In this article, you’ll learn how to get a consistent stream of external traffic (people) coming to your Amazon listing with credit cards in hand, ready to purchase your product. More importantly, you’ll learn how to own that traffic, and avoid the dangers of selling on Amazon without a safety net.

As the nation’s largest online marketplace, Amazon is everything to everyone. So it’s no surprise that ecommerce sellers are flocking to the site in droves to sell their private label products. By selling on Amazon, sellers are able to tap into a network of over 150 million loyal Amazon Prime Members worldwide.

While the opportunities are enormous to cash in on the platform’s traffic well, it’s also becoming more challenging to compete with other sellers vying for the same coveted traffic. That’s where driving external traffic to your Amazon listing becomes more crucial to your success as an Amazon seller.

When you are able to control the flow of traffic and buyers to your product, the Amazon algorithm will reward you by ranking your product higher in the search results. More Amazon Prime Members will organically see your product, and more Amazon profits will come your way.

The Winning Formula

SPOILER ALERT: The big secret is you create a sales funnel, tell your dream customer a great story, and that sells your Amazon product. That’s the winning formula.

Your Dream Customer

The first step in this process is to understand your dream customer just as well as, or even better than, themselves.

What are the core pains they are trying to move away from, and the core passions and desires they are trying to move towards?

For example, someone purchasing a snow shovel may want to avoid the pain of having their car stuck in the snow after a big snowstorm. Something like this can cause them to be late to work which may be frowned upon by their boss. By purchasing a snow shovel, they will avoid this pain and keep intact their good track record to a desired work promotion, and increased perceived status.

This example may be a little far-fetched, but it goes to show that even the most inanimate objects have a core pain point and desire to it.

Now let’s look at the same example of a snow shovel in a more practical manner. What are the core pain points and desires of your specific customer? To find the answer, look no further than the reviews on Amazon for the same or similar products:

In the above example, we see that one of the core pain points is to avoid pulling a back muscle while shoveling. One of the desires mentioned in the review is that the shovel lasts a lifetime.

Here’s another example:

One part of the pain point identified in this example is the height of the shovel. The desire is to have a taller handle. Ideally, you would want to dig in more to learn about the specific pain points and the cause and effect of each. With thousands of reviews on Amazon for this particular product, you could spend hours digging in and learning more about your dream customer!

Understanding this will allow you to craft a marketing message that speaks directly to your dream customer, and will properly position your product as the solution to their core pains.

The consequence of not understanding this will result in lower sale conversion rates for your product when running traffic to it. If Amazon thinks no one wants your product because your traffic is not converting into paying customers, they will bury your product in the Amazon search results.

Where are Your Dream Customers Congregating?

One of the common misconceptions about traffic is that you have to create traffic, but this just isn’t true. Traffic—your dream customer—is already there. It already exists, and all you have to do is tap into that traffic.

This is not particularly difficult to do since generally, people will congregate in groups that are the most similar to them.

If you’re a fan of football, then there’s a good chance you also have friends that love football. You may follow a few of your favorite football players on Instagram, participate in fantasy football groups on Facebook, or watch a Sunday Night Football highlight reel on your favorite YouTube sports channel.

Similarly, people who purchase snow shovels tend to gather in areas where snowfall occurs. Some states and cities are more prone to snowfall than others, but this market is pretty broad so it’s good to note that your warmest traffic will be your sub-market. Who in particular would benefit the most from the type of shovel you are selling? Tall people? Short people? Someone who’s interested in the best ergonomic shovel? Or maybe it’s someone interested in buying products only made of environmentally-friendly materials.

If you don’t really understand who your dream customer is, then it will be much harder to find them.

Further in the article, we’ll discuss how to leverage these congregations to drive traffic to your Amazon product.

Not All Traffic is Created Equally

So now that you understand who your dream customer is and where to find them, you will want to segment this traffic in order to give the right message to the right group. Once we do this, we’ll be able to place the proper “bait” in front of them to hook them into our story and brand product.

In our online world, there are hot, warm, and cold traffic sources:

• Someone who is on your email list or has previously purchased from you is considered hot traffic
• Someone who is looking for a solution to a problem but they don’t know about you or your product yet is considered warm traffic
• Someone who has never engaged with your brand or content, or is even aware that there is a solution to their problem, is considered cold traffic

The master copywriter, Eugene Schwartz, perfectly summarizes in the below quote how to address each traffic source.

If your prospect is aware of your product and has realized that it can satisfy this desire, your headline starts with the product. If he is not aware of your product but only has the desire itself, your headline starts with the desire. If he is not yet aware of what he really seeks but is concerned with the general problem, your headline starts with the problem and crystallizes it into a specific need.

Implementing the above framework, here are some potential ways to address each traffic source for your new shovel:

• Hot Traffic: You can send them directly to a sales page with an irresistible offer introducing them to your new snow shovel
• Warm Traffic: Use a sales funnel to capture the prospect’s information, address the core pain, and introduce your snow shovel as the solution
• Cold Traffic: Use a sales funnel to capture the prospect’s information, create awareness of a solution to their core problem, further educate the prospect, and introduce your snow shovel as the solution

The most common mistake Amazon sellers make when running external traffic to their product, is they neglect to capture a prospect’s email address first. Instead, they send them directly to their Amazon product, which results in lower sale conversion rates.

With both warm and cold traffic, you always want to capture the information of your prospect and own that traffic. This will allow you to further nurture them via an email marketing sequence, thus increasing the chances of them purchasing your product. This will also help you build your own Amazon launch list for when introducing new, complementary products.

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is the multi-step architect of a sales process automation by which a prospect ascends towards the purchase of a good or service.

The successful execution of a sales funnel occurs when it is built with a strong focus on being customer-centered instead of being product-centered.

The Framework of a Sales Funnel

The framework of hook, story, and offer is what you will find in most funnels you see online. This is the core foundation for how to sell anything to anyone.

• The hook is the image or video and copy that gets people to stop and pay attention
• The story draws your dream customer in. It will also increase the value of your offer
• The offer is the solution to the core pain (or problem) of your dream customer

Creating a sales funnel for your Amazon product will allow you to capture a prospect’s information before sending them off to your Amazon listing. Not only that, but the added benefit of sending them through a sales funnel is also the opportunity to make the sale prior to sending them off to Amazon. This way, you’ll be able to retain more of the profits by avoiding Amazon fees, as well as upsell your prospects on additional complementary items.

Creating Your Amazon Sales Funnel

In this section, I’ll go over the key components to building the mechanism known as the sales funnel. We’ll assume you’re using your sales funnel to attract and convert cold traffic.

Landing Page

Your landing page will serve as a lead magnet to attract your dream customer with the perfect “bait” and to capture their email address. This is important as it will build an asset for you whereby your business will no longer rely solely on Amazon customers.

Armed with the proper research of our dream customer, below is our example landing page:

You will notice that the landing page makes no reference to the new snow shovel you are offering on Amazon. As mentioned earlier in this article, the successful execution of a sales funnel is one that focuses on a customer-center approach rather than a product-based one.

Video Sales Page

If the person has opted into your landing page, one can confidently assume they have identified with this core pain point. Once that is the case, you want to immediately present them with a solution to their known problem. In this case, it’s your Amazon product. But instead of sending them straight to your Amazon product listing, you send them to a video sales page within your funnel.

One of the reasons we do this is to control the sale process and minimize distractions. If you were to send prospects directly to Amazon’s site, you may lose the sale to other brand’s product suggestions showing on your listing page.

The video sales page will showcase how your product can help save your prospect from a pulled muscle strain, while also showcasing your product in use. The better you’re able to tell this story, the higher the perceived value your offer will be, and the more product you’ll sell!

Some sellers will shy away from doing any sort of video marketing for their product. They are under the belief that it is hard to produce a product video but that is not the case anymore—especially with all the tools available to us today.

How important is video for ecommerce sales? Check out some of these stats:

• 84% of consumers surveyed were convinced to buy a product or service after watching a brand’s video
• Including a video on your landing page can increase conversions by more than 80%
• 62% of consumers watch product review videos before making a purchase

If you don’t have actual video footage of your product in use, it’s simple enough to create awesome product videos using a series of product images. My video guy has done this for me many times before and has created eye-catching videos for other well-known brands as well. With the overwhelming statistics showing how video can increase product sales, there’s no reason to not have one.

Lastly, you want to make sure your offer is so irresistible that your dream customer will immediately say “Yes!” to it. This can be achieved in a variety of ways, including time and quantity scarcity tactics.

Up-Sells & Add-On Items

Here’s where a sales funnel can really help 10x your business. When customers purchase your product on Amazon’s site, it’s a toss-up as to whether they will show other complementary products from your store.

When you control the sales process, you have the ability to increase your order cart value by showing more of your products to your new customer. This is an especially opportune time to offer an upsell since they’ve already made the commitment to purchase from you just moments ago.

Here’s an example of what a complementary add-on item would look like:

With just one click, your new customer has added a complimentary item to their order.

Sales funnel automation is pretty powerful stuff. When you have a winning funnel, your sales and income can drastically increase nearly overnight. I often refer to it as your 24hrs online salesperson. And the best part is they will never ask for a day off!

Now, you can continue this process of adding more upsells and downsells to your funnel, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll stop at one upsell. If you find yourself wanting to learn how to create your own sales funnel, there are plenty of sales funnel training programs out there. My preferred training—and one that I have personally taken—is the 30-Day Sales Funnel Challenge.

Before we continue, I’m going to let you in on a little-known secret. Oftentimes, sellers will test out complementary products on their upsell pages before actually purchasing inventory for it. Essentially, you can find a closely-related product already selling well on Amazon and include it as your up-sell product at a higher purchase price. This way, you can gauge demand for the product with minimal investment, before deciding to fully invest in purchasing inventory for it.

While this product testing can be executed in a very profitable manner, there are also hazards to watch out for before going this route. For example, inventory of this complementary product can run out on Amazon before you’re able to fulfill the order from your sales funnel. So, something to think about before you decide to use this method.

Order Confirmation Page

The last key component in your sales funnel is your Order Confirmation page, also referred to as a Thank You page.

This page is just as it sounds: It’s the last page in your funnel and will be a receipt of the purchased items. Additionally, while you continue to have your new customer’s attention, it’s also a great time to showcase other products that may interest them….and of course, run them through another sales funnel of whatever product they select to “find out more.”

How to Fulfill Orders that Come Through Your Sales Funnel

If you’re using ClickFunnels as your sales funnel software of choice (such as I do), you’ll be able to integrate ShipStation and create an order flow directly to your Amazon FBA product.

This is what the order flow would look like:

This process will allow you to quickly scale and not have to worry about fulfilling orders on your own.

Directing Traffic to Your Amazon Listing

Customers that do not order via your sales funnel will need further nurturing via email marketing. This will allow them to go from being cold prospects to turning into potential hot buyers.

In any case, you offered a free 4-part video series on your lead magnet that everyone who opted in will begin to receive. Each day you send one new video as promised, but instead of sending them back to your funnel sales page, you can offer them a 20% coupon code to purchase your product on Amazon.

By doing this, you’ll increase your sale conversion rates for the traffic you send to your Amazon FBA product listing. This attention to detail in the traffic temperature is the difference between getting more Amazon organic views to your product or not.

Fill Your Funnels

Now that we know who our dream customer is and created a sales funnel to drive more sales, the last step is to fill our funnels with traffic (people). This can be done using paid traffic, free traffic or both. Preferably, learning both methods will allow you to always be in control of the traffic flow, as well as allow you to predictably scale your business.

Leverage Existing Congregations

This is one of my favorite methods for driving a high volume of traffic to my products and services and can be implemented by anyone, no matter your skill level.

We mentioned earlier in this article that people tend to congregate in groups of people that are most similar to them. Every social platform has standout industry leaders who attract a large group of followers within their specific niche. These people are often referred to as influencers. Getting just one of these people to promote your product on their social channels can be a game-changer for any business.

This is where understanding your dream customer becomes extremely important. If you understand who your customer is, then you will be able to easily find them online.

For example, if we know our customer prefers to purchase products made from environmentally-friendly sustainable goods, then we look for influencers who embody that. If we know our customers tend to be more on the older side that also enjoy being active outdoors, then we seek out influencers in that area.

From there, make a list of your top 100 Influencers that you believe your dream customers would follow and congregate around. Follow those influencers, comment on their posts, and let yourself be known. Then reach out to them. Many of these influencers will have some sort of media package to give you a shout-out or promote your product in some other way. Whichever way you work with them, make sure they include your sales funnel link as part of the strategy. This way, you’ll be able to capture all traffic that comes your way and own that traffic for years to come.

I’ve found that some influencers are willing to do a trade that benefits both of you. For example, I’ve worked with a few Instagram influencers that requested free products for themselves and extras for giveaways to their audience. Once I supplied them with this, they did shout-outs of my product and included my product sales funnel links in their Instagram Stories. It was a win-win situation. They were able to get increased engagement with a fun contest, and I was able to get tons of free traffic to my sales funnel.

Paid traffic is where you can really scale fast if you know how to do this well. The great part about using a sales funnel is that you can pixel your audience and retarget them.

By adding a tracking code to your sales funnel, you’ll have the ability to retarget your prospects on Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc., based on the pages they’ve visited within your funnel. You’ll be able to craft a much more targeted message that will speak to them at the exact point they are along the customer journey.

Conclusion

Now that you have this blueprint available to you, you’ll be able to drive external traffic to your Amazon product listing, while at the same time building an asset of owned traffic. This will increase the value of your Amazon business, shall you ever decide one day to sell it. Good luck!