Plenty of steps take place between a customer seeing a product and deciding to buy it. These steps encompass various factors, such as their personal preferences, the price of the item, product reviews, and much more. It’s your goal as a seller to convert as many leads into customers as possible. While you can’t control every decision a buyer makes, you can help steer them toward your product, boosting your chances of making a sale.
To better understand what goes through customers’ minds, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the Amazon marketing funnel. A marketing funnel is the most direct route that a customer takes to make a purchase. Understanding how this funnel works is crucial to boosting your conversion rate and increasing sales. It can also help you engage with your customers on a deeper level and leave a lasting impression on them.
Here’s what you need to know about the Amazon marketing funnel and how it can enhance your marketing strategy.
What is an Amazon Marketing Funnel?
An Amazon marketing funnel refers to a cycle that customers go through prior to making a purchase. The funnel categorizes key milestones that shoppers reach throughout their buying journey. Ultimately, the goal is to get customers to travel through the entire funnel until they become loyal buyers of your products.
Although the marketing funnel is a concept used across various brands and platforms, the Amazon funnel is specifically designed with Amazon sellers in mind. Understanding each stage of the funnel and optimizing your marketing strategy to hit every milestone will help you grow your audience.
Why Amazon Sellers Need a Marketing Funnel
Even though the customer journey isn’t always as linear as the funnel suggests, understanding the core concept can help you better measure your progress. This will enable you to determine what you need to change or keep the same going forward.
The Amazon funnel helps you take decisive action during each stage of the process, from awareness to loyalty. During the initial stage, you can use the funnel to optimize ad campaigns that attract new leads. Once you have those leads, you can take steps to nurture them and maintain their interest. Eventually, some of those leads will become loyal advocates for your brand, which is crucial to your long-term success.
Stages of the Amazon Marketing Funnel
Before you implement the marketing funnel into your own eCommerce strategy, it’s important to understand what each stage of the funnel represents. We’ll dive into all four stages to give you a clearer idea of what they entail. Once you’re more familiar with each phase of the funnel, you can apply your marketing strategy to every stage.
Awareness
Awareness is the first stage of any marketing strategy. Before your customers can become fans of your products, you need to make them aware that they exist. Awareness refers to how familiar customers are with your brand. They might recognize it by its name, advertisements, design, or messaging. All of these features are integral parts of your brand and help define it.
To promote brand awareness, you first need to conduct consumer research. This helps you clearly define your target market so that you can direct your messaging to the right audience. From Amazon Marketing Cloud ads to social media campaigns, there are various channels available to you to increase brand awareness.
Consideration
During the consideration stage, your goal is to increase the likelihood that a buyer will consider your brand and products. Your key marketing tool during this phase is your brand messaging. Brand messaging can come in a variety of forms, including slogans, advertisements, or taglines. To be effective, your messaging should be brief and convey the most crucial aspects of your brand.
You should also address one of three main points in your messaging:
- A key consumer interest
- A pressing question your audience has
- A problem that your customers need a solution to
The goal is to educate your audience on your brand as well as illustrate how your products meet their specific needs.
Conversion
If you’re successful during the consideration stage, your customers will follow you to the next step, which is conversion. Conversion is the stage in which a customer actually purchases your product. If you successfully convert a shopper, it means you’ve convinced them that your product is the optimal solution to their problem. This is the first major step toward building a loyal customer base.
A detailed and compelling product page is crucial to boosting your conversion rate. On Amazon, optimized product listings go a long way. From improving your SEO strategy to including high-quality product images, it’s important to take each step of the listing creation process seriously. Ensure your brand also offers exceptional customer service to boost shoppers’ confidence in their purchasing decisions.
Loyalty
Once customers decide to purchase your product, it’s your job to provide them with the best experience possible. The purchasing process should be easy and hassle-free, and the product you deliver to them should be high-quality. This positive experience will stay in your customers’ minds and help them look favorably upon your brand.
It’s also important to follow up with buyers and continue to nurture your relationship with them. These positive interactions will make shoppers more likely to become repeat customers. Some ways you can stay relevant to customers include staying in touch via email, communicating with them on social media, or establishing loyalty programs.
Stages of Customer Awareness
To help you more fully understand customer awareness, let’s break it down into stages. Each phase of awareness presents an opportunity to attract customers to your brand and encourage them to purchase your products. Here are the main stages of customer awareness and how you can navigate each one.
Unaware
At this stage, the buyer has no knowledge of your brand or products. They don’t yet realize that they have a problem that your business can solve. Your goal at this stage is to introduce customers to your product and educate them about its benefits. From creating a compelling product detail page to using Amazon ad software, there are numerous ways to help steer buyers toward your brand.
The unaware stage is typically the most difficult to navigate as a seller because you’re essentially starting from zero. However, by putting in the work and staying consistent, you can get shoppers to pay attention to your products.
Problem Aware
At this level, the customer is now aware that they have a problem that needs to be solved. However, they do not yet realize that your product is the solution to their problem. Amazon shoppers are inundated with options, and there is no shortage of competition in any product category. Your job at this stage is to show buyers what makes your product different from your competitors’.
This is your opportunity to highlight your product’s benefits to customers. By helping shoppers understand how owning your product would improve their lives, you can increase your chances of making a sale.
Solution Aware
Customers who reach this stage realize that there is a solution out there for their specific problem. That said, they are not yet aware that your particular product exists. Navigating this stage requires a little less work than the previous stages. This is because the customer is already cognizant of the solution they’re looking for, so you just need to direct them to the best solution, which is your product.
This phase is a good opportunity to design ads that highlight your product’s key features and benefits. Once your ads reach the right audience, buyers will become aware that your product exists and is the best solution.
Product Aware
You’ve finally reached the point where your target customer knows that your product exists. Although they haven’t yet made a purchase at this stage, it’s still your job to give them a compelling reason to choose your offering. Think of this step as the final push to get shoppers to buy your product.
You’ve already caught the consumer’s attention with ads and a product page, so now all you need to do is sell them with social proof. This can include customer testimonials, case studies, or something similar. Showing people why other shoppers believe in your products is a powerful strategy for boosting sales.
Most Aware
If you’ve reached this final stage, you can consider yourself a success on Amazon’s marketplace. Customers who fall under the “most aware” category are loyal to your brand. They have already purchased one or more of your products and are enthusiastic about what you do. To keep these customers engaged, it’s important to stay in their minds. You can do this by providing stellar customer service and staying in contact with them about business updates and new product releases.
Creating a loyalty program can also tell you which customers have the most active interest in your brand. In addition, try to reach out to them with personalized recommendations based on past purchases to encourage regular sales.
How to Drive Traffic Through Your Amazon Funnel
To ensure that your Amazon funnel is as effective as possible, you need to take the initiative to drive traffic to it. Each stage of the funnel, from awareness to loyalty, presents ample opportunities to boost visibility and sales for your products.
Amazon SEO
Amazon SEO is a powerful marketing tool that lets you target users whose search intent aligns with your brand. With Amazon SEO, you can expand your reach via the search box, search results page, sales rank, search filters, and more. Customers use most or all of these features, either directly or indirectly, to find the products they want more easily. By optimizing each feature, you can help your products reach the right buyers.
Amazon PPC
Amazon PPC is Amazon’s advertising platform. It allows sellers to promote their products on the Amazon marketplace. The PPC (pay-per-click) model only requires you to pay an advertising fee when a customer clicks on your ad. If your ad is running but isn’t garnering any clicks, Amazon will not charge you. PPC ads are one of the most cost-effective strategies for boosting traffic to your page, as you only have to invest money in customers who are interested in your products.
External Traffic
While it’s important to advertise your brand within the Amazon marketplace, you can further boost traffic by promoting off-platform as well. From creating video content to setting up Google ads, there are numerous avenues that you can explore to increase the visibility of your products. Here are some of the key types of external traffic to focus on.
Amazon DSP
The Amazon Demand Side Platform (DSP) can help you leverage your ads both on and off Amazon. DSP allows sellers to purchase video and display ads at scale with programmatic ad purchasing. Amazon’s advanced ad algorithm automatically chooses which digital ad slots to buy, as well as the price of each one. With help from DSP’s exclusive insights, you can reach your audience wherever they are. Sellers can also utilize the performance reporting feature to easily and accurately measure the success of their ads.
Social Media
If you don’t already have social media accounts tied to your brand, now is the time to set them up! Social media is a great way to connect with your customers and keep them up to date with your products. When used correctly, social platforms can also help drive traffic to your product listings. The key is to create engaging posts that resonate with your customers. We also recommend doing some market research to see which social media platforms your audience spends the most time on. This can help ensure that you’re present for them.
Don’t overlook Google ads when building your external marketing strategy. Customers who aren’t already on Amazon and are looking for a product are likely searching for it on Google. By setting up ads that directly target your audience’s needs and strategically placing them on Google search results, you can drive more traffic to your product page and increase your sales.
Email List
Subscribers to your email list are some of your most loyal customers. If a buyer signs up for your newsletter, you can be confident that they’re already a fan of your products. The goal of your email list is to keep those customers interested and engaged in your brand. Additionally, by including links to special offers and new products, you can drive traffic and further boost sales.
Funnel Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
While setting up your funnel for success, it’s common to run into roadblocks and pitfalls along the way. Here are some of the more basic mistakes to avoid as you create your Amazon marketing funnel.
Not Testing
Building your funnel is a process of trial and error. To figure out what works and what doesn’t, it’s crucial to test out several options first. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different audiences, ad creatives, links, keywords, and product descriptions while creating your funnel.
As you’re testing, be methodical. You shouldn’t say, “Well, this image with this copy and this link didn’t work, so I’m going to start from scratch.” Take it back to basics and apply the scientific method to your tests.
Poor Copy
Your copy is where you sell customers on your product. If your copy is poorly written, lacks detail, or fails to engage your audience, it’s unlikely that you’ll convert them. It’s important not to overlook the written portion of your content and ensure that it’s a strong representation of your brand.
Neglecting Nurturing and Loyalty
When creating your funnel, it’s easy to focus solely on acquiring new customers. However, don’t neglect the customers you already have. It’s crucial to nurture your relationship with them by staying in contact and keeping them engaged with special deals and loyalty programs.
Optimize Your Marketing Funnel With Trellis
With Trellis’ software, you can reach your customers with the right ads at the right time, every time. Use our software to develop ad strategies that pair well with optimized product listings and the perfect price point. Qualified sellers can start with a free 30-day trial today.