Long-term Customer Loyalty
Focusing on long-term customer loyalty is integral to the sustained success of any business in today’s competitive marketplace. In an era where consumers have an array of options at their fingertips, building and maintaining long-term customer loyalty has become more challenging yet more crucial than ever before.
In this blog, we will explore the importance of long-term customer loyalty, shedding light on Amazon’s Achilles Heel – consumer trust – and how your seller account can benefit from its shortcomings. We will delve into the strategies that empower you to invest in what you can control, develop a resilient brand identity, and stay ahead in the loyalty game.
Some of the failures, Amazon’s examples:
- In a study by Market Pulse, they found that Amazon’s private “Our Brands” umbrella (not accompanied by the name AmazonBasics) did not perform well. They are not making it as category leaders. A shocking 1% of total sales when most companies with private labels 25% or more of their sales. This is despite Amazon’s ability to use internal data that allows them to showcase products and steal market share. source
- Why are their brands not resonating with customers?
- Likely no trust built – no social media presence (happy belly, mamabear, stone & beam, p2n peak performance nutrition)
- Hardly any optimized content (images and copy)
Data
- Research things that annoy customers about sellers or eCommerce, list stats here
Getting to it — BUILDING TRUST, elaborating in-depth about how to do these.
- Refer to a relevant Lab 916 blog
- I have a presence outside of Amazon and leading people to it.
- Both Amazon algorithms and consumers trust a product or brand more when there’s proof of its goodness. Amazon likes when you have outside traffic that leads to your product, and customers like to see that your brand can be trusted. Branding gives you the power to demand your price among the thousands of other sellers.
- Make sure you’re shipping is on point.
- 66% of the top 10,000 sellers use FBA.
- Organizing your inventory and separating ads
- Optimizing content
- Our in-house creative team works together, too, when you’re working with multiple brands of your own. “Everything you do impacts your on-page conversion rate,” “organically ranking for keywords.”
- Staying up to date on relevant trends and applying those changes to your listings quarterly
- Stay in touch with your customers — do what you can to capture their contact information and email. After all, the goal of selling on amazon is exposure! After getting that exposure, you need to capitalize inspo
- Coupons, price drops, influencer programs
- Elaborate on how to do these things
According to a study by Marketplace Pulse, there are over 2 million brands and more than 5 million seller accounts on Amazon worldwide. If you didn’t feel like your seller account was a mere speck of dust in the Amazon universe yet, you might be feeling like it now–sorry!
Don’t let the existential dread set in yet, though. As big as Amazon is, $63.4 Billion in Q2 “big” to be exact, it hasn’t unlocked the secret to influencing consumer behavior. Or maybe it has and just doesn’t put it to use for their own seller accounts and brands.
At Lab 916, an Amazon Optimization Agency based in Sacramento, we help global brands leverage Amazon for their business. Some of the most effective strategies I’ve uncovered to maintain successful seller accounts have been born out of observing Amazon’s own failings.
You’re in luck because today, you get to learn how to develop long-term sustainable seller account growth by increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction on Amazon without making these costly mistakes yourself.
Amazon’s Achilles Heel: Consumer Trust
It will serve your seller account well to remember that Amazon is not your friend; it is your business partner.
Amazon will do what it can to be in a position to win. Its practice of steering customers away from competing products is well-known, as Amazon’s aggressive private label ads frequently appear on competitor listings, its products are elevated in search results, and its more specific consumer insights from pay-per-click advertising are never shared with sellers.
However, their mediocre success with their own in-house brands (that are not associated with AmazonBasics or Amazon Essentials) is proof that even Amazon is not perfect, and its intended brand disruptors are not as successful as audiences are led to believe.
When considering how the tech giant could miss the mark when the odds are in their favor, simply take a look at the differences between optimized listings and un-optimized listings.
From an external viewpoint, the differences that can be visibly quantified are the core tenants we at Lab 916 believe are basic necessities for successful seller accounts to have: an established brand presence, keyword-optimized copy, and communicative images.
Looking at some of Amazon’s private label brands, such as Peak Performance Nutrition, Happy Belly, and Ravenna Home, you’ll find that even the most successful products from each brand are not optimized to convert.
It may not be impossible for Amazon to take up an entire department to handle its optimization, as currently, only 1% of their entire sales revenue comes from their in-house brands. This is to your benefit, though, because it’s an indicator that your seller account has the ability to compete.
How Your Seller Account Can Benefit From Amazon’s Shortcomings
The weakness with Amazon’s products is its reliance on the Amazon name. The platform has evolved as a place known to provide consumers with unlimited choices, which is ironic because Amazon itself has not evolved with the increased competition. Here’s how your seller account can benefit from learning about Amazon’s shortcomings.
Invest in What You Can Control
As a business with a professional seller account, customer feedback on a product can make or break your account’s health. To reduce the possibility of negative feedback, you’ll need to make sure that your listings accurately portray what customers will receive.
When looking through Amazon brand listings, you’ll notice there’s hardly any effort put into their product images or bulleted points. The lesson here is that when you’re competing, consumers still value branding that resonates.
In terms of converting customers, as a business with a seller account, it’s important to stand out among your competition. Hiring a copywriter or graphic designer to help effectively communicate the benefits of your product will pay off. Adding branded elements to infographic-style images and improving the quality of keyword-rich copy will put you a step ahead.
Develop Your Brand
Notice with the Amazon brands above; a simple Google search will reveal that none of them have external social media preferences, meaning no opportunity for the customer to stay connected or develop loyalty.
Establishing your products as brands will benefit your seller account in more than just one way.
According to speculations by various sources about Amazon’s new A10 algorithm, Amazon has started to place more value on conversions from external web traffic. Targeting external traffic not only gives you an advantage over other competitors, doing so can help increase your seller account authority, giving your seller account control over the buy box.
Before promoting your products, though, you’ll need to know your target audience and hone in on singular brand identity. Use that newly established voice to improve your advertising copy, website, images, and any other public communication assets that are visible on social media platforms to improve the longevity of your business.
Sourcing traffic through email newsletters from your website’s subscriber list, running social media ads, and creating landing pages are all ways to positively increase traffic to your listing while building a relationship to improve your customer lifetime value.
Staying Ahead
Most established sellers know: that to stay ahead, you need to keep thinking ahead. To maintain seller account success on a platform as competitive as Amazon, invest in ways to record your own data.Â
There are multiple software services that retain your ad data for longer than Amazon does (an unimpressive 2 weeks) so that you can track trends. This will become increasingly important as the frequency of customers who use voice shopping grows because your product visibility may depend on it.
Conclusion
The eCommerce universe is big enough for everyone–you just have to know how to rise to the top. Investing in what you can control to perform better than your competitors, including Amazon, is your key to making it big.
