is probably the same one as me, you know, back in the day, they always said refund plus 20% so if you can give more, you know, give it and you’ll see that you’ll turn around that customer but the other thing too, is take the information that they have. And if there’s a problem with your product, look at it or other reviews coming in with that issue and change it don’t don’t think that somebody that gives you your first one star is just really kicking you between the legs because that’s what they do. You know, it must be a competitor posting it it’s probably a real person that has an issue that you know take it and a lot of the times a one stars are not the are not where you get the value. It’s the three stars. Three stars are people that are level headed that are okay you know, I liked it, but it they could improve it doing This way, you know, one start could be just somebody that’s irate because it was two days late, you know, right. Anyways, I don’t know, if you handle your customers that way, I almost said it again, but your customers that way. But if you have anything to add to that, I love to hear it.

Troy Johnston  40:17  

Yeah, no, that’s that’s, I probably even overlook that not so small benefit is that you have that outlet, too. And you don’t want that type of feedback. If you can avoid it living on your listing forever in the review, you definitely want to capture it and then make, you know, make and pull some of those insights that come out of getting that feedback in real time. And I would agree with you too, as you kind of, you know, maybe in the two to four star range or two to three stars, those are typically people giving you more the pros and cons. This is why it’s great, but this is what I wish like that it’s a little bit more of a rounded out opinion. But this is really, it’s almost like a safety valve. This is a way in which if a customer buys they scan our QR code, they see what value we’re offering. And then instantly, they can just send a quick message and say, Hey, I’d really love it if or, you know, can you help me with with x isn’t a product, where they need to know how to use it, they need to know how long to wait to receive the results or additional information or links that you can send them, we can send them back to that press release or blog content, relevant information that’s built out that’s really ready for them to, to consume, to empower them and make sure that like I said, the negative review mitigation is a big part of it. But then also just getting feedback from your customers. This is somebody who’s gone through vote with their dollars have invested in and trying out attempting to have a great buying experience with you. And that’s that’s just a way in which they can open up that communication. But as a matter of fact, you’re also owning them, too. It kind of brings it back to the larger point. Yeah,

Norman Ferrar   41:55  

exactly. All right. One last question. Before we get to the questions. Let’s talk about low hanging fruit. And where to start to build that VIP list or owning the client?

Troy Johnston  42:09  

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. No, I think my opinion, the post purchase side is usually what is either overlooked, or there’s a bit of a fear to rolling out a post purchase strategy. Because again, we see the worst examples. And that can often just hang around in our minds, you know, we see the incentivization, we see the examples that Amazon makes of it. And as we look at it, we’re like, okay, yeah, that’s not what we want. Either we want, we would want our customers, our competitors, up to that, that kind of stuff, we would much rather deliver immediate value instantly to our customer, and be able to open up that door for for further engagement. So usually, the low hanging fruit is if you can get your hands on and this is somewhat of a shameless plug is that we have free mini chat flows that help with this. But in that post purchase strategy is figuring out what is relevant and empowering to your customer. We’ve touched on content warranty registrations free products, think of some of those buckets that may make the most sense for your product and your typical customer avatar and deliver that value. And all that you need to do is kind of sync up. This is a bit of a buyer psychology, where syncing up the means with which you’re delivering that value. So we use use mini chat for this because it’s a really kind of elegant solution where we can send them, let’s say that ebook. And then as we’re doing that, if not right before it will request the customers relevant information, because of course, we can send it to their email, or can we also, you know, send it to you via via SMS, that value exchange, and at that point in time, creates a far less cold interaction, if you just say, Hey, give us your information. And there’s nothing really happening here. Instead, if we’re delivering value and requesting value, there’s a really great exchange that’s taking place there. And that already opens up the door to future interactions. What we like to do, and we’ve touched on this in terms of the review request, is we may then wait 567 days, again, depending on our product, what is the customer and get the greatest benefit, and the most utility from our product and buying experience, sending that review request and then adding in the SMS. If that was the entirety of your post purchase flow, you have a really soft touch fully automated to us compliant, delivering more value to your customer that you’re effectively owning through that simple transaction doesn’t really need to be more than that when you see these. And we have these we built out very massive, very long many chat flows that have multiple steps and this entire sequence and this really long journey for a customer. But if you think of it simply as value exchange and information gathering, well time review requests in a text message. Those sort of four key steps can be more than enough to give you again a better buying experience that were negative review mitigation that that positive review potential of leading with the review itself. then you have powerful things like SMS, you’ve opened up that communication channel as well.

Norman Ferrar  45:05  

Yeah. So doesn’t have to be complicated. No, right? Not at all. Okay, so just one last time, the wheel of Kelsey today is a great giveaway. It’s a one free. It’s one free month of seller dot tools, a Chrome extension, which is it’s $117. You get access to all their tools. And anyways, you’ll see how fantastic it is. If you went if you don’t check it out, because they do offer a lot of things that other services don’t necessarily offer. Okay, so let’s get into some questions. Oh, it’s hashtag. We’ll have Kelsey tag two people. If you’ve never listened to the podcast before. It’s just hashtag. We’ll have Kelsey, if you take two people, you’ll also get a second entry. There we go. Let’s get into some questions calls.

Kelsey  45:56  

Oh, all right. Let’s see. The first one is very important question. From Dr. Cause. Hey, Troy, what type of mic are you using? Oh, that is? That is.

Troy Johnston  46:07  

That is the important stuff. It is. It is. Let’s see. I believe it’s the Audio Technica. I always forget the model that it’s the 8020 20 the USB mic.

Norman Ferrar   46:19  

And is that a pop filter on there as well? Yeah, okay.

Troy Johnston   46:22  

It is. Yeah, okay. Yep. Yeah, I’ve been through a number and I have a closet full of rejects. But this is this is the one that made it through.

Kelsey  46:33  

All right, our first question from Jessica Rabbit. Your What is your suggested priority list of capturing customers info, at least likely to offend Amazon’s TLS?

Troy Johnston   46:43  

Yeah, it’s a great question, I think are the post purchase strategy. And where I sort of set that that spectrum up is, if you want to lead with, again, content, FAQs, and ebook some way of giving more value to that customer. And there’s nothing that is there’s nothing perceivably close to any store, any sort of incentivization, you know, mentioned reviews, feedback request or ask for that customer, all you’re doing is saying, Would you like this piece of content that can make your buying experience better, and again, really cater that to the nuances of your product? That’s a really safe and easy way to to capture that customer’s information. Okay.

Kelsey  47:25  

Okay, great. Our next question is from Manny is the second alrights many as sounds like the strategy, the launch pre work, etc. Works for consumable products. What if it’s a product that customers buy only once?

Troy Johnston  47:44  

Yeah, I would say it does work, even if it’s a one time, one time purchase product. In many cases, I would actually say that this is more important, right? Because if we weigh the alternatives, right, let’s say you don’t have a customer list. The litmus test, the question I always ask, and this is a great way of knowing if you have a if you have a valuable list is can I reliably rank my products? Right, if in the next week, you needed to rank your products? Well, if I have a list, and I can tell them the product, the offer, and however I’d like for them to purchase optimize link, Google link, or otherwise, I’m going to have an advantage for that new purchase relative to the the person a seller that doesn’t have that active and engaged community. There are a few other tweaks that like I said, we sort of touched on briefly of having your customer share and refer others at the point of contact. So when you’re still top of mind as a brand, and as a product, trying to grow your list exponentially is another great way of getting new purchases of having you potentially penetrate other communities, other buying groups, and other potential customers, to where again, usually word of mouth is the strongest, you know, that’s the strongest form of advertising and marketing. So we want to tie that into the strategy as well. The other thing I will note is that the quality of your list is as important as the quantity of customers. My business partner, Brendon, I mean, you would be surprised how small his list is. He constantly cleans it out constantly does an auditing to see who’s actively engaged, who’s moving in purchasing, and continually focusing on the quality side of things. We often think oh, well, I need a 10,000 20,000 30,000 person list. Well, if you have a highly engaged community that’s ready to buy that’s excited about your products and is potentially kind of washed out kind of cleaned up every once in a while to where it is a really solid list. That’s another great way of making sure that for that litmus test can reliably launch my products. Well, that list is a really great way for you to be able to facilitate that.

Norman Ferrar   49:51  

That is what Adrian was saying. Just it’s quality. And sometimes if you get worried that you might have 10,000 people on that List, and most of them don’t engage, and you’re worried about that, oh, I’m going to miss out on 5000 of them, you’re not going to miss out, it goes to spam. You know, they probably because they’re not interacting, it’s probably hurting if you’re sending out an email campaign, rather than helping. So you know, get a quality list rather than a, you know, somebody who quantity you know, quantity, right? Not nothing when it comes to marketing.

Troy Johnston   50:29  

Yep, that spot on. Excuse me.

Kelsey  50:31  

All right. Our next question is from Jeff. Jeff asks, what is the single best way to maintain contact with your customers?

Troy Johnston   50:39  

Yeah, there’s a few different strategies for this. And, you know, Facebook groups are a great way of if you can actively manage and cultivate a community, it’s a great way to kind of get them in one place, share relevant content, have them share different feedback, obviously, it’s an interactive way, the trade off there, sort of the downside is that you have to make sure you truly do then maintain that comes with the territory of if you have those customers in one place. While they can be highly active, they can be communicating regularly, they may want to see more offers, they may want to see plenty of value. But if that makes sense for your audience and your product, that’s a really great way of centralizing them. The other ways that we’re talking about communicating with them, I think are really great ways to supplement. You know, Norm has done a great job of touching on email, and you know, finding and seeking out resources for that. And then, regularly, sending out text messages is another great way to go as well. I know, many renters are kind of intimidated by text messages, I think we see how powerful it is, we think, Oh, that’s got to be this big built out thing. But I even like that cadence monthly bi weekly of just checking in delivering some form of value to that list, it can be a great way of also keeping them engaged.

Norman Ferrar   51:52  

You know, it’s funny, with, like pop ups. Okay, when you go to a website, and you see a pop up, it can be annoying, right? And when you talk to, you know, our like clients that come over, they’ll say, Well, it’s annoying, but it works. How many times have you gone over and you know, you have an upsell, down, sell, cross sell. And all of a sudden, you’re walking out of there, instead of $30, you’re doing $100 order. Similar to SMS. Is that annoying? Could it be possibly, but it works. So give it a shot. It’s not about you. It’s about you know, the customer. And as long as there was a value added. And the other thing I wanted to say it’s not only having your own group. But if you could add value to other niche groups, that’ll help to because you’ll look like you’re the go to person. And they’ll come back and like your page and start building your community as well.

Troy Johnston  52:54  

Yeah, that’s a great point. And I should add, and this is the sandbox was play in many, many chat is really great for this to where, because it’s a multi, multi communication channel, we can email customers, we can text them, I can use Facebook Messenger. It is really one of my preferred ways of capturing that customer information, you can automate the entirety of the customer journey, you can use one time notifications, you can send those text messages, you can actually send emails natively in, in many chat. So that’s another great way to go. And exactly to your point normally, that’s that’s where you almost want to think about where my mind goes is when we bring it back to influencer as well. You can use whatever your call to action is or wherever you’re directing them to thinking about building that trust and highlighting that authority is a focal point, whether that is a Facebook group, or you know, you have your your mini chat flow that highlights hey, here’s, here’s some accolades we have or rewards we received or recognition or or user generated content, some way of humanizing but then elevating your brand. Again, specific to your your product, I always mentioned that it’s really thinking about your product and customer. But delivering on that, how can they how can they build that trust if they’ve never heard or seen you before? Build that authority, and then facilitate? You know what, what happens next, right.

Kelsey  54:15  

Okay, and if you guys are enjoying this episode, send us some love, give us those thumbs up smash those like buttons, and we’d really appreciate it. You know, we’re getting tons of questions. So I think Troy people are loving you. I also just want to just remind people if you are interested in joining lunch with Norm, as soon as we go live, make sure you hit that little notification bell. When we were watching Facebook and YouTube. It helps you get those alerts right away when we do go live so you don’t miss it even if we’re fashionably late. All right, it’s all from Jessica Rabbit. What is Troy’s background before Amazon ecommerce he’s so well thought out on this topic. solving issues with real, real world efficient solutions magical.

Troy Johnston  55:04  

Wow, that first of all, it’s very nice to hear and thank you for saying that.

NormanFerrar  55:09  

I paid 20

Troy Johnston

Yeah. Thanks, norm.

Troy Johnson   55:12  

Yeah. I was gonna say she must be a client. But now.

Troy Johnson   55:19  

Thank you. No, but seriously, thank you, Jessica. It’s very, very sweet and nice to hear. Yeah, Mike. So my background is more in project management. What I used to do way back when I actually got started in traditional marketing, so I used to do project management for TV commercials and radio and different traditional creative. And then did project management for digital marketing companies after that. So thing, websites, SEO, that type of thing. So always had a project management background in my, you know, in my history.

Kelsey  55:54  

Okay, from Red, there is a negative comment about our product that is not that it is not charging, how can we send the customer information and advise the customer that they have to remove the plastic coating on the solar panel to get better charging?

Troy Johnston  56:10  

So is this a is this an existing review that the customer has left?

Kelsey   56:17  

So rad? Let us know, in the comment section, and we’ll get back to you. And we’ll answer a question in between. From Tony, many of my products have low star reviews uploaded to the top, is there anything that can be done?

Troy Johnston   56:34  

Yeah, review voting. So helpfulness of reviews, um, this is this can be it can be done. Now, if you have an active following. If you have customers that are part of your list. Obviously, there are ways that you can encourage their support on your Amazon listing. This is again, where you have to decide what you’re comfortable asking your customers to do. or potential customers, depending on where they’re at in the journey. And you have to think about it this this helpfulness, Amazon really set that up to be organic, right? They want their customers to sort of say, Hey, this is a really helpful for review for me. So we’re brought back to the I don’t wanna say risk tolerance, but it’s what you’re okay with is, that’s the system that Amazon has set up, do your customers, is that something you’re asking comfortable asking your customers to do? There is also a norm, you probably know this, there’s there’s different services and providers that will help you with this. And that’s probably getting to be less gray and more black, because you’re using or altering Amazon system, which is meant to again, be driven by their their customers or prospective customers. So since we’re talking about owning your customer, I have to mention that that that’s that’s a possibility. But you want to think about it again, in that context, too.

Norman Ferrar   57:54  

Right. And, like on that note, be careful. Because if if somebody had gone ahead and just up voted, and let’s say you have 50 up votes on something negative, and all of a sudden you come back with 240, the next day? Yeah, I think that’s going to leave somewhat of a footprint.

Troy Johnston   58:19  

Yeah, the execution would really have to, you know, it almost brings it back to some of the ranking factors is, you don’t always want to send Amazon it’s a to be set signal, right. And that means when you exit, when you execute on that request, or you’re sending customers to purchase on your product detail page, you don’t want to send them to the same, let’s say the same link or the same search, find by process, all of that starts to raise flags for Amazon. So for that point, in particular, you would have to be able to control that customer engagement to a point where it’s not that it’s not your example, 50 to 240, all of a sudden, in a 24 hour time span that starts to raise some flags.

Norman Ferrar  58:56  

And with many chat, you could kind of feel that right? If you’re sending out some information, and you can kind of get a feel of what the person thought about the product. You can you can I don’t want to give the wrong information. But you can field whether they’re a good fit for a review.

Troy Johnston   59:19  

Mm hmm. Yeah, you absolutely can. Yeah, you can create it, you could create a condition. You could even show them a picture of what you’re asking them to do. Would you mind thank you for support. If you found this review helpful. And again, as brand owners, you just have to decide what you’re what you’re comfortable with. But mini chat is great for this because we have a whole journey. We can tag a customer create a condition. We can even randomize. So we have certain sets of customer going to specific steps. What’s really cool about that, because that starts to sound complex. Is that what I’m what I’m seeing more and more. And I think I think sellers should should sort of think about this is that some amount of complexity is where they’re where it’s the safest. And by that I mean that same point. If you’re just doing a to b strategies, if it’s heavily templatized, and you’re doing the same thing over and over again, that’s really when that anxiety should rise up like, Wait, am I on Amazon’s radar? My am i doing detectable activity? That’s easily, you know, identifiable through bots and AI and all the things that Amazon has at their disposal to create those correlations, and then send you, you know, send you the notices we don’t like to see. Right.

Kelsey  1:00:27  

So we just have two more questions. So the one from Red, he did answer yes, it is an existing review.

Troy Johnston  1:00:34  

Gotcha. When it comes to existing reviews, there really isn’t much that we can do. If we have that customer who’s come through a post purchase for or pre purchase, I should mention that as well. Then we have outlets, this is really where having them go through a sequence of events that we own. It gives us the ability to reengage and support this customer providing that, you know, immediate refund acting like Amazon, this is sort of like how they they treat customers and be that customer centric. So fortunately, there’s really not as much that we can do with existing customers with the reviews that are left Norma, I don’t know if you have anything to add to that. But there’s only

Norman Ferrar  1:01:17  

yeah, there’s one. One thing if you can go into that review, and you can see who left it and then you can trace it back, they left a real name, if you can go and find that order. And I haven’t done this a long time. But this is the way that we used to do it, a lot of the times the profile would be wrong. But if we could at least get that information, we could try to find the order and then send them out a message it is not against Terms of Service, the contact your customer, and say, I think you have to put I think it’s square important or urgent or I think it’s important square bracket, and then you know, put the subject matter in, and then let them know that if they’re doing something wrong, like with Brad’s a solar panel thing, he can, he can reach out to the customer and let that be known. And that’s not against Terms of Service, but you have to find out who left the review. Now, the other thing you can do on this is you can make it really like just black and white on the listing, you can show even in your video, taking the person taking off the information, putting it into your A plus content. When you send it out to the person, you can have stop before you do anything, you need to do these four things, you know, that gets the person’s attention, and that could cut down or if it is a many chat flow, it will tell them you have to do these four things to to get the optimal experience. You know, but that’s the only thing I can think of.

Troy Johnston  1:03:03  

Yeah, that’s important. Just would add to that, too. If you send them through mini chat, because it’s media rich, a video can be helpful in ebook, what is the best way to convey that, you know, maybe that big stop sign and then watch this video to find out how best to open or utilize your product.

Kelsey 1:03:21  

And our last question is from Simon, would you drive your audience traffic to your website opposed to marketplaces?

Troy Johnston  1:03:29  

Yeah, it’s a good question. The short answer is it really does depend. So what are my objectives? When I start to build that audience, typically unmuted utilizing them to send back to Amazon, I see a greater benefit or impact if I drive external traffic to Amazon. But what are some cases where we may want to send them to our website? Well, having reviewed social proof on our website can be really important running different promotional campaigns. Through our website, they’re typically more time sensitive, with a clear objective. But on the whole, I tend to like to send my customers to Amazon because I see a greater external traffic benefit. But those are some of the things that you may want to think about, you know, if you want to send them to your Shopify, or your WordPress site to, to transact with them there.

Kelsey  1:04:19  

Okay, so that’s it for questions. And I think it’s time for the wheel of Kelsey. All right. Just a second. You got to find this country’s never

Norman Ferrar  1:04:28  

seen this.

Troy Johnston

No, let’s see.

Kelsey  1:04:32  

I’m just building some suspense. I get it. There we go. All right. It’s time for the with Kelsey. Here we go

Norman Ferrar  1:04:52  

there we go. 

Troy Johnston   1:04:56  

Man.That was intense.

Norman Ferrar  1:04:57  

What now? Okay, there it is. Alright,

Kelsey 1:05:00  

yeah as a courtesy of my older brother Hayden who created the song and music under the the graphics shadow Hayden Farrar. Thank you. Alright, so this is for the one month of seller tools. Thank you everyone who entered today. If you are the winner, just please email me Kay at lunch with Lauren calm. And here we go. So especially you YouTubers, I cannot contact you. So you have to contact me. Alright, our winner, it looks like is it red? Oh, perfect.

Norman Ferrar 1:05:36  

That works out really great. He rad was asking all the questions about his products. And so this is gonna be great. I know Brad’s products. They’re awesome. And I know your your tools will and your apps will help them out. So rad congrats on that. One of the other things I want to just discuss very quickly. It’s seller tools, like what is what do you get with seller tools? What are the different apps are the tools within it? Yeah, absolutely. The tools within seller tool.

Troy Johnston    1:06:15  

Yeah, really what we aim to do so if you come to us as a seller, what we want to help you do is first and foremost, get the optimization strategy done, right, you sync your account with us, we see your product, we’re going to take you through a process of running a reverse asin on your top competitors, we’re going to be able to then take that reverse asin data and use some really unique date data, some of the things that you touched on norm where we display brand analytics data, we show at the keyword level, estimated unit sales, estimated purchase rate even so estimated conversions that are realized for that keyword. So you can start to see, Hey, how is this keyword actually performing? As well as again that brain analytics is super insightful. So we can take those powerful keywords, and then bring them over to our listing manager. And the tool itself actually walks you through this flow. It’s a five step process of product competitors, keywords. And then at that four step we do we take you through the listing manager. So we know based on things like brain analytics, what are the most highly sought after relevant because we run a reverse asin search keywords that you can plug into your listing, the listing manager will actually let you take those higher priority keywords, include in your listing, removing them as you’re adding them into your title, subject matter bullet points, and really building out what is going to be your organic presence and your optimized listing on Amazon. Then lastly, we will take you to launch readiness, what do you want to do now that you have a fully optimized listing to effectively launch it. And that’s where we can take you into some of our many chat, pre and post purchase free mini chat flows. Last launch was our launch platform. But we make the optimization step very seamless, and very straightforward. When you get into that launch step is when we start talking about things like automation, how do we take a very robust mini chat flow and have you put in four or five pieces of information to where all you have to do is give a customer a link or give them a QR code. And we can take them through the entirety of of that journey. And then we have some tools that are built around that as well. We’ve got alerts that you can configure product and account level alerts, we have our own PPC tool, we have our own digital wallet. So if you run promotions, discounts, if you run rebate campaigns, we can automate that type of activity. And then we offer just a ton of free stuff too. You mentioned our free chrome extension. It now has four or five really big, unique features or keyword expander. We have our listing quality score. That’s probably what I’d highlight the most. It’s come up more and we’ve sort of intentionally highlighted this for aggregators who are looking at how optimizes a listing isn’t leaving enough room for them to potentially improve. So what’s working well, what’s under optimized, and we look at 33 different variables, from keywords to media, to conversion readiness to really drill down, it’s actually scored 1000 How optimized a listing is. And then we’ve got Yeah, handful a handful of other features, we touched on the review request, I have to I have to mention that because we have two different ways that you can use that in the way that we touched on it for many chat where you can trigger sending out that TLS compliant review request. Really simple and easy to set up in many chat. But we also have a dashboard within the app where if you enable it, if you didn’t do anything else, if you just click that enable button, every single eligible order eligible order that Amazon deems eligible will receive that review request customer will receive it right in their inbox, Amazon branded and everything and then all you have to do from there is just watch the requests being sent out over time. So we cover a lot of a lot of ground but those are you know those are kind of the three areas unique data, making optimization easy And then once you have that foundation, it’s how do you start automating? How do you run this really small team? Brendan, we touched on him, he’s runs a four or five person team. And they’re looking to sell their eight figure brand there. They’re just doing a pretty large scale, given how small their team is, but they rely on tools to be able to facilitate all that activity.

Norman Ferrar   1:10:19  

Very good. All right. So if people want to get a hold of you, how do they do that?

Troy Johnston   1:10:23  

Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned our group, our Facebook group, FBA kings, it’s a really great and supportive community would love to see and engage with you there. Don’t hesitate to reach out to me or the seller tools team at Hello at seller dot tools, more than happy to answer any questions support you with use of the tools, Chrome extension or otherwise. But those are probably the two best ways to find us. And then we’re on all the socials LinkedIn, our Facebook page, Instagram and others.

Norman Ferrar  1:10:51  

Okay, very good. All right, try so I’m going to after this call, I’m going to be asking you to join our Patreon group for some training as well. Everybody’s been talking about you know, how great your your you know, your your skills are and the way that you present. So I’m not going to back into the corner, but I am going to ask that you help us out with that with some training. But hey, it was a pleasure having you on I can’t wait to break bread with you, you know, sometime in the future, and say hurry to your partner for me.

Troy Johnston  1:11:23  

We’ll do good seeing and Norm thanks so much.

Norman Ferrar  1:11:26  

Alright, see you later,Troy. Thanks. Okay, everybody, I hope you enjoyed that. Friday, we’ve got the man the myth, Kevin King coming on. We’re just going to be talking about fourth quarter what’s happening, all the new and exciting things that are exciting, things are happening. It’s a love hate relationship, I tell you over at Amazon, but we’re gonna get into it. There’s a lot of things that have happened. You’ve probably seen some emails that have been happening, some some news articles, press releases. Also some really cool things that Amazon’s doing. So Kevin’s gonna be on on Friday can’t wait, and also want to give a shout out to global wired advisors. They’re a leading digital investment bank focused on optimizing the business sales process. For more information, visit global wired advisors.com Mr. Kelsey

Kelsey 1:12:21  

Lowe, another great episode for the books. Thank you guys for joining the lunch norm podcast. As Nora mentioned, we do have a patreon program. So that is like our membership area where you can have small group sessions with me in norm. I handle the social media sessions and then norm handles all the rest. But we also have guest lessons. So we’ve had Ben Leonard on. We’re just setting up our guests for this month. But Amy waste has been on we’ve got a ton off a lobby. So these are like private lesson. It’s not a podcast. Yeah, this is actual like, yeah, you can come with actionable steps. We we give you answers. So yeah, if you’re interested, go over to lunch with norm.com and click on the membership area. And that’ll take you there. Also, don’t forget totally free our Facebook group. It’s a lovely place for our beer nation here. So that’s just lunch with no Amazon FBA and ecommerce collective, join the group hang out with us. It’d be great to get to know you. And I think that’s about it. If you haven’t yet, please smash those like buttons. Kevin King episode is on Friday. So that’s a big episode. You can RSVP on the group on the page as well. So you don’t forget. And yeah, I think that’s it.

Norman Ferrar   1:13:43  

That’s it. Alright, that’s it

Norman Ferrar   1:13:46  

That’s it. We made it nice and simple. Alright, everybody. Just a note, if you are around, if you are in Miami. And by the way, if you want to, I don’t even know if we ended up with somebody grabbing that free ticket. But if you are in Miami November the second I’m going to be speaking Kim is going to be speaking at the Amazon powwow in Miami. And we’ve got a we’ve got a ticket, just contact us. And we’ll be able to give that to you for the main event. So I know also, Michelle Harris is going to be there. She’s our senior manager over at our media department. So she’s going to be there and it’s going to be fun. Anyways, we’ll see you there. And that’s it for me. So tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Noon, Eastern Standard Time. And don’t forget, you know, to what am I trying to say? Hit those likes, do whatever you told me to say some stuff. Anyways. It’s the end of the day for me almost. Yeah, it is. I’m going crazy. I work late. I think I got to bed at around four last night and anyways, thanks everybody for watching the episode. We couldn’t do this without you. You know we’ve got this huge, great community and you know we just love it. We love the interaction. We love the engagement and have a great day entre entre

Transcribed by https://otter.ai