This is the fourth of our eight part series on driving traffic and conversion on Amazon. Earlier we looked at how traffic is the most fundamental metric in retail, how winning at search helps to generate it as well as a few ways brands can utilize to actually win at search. Next up we’ll explain how controlling the buy box helps brands consolidate and maintain their conversion rates, and conclude by glancing at how cereal brands and computer monitors brands are winning on Amazon in the US and UK. Also included is a Q/A with Content26 co-founder and president Mark White and gen.video’s co-founder and president Jessica Thorpe, as they tackle several key questions generated by attendees of our recent webinar, “Driving Online Retail Store Traffic with Paid Advertising and Influencer Programs,” which can be found here.
Improving Your Amazon Conversion Rate
So far in this series, we’ve focused on the importance of traffic and examined a few of the ways brands can increase their share of it. But you can have all the traffic in the world and it won’t make a difference if your conversion rate is low. (In fact, with a low conversion rate, you’ll need all the traffic in the world just to keep up.) Today, we’ll look at a couple basic ways brands can increase their Amazon conversion rate.
Marketing and search performance can drive plenty of traffic, but it takes high quality product detail page (PDP) content, controlling the Buy Box, fending off 3P sellers, and being out in front of price and promotions to turn that traffic into sales.
As Content26 CEO and cofounder Mark White mentioned in our recent webinar, however, maintaining a good conversion rate starts with two fundamentals of ecommerce: brand content and ratings & reviews.
Brand/Product Content:
The first pillar of traffic is content. And these days, content is still key for optimizing search performance, keywords, and generating traffic. But now Amazon is so user- (and user-generated content) focused that shoppers use Amazon as a source of information as well as a retail platform. Over half of all purchases in retail began in the digital channel, even if they didn’t finish there. In other words, millions of people log onto Amazon and other pureplay retailers to read product reviews and content before making their purchases in brick-and-mortar stores. So yes, content is crucial for driving conversion across all channels, not just digital.
On the digital side, optimizing PDP content can boost conversion by up to 36%. Good PDP’s must be clean, concise, and uncluttered, yet still clearly convey information on what the product is and its features. When optimizing for conversion, images, bullet points, and ratings & reviews are the most impactful - over 95% of buyers look at images and content above the fold before completing the purchase - but no aspect of the PDP should be overlooked.. For example, while only 15% of shoppers read A+ content (often located below the fold), the conversion rate among that 15% is much higher than average.
User-Generated Content
Like brand-generated content, generating ratings & reviews is crucial for any brand in any category, whether or not Amazon is a primary sales channel. This is because shoppers are for more likely to trust a user-generated review than the brand’s description of its own product. Many consumers scroll right to the reviews before anything else on a PDP. A product’s ratings & reviews count has a direct impact on both search performance and traffic - reviews can boost conversion by over 50% and and increase traffic by up to 25% - and as we’ve already mentioned, this impact goes beyond Amazon.
It should come as no surprise, then, that a higher rating translates into more conversion, but what's less obvious is how significant an impact the total review count can have on sales. Reviews drive more traffic (by improving search rank) and more conversion (by inspiring consumer confidence) which in turn drive more customer engagement and, yes, more reviews – so the brands winning in reviews today are at a major advantage on Amazon's growing European market.
And although they obviously have less direct control over ratings & reviews than they do over product content, brands do have a surprising amount of control and can deploy numerous tactics to exert drive volume and influence customers’ ratings, including being active on Amazon’s Vine program, using third-party review programs, and most importantly, being active participants in the reviews section.
Contact us to learn how leading brands are using Clavis Insight to improve and optimize online retail store ratings and reviews, and improving their Amazon performance.
So to sum up, content - both product/brand content and user-generated content - is the best way to boost conversion. Optimizing PDP’s and nurturing ratings & reviews are still the most effective techniques to boost conversion on the digital shelf and in traditional retail.
To go more in depth on how to succeed in this crucial space, download our whitepaper “Turning Amazon traffic into Amazon sales” here, or give our on-demand webinar “Driving Traffic and Conversion with Paid Advertising” a listen here, and check out the rest of this blog series, and all of our expert insights here.
