Josh Hadley 4:41
Yeah, no super impressive. Yeah, I know there’s a lot of barriers to entry there in the supplement space. And there is a lot of good competition but because of that, I think you’d know you know how to compete how to make an offer stand out. And if you can succeed in the supplement space, I would argue you could probably succeed in In any of the other spaces there on Amazon, so tell me a couple of the brands that you exited from, you know, when were those exits? How did you get them? You know, to that point?
Matt Altman 5:10
Yeah. So unfortunately for me, the ones that I did exit I sold before the huge aggregator gold rush. So my multiples were nothing compared to what they were. But the the first one was really just generic men’s products. So we had like some beard brushes, some like straight razors, different things like that. Really sold that one, just because we saw where the category was going. We were seeing new listings pop up every other day. And then there were 1000s of reviews on them within a month. And we’re just like, Nah, we don’t want to be in this. So sold it privately to someone that was interested. Actually, I haven’t even looked at it and like seven years, so I have no idea what they’re even doing now. But very glad we got out of that one, because it’s definitely died. The other one was actually interesting, though. So when I was in commercial real estate, I met a doctor at the time, who had a bunch of patents on products. And we were just going back and forth. And like he loves creating products, but didn’t really want to be involved in marketing or selling them in any capacity. And then come to find out he had quite a few patents that he’s just never done anything with. So basically bought them out from him whipped up some products around those patents. And for that for about four years, and then sold that off of those were all kind of in like the, I would say like medical like remedy space. So we didn’t need like FDA approval or anything. But there were certain patents he had on how to make the formulas that basically made it so that no one else could knock us off. So that was a great multiple. Yeah, yeah,
Josh Hadley 6:51
yeah. So yeah, I got to that point. You know, we had formerly Rich Goldstein on the podcast, right? I IP lawyer, he had talked so much about, you know, IP, being able to, you know, increase your multiples when it came time to exit. So I guess it sounds like that came to fruition here.
Matt Altman 7:09
Correct? Yeah. And actually one of the companies so we split off, we had two different brands under that one, one of the companies that made the purchase, they ended up using that patent on other products that they had already been selling to kind of make those stronger as well. So adds a ton of value on the back end.
Josh Hadley 7:27
Fascinating. Yeah, that makes a lot more sense. Well, that’s great. Well, it sounds like you’ve had experience, you know, working with some IP, intellectual property products, and then just some generic products. And then so what got you into the supplement space, then?
Matt Altman 7:42
I’m stoked. Strangely enough, it was a friend of mine that was in the space selling, saw that he was doing extremely well, which I couldn’t figure out like, I thought I was selling well on Amazon at the time. But obviously, my items aren’t replenishable you’re subscribing saves aren’t massive, your margins aren’t massive, but I mean, back then, and supplements, margins were absolutely insane. And really just kind of figured, hey, I’m gonna have to put in the same amount of work, no matter what products I do, I’d rather gain a customer for 12 to 16 months versus a one time purchase, you don’t have to work is hard, and let that continue to multiply as much as possible.
Josh Hadley 8:21
Yeah, no, I think there’s a lot of truth to that being able to have repeat purchases, Subscribe and Save replenishable products definitely are the sweet spot there on Amazon. So let’s dive in a little bit more to that, Matt, you’ve gotten a lot of experience launching new products on Amazon, you’ve have a lot of experience optimizing products on Amazon. So let’s talk about you know, when you get into the supplement space, or we can just talk broadly on Amazon itself, what are some of the key things that you you advise or recommend, when launching a brand new product on Amazon that are working today, because as you know, a lot of those black hat tactics, you know, they’ve come and gone. You also have the, you know, the rebates that everybody was doing, and now it’s kind of leveled the playing field a little bit more. Tell me what you’re doing that’s been working for you guys.
Matt Altman 9:12
Yeah. So first up, I think that the biggest thing is making sure you have a big enough budget to launch your products, like the days of five to $10,000 budgets to launch products are just gone in my eyes, at least in the spaces that I work in. So we usually overestimate our budgets by like 20 to 30% of what we actually think it would be just to make sure that we’re in a good place in case it doesn’t go the way that we want it to. But outside of that, we’re looking for a couple of major things. One is we want to see continued growth in the category Amazon’s making that way easier. Now with like the search query reports, the product opportunity explorer, there’s so many internal tools that they’re giving you access to now that you can really easily find that. And then the other big thing that we’re looking for It is categories that you’ve got maybe like three or four power players in. And by power players, they aren’t really doing that much. They’re still kind of growing. But they’re ahead of like the other 20 items, they’re really just kind of is showing us that, hey, there’s enough sales to go around if these four people can all kind of be around the same. And customers really don’t care which one they’re choosing right now. They’re just basically picking whichever ones at the top from what we can say. So, yeah, we used to go into very heavy like categories, where you would just I mean, like launches would be half a million to a million dollars. And if you can make them work, yeah, the payback is amazing because of the volume that some of those categories do. But if you lose, like, it absolutely sucks. So sure, we’re looking at like 50 to $75,000, to launch a product right now in the supplement space that we’re kind of going after. And we’ve seen, it’s kind of the sweet spot for everything. So if we do find a product, and we think it’s going to cost more than that, to actually launch it, we’ll hold off for a bit and see if we can find some other ones that are within our thresholds.
Josh Hadley 11:10
That makes sense. So how do you estimate you know, that budget, right, what’s the difference between a half a million to a million dollar product launch budget, versus something that’s 50 to $75,000? And how do you estimate that?
Matt Altman 11:24
Yeah, so the the biggest thing is ads. I mean, we’ve really, in the last like three months, all of our launches have been almost exclusively on Amazon through Amazon ads. So we’re pulling averages of cost per clicks through the the advertising API, and really just looking at, okay, what is the conversion rate of the top products? If we wanted to spend to get that conversion rate on that keyword? Like, what would it cost us per day and working that backwards. The other big thing that I don’t know anyone else that’s kind of touched on this, but what we what we’ve been doing here recently is we have a seller accounts where we’ll create the product beforehand, it’s not the product that we’re actually going to sell, we’ll put some items as merchant fulfilled, and then we’ll just have ourselves buy the products. So that way, we get all the search query report data for that product before we actually
Josh Hadley 12:15
launch it. That’s, that’s fascinating. So you do that in a separate account, then is that what you’re saying? We’ve been doing it
Matt Altman 12:21
in the same account just like a different brand name, and throw up a listing merchant fulfilled, and do a couple buys through it, and then you get all that data.
Josh Hadley 12:31
Interesting. Okay. So then you’re going for the search query performance reports from Amazon, right? And Correct. What are the additional data points that you get from the search query performance that you want to get? Normally just looking at brand analytics, right?
Matt Altman 12:46
Yeah. So really, the big things we focus on are, obviously get the the add to cart, the click through rate, the overall impression rates, things like that. But taking those out and breaking them down, like a lot of people always kind of go by that old method of I need this many buyers per keyword per day. And they were just like, oh, we need to add in some add to carts here and there to make it all look kosher. Through the search query report, you can basically know exactly how many add to carts you need, how many detail page views you need, and then you can equate that out to the exact same for the top sellers, if you marry the brand analytics data into it. And basically, it’ll tell you exactly you’ve got to hit between these three numbers each day for we’ve been seeing, like 25 to 30 days is how long we usually like launch on a certain keyword. And then you’ll pretty much stay ranked like we haven’t really had any issues.
Josh Hadley 13:36
Interesting. Okay, so you’re targeting specific keywords right out of the gate, right? So if we drive, you know, dive a little deeper here. If you you’re launching a particular product, you’ve probably got hundreds of keywords that you could focus on, right. But are you coming out with auto campaigns and broad campaigns? From the get go, like tell us, you know, what type of ad campaigns you’re launching? How many keywords are you focusing on? And in that?
Matt Altman 14:05
Yes. So for the first like 35 to 40 days, we launched two campaigns, there might be more than two campaigns, that depends on the volume of the exact match terms that you’re going after. If they’re super high volume, we’ll break those keywords out just to spend a little bit more efficiently. But really, the main focus is taking those top keywords for that product. As long as our budget can withstand them. Usually, we always go for the top ones we’ve seen. Yeah, you can go for the long tail ones, you can extend this long out, and it may take you 90 120 days to get to where you want to go to but we’d rather spend the budget upfront and get there as quickly as possible. But what we do set up exact match campaigns, we set the bid at the suggested bid from Amazon and then we put in a 300% top of search modifier. Basically we wait two to three days. pull the data out. And we’re using PAC for you right now to do this, but you can easily do this and just a bulk sheet if you want to do that. But we’re pulling out that data. And then we’re comparing our conversion rates on products, or sorry, not products on keywords, by the brand analytics data day by day to see kind of, are we matching the brand analytics like conversion rate or sales rate. And if we are we keep spending against that keyword, if we aren’t, we decrease the bid. And then we basically just keep doing that every two to three days, we don’t worry about a cost, we don’t worry about tacos, we don’t worry about anything except for our conversion rate, as long as our conversion rate is within two percentage points of the brand analytics conversion rate for the top couple people, we keep running that keyword until we are either ranked in the top three, or we just fall off completely because Amazon didn’t find us relevant. Then the second campaign that we launched is a sponsored product campaign as well. But we do asin targeting. And basically, we’ll take those five to seven keywords that we’re targeting in our launch. And we use ECAM analytics for this, but you can do it through the API or brand analytics yourself. But we pull the weekly data going back for the last 12 months. And we target any asin that’s ever been in the top three for the five to seven keywords that we’re going after. And we’re hoping that that gives us relevancy towards those keywords as well. And there’s other products that are converting well for those keywords.
Josh Hadley 16:27
Fascinating. I love that. I don’t think I’ve heard that kind of tactic or approach to PPC, especially when it comes to launching new products ever. I think you know, everybody’s like, ugh, create a million exact match campaigns or create, you know, your auto campaign and then start filtering out your keywords from there. So I love this approach, because you’re so focused just on the conversion rate. And so to dive into that a little bit more, Matt, when you’re focused on the conversion rate, and for the particular campaign that you’re set up, right, you have one campaign that has all of your exact matches in there. Right. So how many like keywords, would you put into a single campaign? And is there any limit to the number of keywords that you’re putting into that campaign to begin with?
Matt Altman 17:13
Yeah, so for us, we typically launch on five to 10 keywords, most of the time, it’s between five to seven, anything else than that you, you can launch on keywords, but you’re not gonna like move the needle, you’re gonna pick up like five extra organic sales a week, which isn’t gonna help you rank for other keywords. So we really focus just on those top moving ones, the main thing that we really look at and we compete a lot and kind of like the healthier for you foods. So like the Keto foods, the like low carbs, all of that. keto snacks gets like half a million searches a month, if you put that keyword in an exact match campaign with other keywords, it’s just gonna
Josh Hadley 17:54
gobble up all of the budget and right, yeah, all the impressions go to that one keyword, right? Correct. You separate that out, if you do want to run that as a separate campaign yet
Matt Altman 18:04
or so. So usually, if the keywords are over 20 to 30,000 searches per month, we’ll go ahead and separate them out into their own campaigns. Try and keep every campaign under about 50,000 total searches. We’ve We’ve tested this as well, where we’ve left them in the same campaigns, but just increase the budgets like $20,000 a day and stuff $1,000 a day, we still see the same thing happen, where that one keyword gets most of the budget, and I wouldn’t even spend all the budget. So we really don’t know, why does that. So we just separate them out
Josh Hadley 18:39
to keep it easier. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So tell me what happens then it to a product if you’re launching on a particular keyword, and you’re not getting the conversion rates that are higher, you know, let’s say you’re 5% that the main conversion rate right for the top three seems to average around 10 to 15%, let’s say versus at 7%. What do you do at that point? Maybe we move into a little bit of product optimization here. But tell us like, what’s your approach at that point?
Matt Altman 19:06
Yeah, so we do two different things. The first one is we pull our impression share report, and we’re just looking, how often are we appearing for this keyword? Is there room to increase our bids and try and get a higher conversion rate by being at the top more frequently? A lot of times you’ll see that’s the answer. And we just increase our top of search placement on that keyword by 100% or whatever it is until we start to see more impressions and see what happens to our overall conversion rate. The second piece is exactly what you said we would then take out our product, we look at what everyone else’s products are in the top three for those keywords. And then we would basically send it off to like a pick foods or different services like that and just get analysis from people that are in the market for the product and see if there’s anything we can do to really tailor our product more for that keyword.
Josh Hadley 19:58
Interesting. So So you’re Are you testing like main images? Or are you just testing like the overall idea of the product and just trying to get feedback on pic? Yeah,
Matt Altman 20:09
so we’re testing main images and titles sometimes. So a lot of times, what we’ve seen is just by adding that keyword closer to the beginning of your title, so it appears on mobile could be enough to make the conversion. Other times like a lot of our our snacks or items that we’re selling, like, there’s these benefits that you don’t really get across until the second or third image. So we’ll we’ll change the way the box looks, or we’ll add something over the wrapper like it’s not really there, we’re just seeing if, hey, if we add like, one one net carbs to the outside of this package on the main image, does that increase the click through rate for low carb snacks and things like that? Most of the time, what we’ve seen is yes, that’s usually like the one thing that changes that is changing the image. Because if anything we’ve seen no one really reads the titles that we’ve been changing doesn’t do much conversion rate wise, but interest is killer, even if you add text to the image, people are more likely to read the image from what we’ve seen.
Josh Hadley 21:05
And are you just focused exclusively on the main image? Or are you You know, I guess how important obviously, the main image is what gets you the click through, right, like, how do you differentiate differentiating yourself in the market? Like, how important are those secondary images? Are they kind of the same thing? Where it’s like, well, nobody actually reads those. Right? What are your kind of thoughts there?
Matt Altman 21:27
Yeah, so we really focus mainly on that, that primary image more than anything, and then the second and third image, we really don’t start changing those until we’re kind of like, I would say, almost finished with our initial kind of ranking campaign. The only thing I would say to this, though, is we’ve been getting this a lot here recently, I’m not getting to today, but where the first and second image are appearing now in search. And like you can kind of if you hover over it, it will flip between the two. So we’ve been testing if we do see that pop up, like bigger call outs on our second image to try and at least be be readable in search, because I’ve seen a lot of times when people try and do this and search and the text is so small by the time it’s actually there. It’s not even worth putting it there.
Josh Hadley 22:13
Yeah, especially if somebody’s on a phone. Right. And they’re exactly browsing on a mobile device. Yeah, that’s gonna show really small somebody has a infographic with lots of text on it. Like it’s not even going to be readable, right? Yeah. Yeah, Amazon’s always testing out stuff. That’s, that’s great insight. I don’t think I’ve come across that one yet. But I’ll have to, I’ll have to go. Take a look. Now after this.
Matt Altman 22:35
Yeah, we’ve actually seen some autoplay video ones as well here recently on mobile. So there’s a lot that’s going on in that space.
Josh Hadley 22:42
Yeah. So with that, then Matt, I’ve got my brains is filling with ideas, you’ve already dropped so much knowledge here. I love it. Going back to the main image, because that is so important, right? Your primary image, that’s where you’re going to drive a lot of your click through rate is how you’re going to set yourself out amongst the competition. What are some of the things that you’ve done to that main image to increase those conversions? You talked about, you know, applying a label around maybe a product package, even though it’s not actually on that particular package? You’re just photoshopping it in, what are some of the other things that you’ve been able to do that have worked successfully as you’ve tested this out multiple times?
Matt Altman 23:21
Yeah, I think the the biggest thing for us and what we have VAs do they actually do this quite a bit. We have a tool, I’m actually blanking on the name right now. But it’ll search a keyword and basically take a full page screenshot of that keyword every day. And then they’re kind of looking and seeing what products come into the first page of search for that keyword. And we aren’t really caring what products come in, we’re caring what that main image looks like. Like we compete a lot in the Keto bar space. Almost everyone in the Keto bar, like if you search keto bars, you’re gonna see a bar and then a box behind it. And it’s just like, okay, they’re all exactly the same. So what can we do to stand out as a whole from that and really just get that click through as quickly as possible. And you’ll see a lot of people like breaking the terms of service and putting like flavor costs where they put like, the chocolate and different things like that. It’s just you can play that game, but you’re gonna get caught at some point, we’d rather just change the actual like packaging of the product a little bit in the image and a lot less likely to get like flagged by Amazon internally. Yeah, but we mess with the colors we mess with making certain text things bigger, really, all different types of things. Because like, at the end of the day, I’ve learned we have no idea what the what the heck’s gonna convert like, I don’t I we sell keto products that’s like our best seller of one of like my personal brands, and I don’t even eat keto foods. I’ve never I did the keto diet once like a month and that was it. So I’m not the end customer. I don’t exactly know what I want to see. I’m just putting up what like market research tells me and Nine times out of 10, we’ve found that a lot of those market research studies like this people are lying or just like filling it out nonchalantly to to get paid on the internet. So we test everything
Josh Hadley 25:11
nice. And mainly through pick foo then or pick foo. And to get started, right, and then you sell on Amazon and see what sticks. Yeah, so
Matt Altman 25:20
pick foo, we actually don’t use pick the we haven’t used it in a really long time. They’re the one of the easiest to like get things up and going. There’s another one out there that just launched called Intellivue. That I think is pretty amazing as well, because they go a bit further where you can add in like all of your top competitors. And they’ll make it look like an Amazon search results. And then you get like different things, you can change your star rating competitors star ratings, like it’s really cool. But we’ve been doing something basically like what IntelliBeam has been doing for years, we just had our graphic designers mock up Amazon search results. And then we were using Amazon MTurk to actually do it because it’s it’s so much cheaper. And with MTurk, you can actually put one of your settings as an Amazon customer who has bought in a certain category within a certain timeframe. So we know we’re getting people that bought within the protein bar space within the last like 90 days, so should be a pretty engaged customer for our audience. And we try and get a few 1000 people through it, it literally takes an hour, maybe like two hours to get that many people through. And we’ll test like six or seven different things. And then we’ll run split tests on Amazon with them.
Josh Hadley 26:32
So you’re using the A B testing feature on Amazon itself to manage your experiments feature.
Matt Altman 26:39
So so we are, we used to do a lot of it manually. And it just it gets too hard to keep track of all of it to be honest. So we’re relying on Amazon to do that the the big piece that’s kind of when we were doing it ourselves we couldn’t figure out is we don’t know like when the peak traffic times on our on Amazon, like we obviously can guess like, hey, Mondays are awesome things like that. But we don’t know what’s happening and specific categories or how it’s all kind of correlating down. So yes, we can switch out the price, the images and things like that. But you can’t really get a correlation to any of that. Since we don’t know the other variables that are there. We’re hoping that Amazon takes those variables into consideration when they are doing these tests. And that way, we’ll get a little bit better results from them.
Josh Hadley 27:25
Yeah, makes sense. What all do you let Amazon test for you? Is it just the images? Are you doing? Copy? What all you have an Amazon test for you using the experiments feature?
Matt Altman 27:35
Yeah, so for us, it’s mainly images and titles. What we’ve seen and we’ve tested this, we’ve launched products with no content besides images and titles, and you can still rank for everything, you can still get sales that it does not matter. And really, yeah, the big thing that I think people forget as an Amazon seller is take some time on like the app or the site and actually just be be a buyer put yourself in their shoes. If you go to any product on mobile. The bullet points are like three quarters of the way down the page. No one No one’s fucking reading in your bullet points.
Josh Hadley 28:09
Yep, it’s very true. A lot of that copy and so far down and then you’re just gonna blit you know, blow right through it when you do get to it anyways, kind of looks like the small fine print like terms and conditions of the product anyways. Yeah. Fascinating that that makes a lot of sense. How do you test price then?
Matt Altman 28:27
Yeah, so we actually use a software for this called Eva guru. They’ve been at a couple of insects. I think they were a billion dollar seller Summit. They’re amazing. We actually started working with them because we had a client that has over a million skews that they actively have to keep pricing Oh my head upon. Yeah, and it’s like a lot of it is they’re they’re reselling other parts and things like that. So we’re constantly competing for BuyBox but they do have a lot of their own I think like 3000 Private Label items that we just want to maximize price on Amazon as much as possible. So they have some awesome tools that really they some of the smartest repressing I’ve ever seen where you can set it like hey, increase my price by this percentage every two days. But if you see declining sales like revert back to this price until you see a steady again and like it’ll do all kinds of crazy things. So I can’t recommend it enough. And for the price I think it’s one of the cheapest reprice errs out there. For really anyone even if you’re small or large.
Josh Hadley 29:29
That’s fantastic. I know you’ve you’ve shared a lot of tools already. So you have Eva Guru, correct as the rent pricing tool. Is that EVA?
Matt Altman 29:38
Yes, it’s EVA.guru.
Josh Hadley 29:41
okay. EVA.guru, okay, and just want to go through these just to make sure I’m on the same page, but also so that our listeners can make sure that I wait, did I hear that correctly? intellia V was another one that you talked about, right? Correct. Yep. So INTELLIVY, I’m assuming?
Matt Altman 29:56
It is INTELLIVY.net is the website. Okay. And this one’s pretty new. It just came or was just released like to the general public, I think a few weeks ago.
Josh Hadley 30:15
Whoo, amazing. We’re getting that hot off the press. Yeah, I love I love that, you know, all of these amazing software tools. And then you also mentioned in Turk, what was that?
Matt Altman 30:26
So it’s actually something from Amazon. So M Turk is Amazon’s micro worker, network, Amazon Mechanical Turk. I can just sign up, create an account. And basically, you can pay whatever you want to do these little micro tasks. So we used to use this for all kinds of things to be honest, like, we used to use it for add to carts back in the day or like upvotes 100 views because it was Amazon accounts. But you can pay like a penny for people to do this and get 1000s of responses for like 1020 bucks.
Josh Hadley 31:00
Interesting. MTurk is what you see. Right?
Matt Altman 31:03
It’s just mturk.com. Okay, easy enough.
Josh Hadley 31:06
Awesome. Matt, what are some other software’s that are maybe new software’s? What are some of the software tools that you have been using that you use to manage these multiple brands that you guys are managing as in your agency?
Matt Altman 31:19
Yeah. So obviously, I think we touched on earlier pack, do we use Pacvue for everything, we’ve tried a lot of the software’s out there. We don’t really care for a lot of the AI ones, because I don’t believe there’s any true AI software in the Amazon advertising space, it’s all fluff. It’s basically just a rule set that they’re applying based on whatever’s happening, which you can do the same and create your own manual rules that will be way better. So that’s why we ended up with Pacvue because they allow you to not only use that AI if you want to, but you can set your own manual rules and really dig into things. We also use Data Dive like daily, Brandon Young’s tool, I cannot say enough good things about that. I think he probably use it as well, like, anyone that’s anyone in this space is using Data Dive. It saves hours upon hours of work for us. Makes sense. Makes sense. I’m trying to think of an Ecom Analytics, we use that quite a bit as well, because they do before the search query report, they were the best way to pull like estimated sales from the brand analytics data. I’m not exactly sure how they were calculating it, but it was pretty close. So we used it quite a bit
Josh Hadley 32:32
fascinating. Those are some awesome tools. I know I’ve already got a few takeaways from this, we just recently started using Pacvue. And we’ve been loving it as well, just the amount of data that we can access. Now the amount of like control that we have being able to establish rules, do this when this happens do that when that happens, has been amazing. So I recommend Pacvue, as well. So let’s rewind and go all the way back to PPC. Right. So you’re starting with these two campaigns, we talked about the exact campaigns, we got off on a tangent of product optimization from hey, if your conversion rate is not where it should be. And that’s the key thing that I think you’ve summed up so well Matt is like, you’re just looking at the conversion rate. And then you do all that troubleshooting. If your conversion rate isn’t up to par, then what what’s the next approach? Matt, let’s assume our conversion rate is we’re, you know, 10% we’re meeting that minimum that our other competitors have? Where do we go from there after those first 30 days?
Matt Altman 33:34
Yeah, so then it really comes down to again, actually some of the same steps, we’re still pulling that impression share report, are we maximizing our impressions? Can we can we spend more on this keyword and potentially get more sales? So we say we are converting well, but we’re only getting like 35% of the impression share? We’ll bump that up and look okay, we increased our impression share last week by like 20 percentage points, what was our actual like increase in sales for that keyword. used to not be able to know this, you had to guess but you can use the search query report now and figure out your organic sales plus your ad sales for that week. And you can see, okay, incrementally, I spent this much more to get that 20% More share, is it actually quantifying out as more dollars in my pocket or a higher run rate for me as a whole. So that makes it super easy. If we continue to see that we’re like, Alright, let’s keep spending and we’ll keep bumping things up from there as much as possible. Only time we really back off is if we’re ranked like number one. But and a lot of the categories we’re in if you are ranked number one and you pull back ads for a couple of days, you instantly fall to like number four or five because really you just lose some sales. So we’re constantly checking that we actually we use Pacvue to manage that they actually have a if my organic rank drops below this increase my bid kind of roll which is awesome because we were having someone pull it in Helium 10, drop it in a spreadsheet, and then they were uploading bulk files and it was a pain in the ass. That would be a lot of work. Yep. So from that point on, it really kind of flows into our kind of steady state. And for us steady state is different than what I think most people do. And this goes for every not even my own products. But every product we manage in the agency, we’re trying to get people to get out of that mindset of a costs and tacos and direct ROI on ads, because Amazon is turning more into, really, it’s, it’s a brand dominated space, and you have to build the audience, build the brand, and continue to grow that and that costs money. So like one of our kind of hero brands that I’ll actually share a case study over with you afterwards. And we can kind of run through some of it here. But they came on with us about a year, year and a half ago, they were doing about $10,000 a month in sales, we’ll close out this month at about 5.7 million. And the main difference is they came to us saying we want to have like a 15% A cost. And I’m like, yeah, we can do that. But you’re leaving so much on the table. And basically the founder came to me like mid COVID. And they’re just like, hey, we’ve got this much money left, we’ve got to make this work. If it doesn’t work, like the company is gonna fold, what should we do? And I was like, alright, well, we can easily spend three, four and $1,000 a month on ads, we had been spending 200,000 Up until this point, started spending that that month, raised it to 150, the first month about 225. The next and then about 350. And the third month, what we saw is, yep, our house was 120 130%. But our repeat purchase on these customers was almost 67%. So we weren’t firing people for I mean, it all goes back to to what the price of your product is they were selling the $19 products. So 120% a cost is really only like a 23 $24 CPA, which if you’re selling traffic to your Shopify site, like I would take that CPA and a Sure. So we related it all back to that and we’re seeing Alright, as long as this person continues to purchase, for this many months, this is what our profit will be. And we really kind of hedged an estimated our LTV of a customer at that point. And we spent towards LTV as long as on LTV, we were breaking even, we were just spending money and like our a cost was to 300% someone’s like, straight up. But now we’re running at a steady state of about 100% A cost across all their products a year later, we’re acquiring around 12,000 new subscribers a month on our products. That’s not not people that repeat purchase, but people that actually Subscribe and Save. And then our repeat purchase rate is still above 40%. So amazing. It’s it’s absolutely dominating, we have over a million and a half dollars in subscribing saves that go out every single month. And they’re just like continue to spend like if we can keep spending more let’s let’s spend and that works.
Josh Hadley 38:07
I love that. And I guess the reason why that works to be able to be willing to basically acquire customers at a loss is because you know the data behind it right? You can project what that lifetime value of a customer is you’ve got Subscribe and Save. So I would assume this is a replenishable product, right? The correct name.
Matt Altman 38:26
Yep. But we we’ve also flipped the same strategy into non replenishable products. So we have a lot. I mean, I would call them like semi replenishable. You buy it every like two years when you break the one that you have kind of thing, okay. But it’s the same math and model that goes into it with just a little bit of a tweak. And basically, we were estimating this before, but with the search query report, you can pull all this data and figure it out, we know exactly how many organic sales are happening for every single keyword. We know if you’re ranking organically for those keywords, this is what you should potentially get in sales weekly. So our entire process for products that aren’t super replenishable is, hey, I’m okay spending at 150 to 100% a cost if I can maintain that number one or number two organic ranking, because I know it’s going to pay me back on the sales from those rankings. And we run everything based off of that model and use a lot of those, like if I’m in this position, decrease my bid. And we kind of ride out those top organic placements until they start to drop. So we’ll pause our ads if we’re in position one or two. And then we’ll turn them back on once we’re like in position four or five, and we just keep riding that wave. And that’s how you you make that profitable.
Josh Hadley 39:42
Interesting. So you’re willing to just kind of like stay in that one or two position even though you’re losing money on the front end. Right. And but you know that that’s boosting your organic rankings across other keywords, right. And then ultimately, you’re you’re counting on the fact They’re like, you’re just getting more money down the road, right? Like, do you run into cashflow issues that way? You know it with some of these brands? And what do you do about that? Right? Because it does take money up front that money goes out the door real quick with Aspen.
Matt Altman 40:14
Yeah, so I would say we do from time to time, obviously, putting it all on credit cards. American Express gold is like our preferred because the Forex rewards and yeah, if you spend over 150k i That’s like when the Forex stops, you can just open more like multiple, we have like 40 employee cards that we just we keep rotating or adspend through. So we keep getting that for x multiplier.
Josh Hadley 40:39
So you get that for every employee card that you add to that
Matt Altman 40:43
it adds on 150,000 for every employee card that you add.
Josh Hadley 40:46
That’s wicked smart, because we even for ourselves, like we max that out pretty quick. And then we’re, I’m going to need to sign up a bunch of employee
Matt Altman 40:55
cards. Yeah, so like that my grandma’s got one of my grandpa got one. I’ve got cousins, they’ve gotta like they’re all just running through our company.
Josh Hadley 41:03
I love it. I love Yeah. Okay, that’s a good, that’s a great ninja hack. Everybody maximize those reward points on Amazon.
Matt Altman 41:11
Yep. So we’re delayed as much as we can there. And this is like our own personal strategy. This is how I do it. And then we have an Amex plum card, you can actually use your plum card through a relationship with bill.com that they have to ACH money to vendors that you’re working with. So we pay our gold cards with our plum card, which then gives you another 60 days to basically pay your ad spend. So we’re looking at like 90 to 120 days on average is when we’re like having to actually pay those bills without taking any loans or anything like that. It’s just arbitrage and these credit cards, you do you pay a slight percentage on the like bill.com, like ACH through the credit card. I think it’s like 1.2 1.3%. But it’s nothing. We just add that into our cost of advertising.
Josh Hadley 42:01
Yeah, that that’s super smart. So what’s the Plum Card? That’s just a new card offering from Amex?
Matt Altman 42:07
Yes, they’ve had it for a while most people don’t go for it, because it actually doesn’t give you rewards points. It will give you a discount. If you pay off your bill in full each month, I forget what that percentage is. We don’t actually ever use it for that. But it gives you 60 days, basically to pay whatever the bill is with no interest. So it’s made for small businesses that may have to carry psalms for longer than what your average credit card period is.
Josh Hadley 42:33
Okay. So you’re, you’re basically transferring the balance or you’re paying off that balance from the gold cards to the Plum cards. Correct? Correct. And then eventually, then you’ll pay off the Plum cards within 60 days.
Matt Altman 42:47
Yep. So yep. So you’re getting basically depend on when you spend like 35 to 40 days on the gold card, and then 60 days on the plum. And the nice thing with the Plum is it’s not a rolling billing period, like most credit cards, it’s actually from the day you spent that money. So if you spend $1,000 on the first of October, you don’t have to pay that back until the first of December. And it’s only that $1,000 Even if you spent $100,000 and October.
Josh Hadley 43:14
Brilliant. That’s amazing. That is a fantastic like cashflow hack, I’m gonna have to add this now to the beginning of the podcast to say, hey, now we’ve always we’re including like cash flow information, because I think that’s so many people overlook that. And it becomes a challenge real quick for brands that are growing rapidly. And so being able to do that without you know, I think there’s there’s a lot of financing partners out there in the Amazon space now, as we all know, but my goodness, like if you take a look at their interest rates, like it’s beyond ridiculous, is it basically you’re like 1% for, you know, 90 to you know, maybe 100 days, right?
Matt Altman 43:55
Yep. And I mean, I’ll preface I would say like it is high risk, like if your account gets suspended or anything happens, like, obviously, you could have some pretty high interest rates. But it works well for us.
Josh Hadley 44:07
Yeah, no, that’s great. Thanks. Thanks for sharing that, Matt.
Matt Altman 44:11
Yeah. But basically, like even on smaller products, say you like we just launched a product here recently with about a $20,000 budget. It was well below kind of a lot of our thresholds. But we just wanted to prove a point because someone was like, well, your product is only successful because you’re putting this much money behind it and losing money for four months to make money at the end. And what we did is if you have a small budget, a lot of times people go for way too many keywords still, like I see it time and time again. They either go for super small keywords, which you can do, like under 1500 to like 3500 searches a month, like yeah, you can do that. You can rank for those, but it’s going to take a very long time to actually build your sales up. And by the time you do get to that point where you can start to spend some money your honeymoon periods gone, all the stuff that helps you rank with the big boys from the beginning is gone. So what we would tend to do in a strategy like that is pick one major keyword that’s getting at least like 30 to 40,000 searches a month. And that is all we would go for on that entire launch. And we know if we can rank in the top five for that keyword, you’re going to pick up an extra six 700 sales per month organically, and all of those small keywords that you’re going to target anyways that have that one, and then you’re going to rank for him. It happens every single time. So we were able to launch a supplement, there was a $20,000 ad budget for basically three months, and we were able to rank it number one for the keyword we’re going after. And we picked up actually, I can check it right now. 35 other number one positions, with that for a total of 142,000 search volume in the top 10 per month.
Josh Hadley 45:52
Amazing. So everything you’ve talked about thus far, you’re just focused on Amazon launches only PPC on Amazon. Are you doing any external marketing? Because I know you guys are very well experienced when it comes to the marketing game? Are you doing anything with external traffic to get those type of results?
Matt Altman 46:12
Yeah, so we do. We run Facebook ads, for launches, we do emails, we do Google ads a lot just ongoing constantly. Really, we’re mixing any type of media we can in. But the biggest one that I’m actually most excited for, and we just started doing this a little bit deeper is affiliates. So the big thing with Amazon associates or affiliates is the Amazon cut their Commission’s tremendously, I think was like a year and a half ago from like seven to 10% to like one to 3% It’s basically nothing. So reversion, which is actually I think now owned by simulate impact you in helium 10, they created a new Amazon version that allows you to link in your brand referral bonus and hand out affiliate codes to Amazon influencers through your brand referral. And not only can you basically pay them, like whatever percentage you want, but like you can add kickers onto it, you can do sweepstakes and things like that, depending on like who refers the most sales that month, and really push those buttons. So I think it’s gonna be a huge game changer. We’ve only been doing it for a few weeks now. And we’re already seeing great results in the products that we’re putting up against. So probably a lot that come in that space and will be a number one spot, they kind of want to push things out to the actually the main reason we got into this as we did due diligence for a acquisition about seven months ago. And through the process, what we found is this product that they were trying to sell us company for, I think they exited for almost half a billion dollars, maybe a little bit more. They were constantly outselling everyone else that had the exact same product by like 60 to 70,000 units a month, and we couldn’t figure it out for the life of us. And what ended up happening is we actually went to sem rush and pulled all the backlinks for their product. They were ranking number one in Google for so many freaking keywords because of their affiliate game for their DTC site that they had almost 1000 people per month from Google clicking out to their Amazon listing. And that’s where every single sale is coming from.
Josh Hadley 48:20
Wow. Okay, so affiliates, we’re driving all of that. Right. Yeah. With reversion. And, again, I, I’ve been introduced to reversion recently, as well, as you’ve gotten started there, did you have to go and find the affiliates? Or did you just, you know, post your offer on reversion and allow, you know, whoever wanted to kind of sign up there? Because I know, running affiliate programs is no small task, right? Like, that’s a job in and of itself, and recruiting and maintaining and creating games and, you know, being no challenges to incentivize people. What have you experienced thus far? I know, it’s really new for you.
Matt Altman 49:00
Yeah. So we did both. The good thing that we’re kind of lucky with with right setup is we actually have an entire affiliate team. So we already have a quiver of top performing affiliates that we work with across all different verticals. So that that made it a lot easier for us to enter. But yeah, this is 100% of full time job. And it’s like, I mean, you’re you’re basically selling yourself to these affiliates, 24/7. And constantly just trying to stay top of mind. It is extremely hard to do and it’s extremely hard to get the big ones because everyone will pay them more and more. But at the end of the day, what we’ve realized is sometimes it’s worth just literally paying them like crazy percentages, like on some of our settlements will pay them like 90% of the sale just because of the traffic they can produce and what that does for us elsewhere.
Josh Hadley 49:48
Fascinating. Yeah, so really incentivizing that front end purchase knowing that you’ve got a funnel to capitalize on that. Now talking about that funnel to capitalize on that lifetime value of a car. customer’s there anything that you do with product inserts? Or, you know, getting people’s emails? Like how do you maximize that lifetime value, if you’re giving away the farm, so to speak, on that front end, so
Matt Altman 50:11
yeah, so we do we do inserts on just about every single product or some sort of like call out for a lead gen. The big one that we’ve been doing here recently is the NFC chips. Not enough to use NFC is the little thing on your credit card that lets you like tap it. Because like, it used to be huge to do the, like supplements that I’m sure if anyone’s been a supplement on Amazon for the last like three years, it’s like go here to get a second bottle for free. Like everyone does that. We’re basically doing a very similar offer, but within an NFC chip that’s hidden under the label, so they don’t realize it. But NFC chips as soon as your phones near that bottle, it’s going to pop up and say there’s something near and people are gonna click back. So like what the hell is near me that’s making this happen. So we’ve had great results with that I would highly, highly suggested there’s dirt cheap, like we thought it was gonna be expensive. They’re like a 10th of a cent apiece to order these is super cheap, and you can stick them on literally anything and everything. They’re just like little, little stickers. So super easy to implement that we just send them straight to a landing page and collect the information. We also do do direct mail still still works very well for us across our brands, our average, like ages 54 Plus on most of our like, okay, my personal products that I sell. So they still convert extremely well. The other thing that we were doing, it’s gotten harder now because Amazon’s like, blocked a lot of the data on both like full addresses and customer names. We used to scrape those and do like data pins through a third party data service that we could try and retarget those people on like Facebook or other
Josh Hadley 51:57
platforms. Yeah, luck. With that, I think those are brilliant strategies. What’s your offer right now using the NFC chips right now? What is your offer? Is it still get a bottle free, but you’re just using the NFC chip? Or what? What’s the offer?
Matt Altman 52:14
Yeah, so for us right now? It depends. So it rotates through a few things. There are some free offers, it basically takes them to like some sort of contest page. And we do give away free bottles. We aren’t doing it. So I would say we’re trying to keep it as kosher with Amazon as possible. So like, yes, there is a chance to win a free bottle. Yes, like a lot of people win free bottles. But there’s other chances for coupons and things like that. And then what we’re doing from there is once we have their phone number or their email address, we’re paying them within that first week and basically giving them an offer that’s valid on both our DTC site as well as Amazon. And whichever offer they pick from that email is basically how we communicate to them in the future. So if they pick our DVC site, we’re always going to send them to DTC if they pick Amazon, we’re always going to send them to Amazon from there on out. Because we tested this a bunch on super large lists that we had. And what we found is when we gave them both offers, people don’t like choice. By converts way less if you give them the choice of which one to go to, versus just telling them here’s the offer, here’s where it’s at. So use that first email get their preference, if they don’t interact with that first email, they basically keep getting an iteration of that email and tell they react to one and then they’ll kind of follow our flows from there.
Josh Hadley 53:40
Interesting. Yeah, I love that. So on that point, how much do you spend, you know, focused on your D to C website? Right? Especially as it relates to like affiliate traffic, right? I think a lot of people would say, Oh, well, Amazon is just gonna take, you know, a lot of your money. So why send people to Amazon right now we have the brand referral bonus now. But prior to that, or even with that, today, people would still make the argument of Oh, you’ll have better margins, just send them directly to your DTC shop. So sounds like you have both going on. So what’s your kind of strategy and recommendation there?
Matt Altman 54:15
Yeah. So for us, it, it really comes down to the way that you view Amazon and I think a lot of people just look straight at like sales and sales out what are my fees? That That means nothing. Amazon is a search arbitrage channel. It’s not a search demand creator, you’re arbitrage in what’s already there. If you are not ranking well, for a keyword you can arbitrage so no matter what, like Sam paid an affiliate and extremely high commission plus the Amazon fees like it’s all a cost of business on Amazon. It’s all an add. As long as it meets my CPA thresholds. I’m going to continue to do that because the more you can push sales through Amazon, the higher you’re going to rank organically, the more you’re going to benefit from just that traffic flywheel that Amazon allows you to arbitrage so we’re agnostic to where you go, like we don’t care. As long as you’re coming to us and buying a if you’re like our main brand sells in Whole Foods, we’re in Walmart, we’re an Amazon de to see Instacart. I don’t care where you’re buying us from, I just want you to be thinking of us and buy that. That’s it. So we’ll touch you on every channel and whichever one you want to go to. That’s your choice.
Josh Hadley 55:22
Makes make sense. So with affiliates, you’re you’re allowing them to kind of give multiple links? Or are you trying to push more towards Amazon? Or do you have like a preference?
Matt Altman 55:33
Yeah, so it really depends on the affiliate. Like, I think this is where it gets super detailed on affiliate marketing is you need to look at who their audiences you need to look at. Okay, this is that age range? Where does that age range go to shop? Where are they going to see me? How am I going to pitch this offer to them and really tailoring it that to that specific niche. So for like, all of our affiliates, they will only send to one site per campaign. Most of the time, it’s either Amazon or RTC sites, I would say like, usually it’s like 70%. Amazon just because we see like we just did the campaign last week, and I’m looking right now, our keywords in the top 10 For our main product went from 71 to 145, with over 1.2 million search volume now in the top 10, just from that affiliate push. So yes, it costs me like $30,000 to do that. But the sales this week, we’ll probably do five 6000 units a day on that one listing for the next
Josh Hadley 56:31
week and a half. Amazing, amazing. You’ve got so much experience and you see so much data there, you’ve you’ve got 12 years of experience. So you know your stuff, Matt, you’ve got a wealth of knowledge you’ve already shared so much with us today. For our audience, they’re established sellers, right? They’re looking to go to that next level, they want to break into eight figures and beyond. So Matt, with your experience, you’ve done a lot of deal due diligence for some huge brands as well. What is it that you would recommend for those people that want to move to eight figures? And beyond? What should they be focused on?
Matt Altman 57:07
Yeah, so I actually get this question a lot. And I think the biggest thing is a lot of us as Amazon sellers get caught up in our day to day and we kind of get like, you get a taste of success, and you get this superiority complex, like happened to me happened to a lot of people that I know. And at the end of the day, that’s that’s only going to cause problems. It’s when you start kind of twiddling your thumbs and you’re doing stupid things like should I add this product to this variation? Should I add this color and like none of these are going to move the needle incrementally in your business like you can add 20 Different colors, it’s not going to make a difference. So really focusing on new products and launching new products, we try and launch four to five new products a month. And if they don’t perform, we kill them within three months. Like it’s a very quick to market quick to kill. And what we’ve seen though, is Amazon favors that like all of our old products, we’ll get a huge boost when we are consistently launching new products on that brand. Rom. Like tremendous bumps, it’s it’s actually really surprising. And if you read some of the the Amazon like science papers, I don’t know if you’ve ever gone there. It’s like Amazon sciences. If you Google it, you can find it. And then search for I think it’s called cold starts. Just search cold start and you’ll find it but it’s basically a white paper on the patents and how the algorithm works for Amazon. And one of the key things is how many new products is this brand launching. So they’re weighing that in and they’re looking at as a brand, how many units to sell on a monthly basis? How is that increasing month over month. So as long as you’re launching new products that should always be somewhat increasing. So you you get favorable benefit from Amazon. But the other big piece that I’ve seen, and this is something that we just I would say like Yes, probably in about a year now we finally figured this out. And it was like Man, why did we not think of this before. So like pretend you’re selling in the gardening niche, and you sell like one of those extendable hoses because I see those everywhere. At the end of the day, if you continue to launch products in that niche, you’re gonna launch let’s do like an attachment for the hose like a spray nozzle, you’re gonna have an overlapping keyword sub segment of like 78 to 80% of your keywords because a lot of those products come with a free attachment. It’s like their their free offer when you buy the product kind of thing. What we do now and we use Data Dive and actually a couple other tools to do this, but we look and see okay, right now, how many keywords? Are we ranking in the top 10 For for this entire brand? What are those keywords? Here’s the 30 products in our product opportunity list, the top sellers for each of those keywords or each of those like sub segments. Where are they ranking? And what is that overlapping keyword relevancy? So we’re now instead of launching like the next logical product as of that hose attachment, we’re gonna go to like a garden kneeling stance, it’s still in the same vertical, you can still brand it under the same brand. But that’s almost 100%, like non competing search traffic. And you’re basically, in a roundabout way, increasing your traffic back to your original listing, because if you’re buying like a kneeling stand for the garden, more than likely, you’re going to need a hose at some point. So you’re just continuing to build your brand kind of outreach through these new products without overlapping the same customers that you currently have. Yeah.
Josh Hadley 1:00:38
And you’re in you would kind of advise against trying to create products that overlap on the same keywords, because then you just start, you know, eating away, I guess, some cannibalization. Right, and then you start destroying your own organic ranking, is that
Matt Altman 1:00:51
correct? Yeah. So like our main brands, we sell low carb, keto snacks, if you search keto snack, like, we buy the top, like for ad placements 90% of the day, every day, because all of our products kind of relate to their one product in that like line of I think we have seven keto products. Now one product gets 80% of the sales for that keyword. No matter what we do, it doesn’t matter if we switch the adspend to higher on the ones that don’t normally get those sales, it still goes to that one. So we’re kind of like stepping away from keto products now as a whole and working on different like dietary restrictions just to extend our reach a bit more, but it try and make it as varied as possible. Yeah,
Josh Hadley 1:01:31
fascinating. Well, I think another game changer. And I’ve never heard somebody talk about this. But as part of Amazon’s ranking algorithm, like launching products, is a component of that. I’ve never, I’ve never heard that before. But I believe it i Sounds logical to me. And again, that’s what Amazon wants, right? They want brands to be bringing new products to their channel, Amazon wants to stay relevant. They want to be, you know, the place people always go to, instead of, you know, becoming an afterthought. So love that I think that’s a huge mindset shift for a lot of sellers have, just keep feeding the Amazon beast, bringing out new products. And then going back to you know, You’re quick to launch and then you’re quick to kill. After 90 days, Matt, you know, how do you make that determination of like that this product is not going to cut it? We’re just going to kill it. What are the metrics that you use to make that call? Because I think all of us, you know, and again, sometimes it’s an emotional attachment to the product for a lot of sellers. It’s like, oh, I believe in this. I know, I can make it work like, Do you have a case study or two that you could share? That’s like, here’s the product like it wasn’t meeting these criteria. We did all of the optimization stuff that we talked about earlier in this podcast, still didn’t work. And we killed it. Right? Do you have anything you could share there? Yeah, so we peg
Matt Altman 1:02:50
everything to like a net return after like four to five months, and we want to hit a certain number for us with our products have to make us at least like 75, sometimes 100,000 a month, or we don’t want to continue launching it or even like paying to play in that position. Because we know we can launch another product that will get us there and we don’t have to worry. So that’s the first thing if the after like three to four months, it’s not hitting those targets, or we’re just not like mainly because you’re not like sticking your organic keywords. It it’s just not worth it to continue to pay to battle that because we aren’t really getting any true benefit from it if we’re constantly spending a ton on ads for it. The second thing is actually user feedback. So we we strive on having like premium products, and we want to make sure that hey, if our product is not the best that’s on the market, we’re gonna take it off. We actually we launched a Keto gummy, did extremely well back in March, we were selling almost 2000 units a day across three flavors. We ended up killing it three months in because we were kept getting feedback from our customers that like hey, like, there’s something wrong with this. Like we don’t like the texture of it. It’s just like it’s sticky this and that. And we could see that our reviews were already starting to drop. We were like, I think we had over 1000 reviews at that point. We were slowly ticking down like point one each week. And I was like, Alright, we’re going to hit like three stars in this product. It’s going to happen. So we figured, alright, we will kill it. And we lost this was on I think we lost almost $30,000 on we killed it. We destroyed all the inventory. We had 20,000 units still left. And we reformulated it and we’re getting ready to relaunch it here the end of next month. But for us, it’s like, hey, this brand is selling well across multiple products. If this is your first interaction with our brand, you’re never going to want to try another one of our products and we don’t want to be putting that foot forward. So upfront, it cost us a lot but in the long run it would have cost us 10 times as much.
Josh Hadley 1:04:57
Yeah, I think that that’s a brilliant takeaway there, right? Because you’re not just focused on, hey, I’ve got to make sales on this product, which I think so many people when they launch your products, like, I only care about just making money on this, and they exclude, or they forget about the overall brand appearance, right. And as you so eloquently, you know, disseminated to us, you’ve got to understand that this is a much bigger picture, Amazon is moving into the whole brand space, you’ve got to be bringing a brand to the table. Kevin King was on the podcast. That’s the one thing he talked about. He’s like, you’ve got to create an experience with the customer. Long gone are the days of just slapping a logo or a brand name on a product and hoping that sells well. You got to create this cohesive experience. And you’ve established that with a lot of your examples here today, man. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I’ve got another question. I want to ask you, but I didn’t want to cut you off there. Do you have something else you wanted to add onto that?
Matt Altman 1:05:54
Oh, yeah, the only other thing that I was gonna say is, so we’ve been doing a lot of testing now with like this, like build the brand out as much as possible. The big piece on like those brand engagement emails, I don’t know if you guys have seen any of these, but we’ve been doing the repeat customers, recent customers and like high spenders, all of our previous emails, when we just had that one, only two followers, we’re lucky if we got one sale, our last four emails have all produced over $3,000 in sales.
Josh Hadley 1:06:24
Wow. So you’ve been seeing success with the new kinds of emails that Amazon’s allowing us to send out the app. That’s great. I think that’s a great component. And I think as you can see Amazon’s leaning more into this giving the brands more tools to communicate to customers, which is good, which is good. So Matt, as we wrap things up here today, I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from each episode. Here are three takeaways that I noted, Matt. So let me know if I’m missing something. I mean, we could, this list could honestly be like 100 takeaways from today. But the three that I kind of highlighted, and these are big, overarching themes, and then you can, you know, dive deeper into these. But I think number one takeaway is you have to be launching new products, aggressively, right, quick to launch and then quick to kill products. That’s your number one takeaway, if you’re not focused on finding your next new product, you’re already behind the eight ball, you should always have a pipeline of, you know, 18 months, two years, three years worth of products that, you know, you’re going to be coming out with number two, is focused on PPC optimization when launching a product and getting in getting rid of the whole thought process of what’s my A cos? What’s my tacos, percentage? Remove that and focus more on what is my conversion rate for those specific keywords? And how is that comparing to my competitors. And you can see all of that data and brand analytics. And that’s a big mindset shift that people need to implement today with our PPC campaigns, because you could forever spend money on a keyword. But if you’re your conversion rates battle, good luck trying to improve that performance of that, right. Yep. And then last thing that I have here, as an action item is optimization. And one of the first things that you should be doing in terms of product optimization is focused on that primary image. And then depending on where Amazon goes with this, you know, flipping to a first and second image in the search results, focus on that primary image, and then even your secondary image making sure that it’s readable, it’s easy to understand quick hit, somebody can look at it within a second, they understand what that product is about, conveys a lot of value to them, in differentiating yourself, then we have a lot of software tools that you shared with us as well to be able to implement many of these tactics here today. Matt, did I sum things up properly? Anything else that you would add that I missed?
Matt Altman 1:08:59
Ah, no, I think you hit it all. Right, I think the only other thing that I would add is really step back from your business and think strategically about what you’re doing in your day to day. We did this a couple years ago and actually found out I was the bottleneck and like 90% of everything that was either not getting done or getting like tossed to the side for that period. And really either hire good talent that you can remove yourself from those pieces, or rework the way that you’re doing some of these processes to remove yourself in that bottleneck because it’s you don’t realize where most of your time is going throughout the day and you get stuck doing the same stuff that doesn’t really actually move the needle.
Josh Hadley 1:09:46
Yep, I could 100% agree with you on that statement. I think us as entrepreneurs battle with that on an ongoing basis and you move into something new and you start figuring that out and you have to do that time study and start offloading delegating more and, and continue climbing and moving on further. Great takeaway. Matt, my final question for you is, who in the E commerce space should people be paying attention to? Or following, you know, to stay up to date with the latest trends or to stay ahead of the game? When it comes to ranking on Amazon? Who would you recommend as some people to pay attention to?
Matt Altman 1:10:23
Yeah. Honestly, I think Brandon Young puts out some of the best content in the space. Like my issue with a lot of the gurus out there is they’re actually doing anything that they talk about like Brandon’s in the trenches, he’ll tell you like, what’s happening, and very honest about it. His group is great as well. From an ads perspective, I think Destaney over at Better AMS is always pumping out great content, 24/7, whether it’s like on Facebook or LinkedIn, they’re doing some awesome things. And I think there’s anyone else outside of that. Not many else that we’re looking at right now.
Josh Hadley 1:11:01
I think both of those are some great names. And again, Brandon Young, will be a future podcast guests that we look forward to sharing or hearing his insights as well. But Matt, thank you so much for your time. This was a lot of valuable information. Where can people go to learn more about you, your agency, and I think you also have a free gift as like a free audit that you’re going to give people right?
Matt Altman 1:11:25
Yeah. So you can find out more about us and our agency, just start by going to RightSideUp.com. And if you fill out the contact us form down below we we are offering free audits to anyone that listens to the podcast. So just mentioned that and we’ll go ahead and get that taken care of for you.
Josh Hadley 1:11:46
Awesome. Thanks again for joining us, Matt, and we’ll chat with you again soon.
Matt Altman 1:11:50
Sounds good. Thanks for having me.
Outro 1:11:51
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