Thinking Like Your Customers: Using Feedback & Customer Questions to Guide Productive Changes

The busy holiday season is just around the corner, and with big shopping days looming ahead, it can be easy to lose sight of what’s really important to growing your brand presence on Amazon: the customer experience. 

Having a solid brand presence on Amazon means considering your customer base, the benefits of your products, and ultimately how they will service the end-user. Putting time and emphasis into your brand messaging and how your products benefit consumers will only help drive more exposure and long-term growth of your customer-base. The more customers identify with your brand and have a positive experience, the more they will continue to come back again and again.

In January of this year, we looked in the rearview mirror to analyze top growth lessons learned from Q4 2018 for some of our clients who experienced exponential holiday sales growth. One of the key factors that we discovered was that “EBC [Enhanced Brand Content] development and implementation hinges on identifying customer needs and gaps in existing listing content, and then using that research to generate image-rich content.”

Who Is Your Customer?

The foundation of your brand presence on Amazon is through optimized Product Display Pages (PDPs). To create and optimize your listings, it’s important to take into consideration: 

• WHO is your buyer?
• WHY would they buy your product?
• WHAT benefits does your product provide?
• WHEN can it be used?

Amazon offers unique opportunities to show you how you can improve your brand presence and listings. To gain further insight from your current and potential customer base, consider the feedback that can be found in multiple areas of Amazon’s platform: 

• Buyer messages and Product reviews
• Customer Q&A
• Brand Analytics

By assessing these areas of your account (don’t worry, we’ll get to that in just a sec!), you’ll have the ability to take valuable insights from what is shared to make positive and productive changes to your PDP as well as your brand impact as a whole. 

Plus, at the end of the day, we all know that a happy customer is a loyal customer!

Where To Look and What To Look For?

As mentioned above, we are going to be focusing on three specific areas of your account to identify trends and customer feedback, starting with customer reviews and buyer messages.

Amazon Customer Reviews and Buyer Messages

In order to maintain the health of your seller account, you naturally need to be reviewing and responding to buyer messages within 24 hours, so why not track and note any trends from what your buyers are saying? Perhaps there is a feature of the product that breaks easily or isn’t as it’s depicted in your listing. 

If the product customers are receiving is not “as-described,” the solution could be as simple as upgrading your product description and bullets to better highlight the features from those who have purchased it, or adding an infographic image to show actual size compared to a common object. 

Recently, we performed an audit and review analysis for a brand in the Kitchen, Bath & Home Improvement sector across 800 listings to identify trends and pain points from buyer messages and product reviews. Our team pulled reviews for each of the products and then identified which type of issue the review feedback fell into: functionality, condition upon delivery, color, fit, price, instructions, or Amazon issues. 

A common issue identified was the struggle with fit for one of their top-selling products. 

In response to this trend in customer reviews, we were able to recommend updated content on the PDP, ensuring that specific dimensions were called-out in the listing. As a result, our client was able to alleviate a major pain point and provide valuable information for their customers. 

Another great example of this comes from a brand whose top-selling items had color-changing qualities, but many reviews and messages expressed frustration over the item not changing colors as it was supposed to. 

Simple instructions and pointers were added to the PDP, sharing factors that impact the color-change. Such a subtle change decreased the rate of negative reviews in half. 

Though some feedback may be easier to address than others, it helps to know if you have a real problem on your hands with your manufacturer, or if you simply need to be more transparent about the item’s size, instructions, use, etc. in your bullet points and description. 

Customer Q&A

Another great place to watch for consistent feedback that may be lacking from your descriptions or imagery is the Q&A section of your listing. 

The Customer Questions & Answers section on the Product Display Page (PDP) is a great place to understand what's top of mind to your customer base and also provide helpful answers and feedback to their questions. 

Are consumers asking similar questions, or are many finding a specific question/answer helpful? If so, you may have identified an opportunity to highlight specific features or uses that were not already present in your listing. 

A strategy to consider with Amazon’s Q&A section is the ability to proactively ask questions that you know may be top-of-mind to your customer but weren’t a natural fit in the listing itself. 

Ask the question from a personal account and reply as the Seller so you are offering important insight into what buyers want to know before purchasing. By doing so, you are offering facts about the products you stand behind as the brand owner/manufacturer while also demonstrating engagement to your potential buyers. 

Amazon’s Brand Analytics

Lastly, if you’re a brand registered seller and have had the benefit of obtaining Amazon’s Brand Analytics dashboard in your account, you have the ability to see the ranking for the most clicked ASINs for a given search term. You can find this dashboard by clicking on Reports > Brand Analytics.

After identifying who your key competitors are, take some time to search for their product pages on Amazon as though you were a customer.

Assessing their Q&A section, images, and reviews could provide you with vital information and clues about how you could better promote your product or upgrade your PDP.

Sharing Vital Information With Your Customers

So you’ve taken the time to track your buyer messages, analyze and respond to negative reviews, assess the Q&A section of your listings, identify trends, and review competitor pages—now what? 

It’s important to understand how to best share information with your customers. In a survey done by Wyzowl, a video creation company, “96% of people say they’ve watched a video to learn more about a product or service.”

If you’re looking to connect visually with your customers or are hearing that there’s a lack of understanding about how to use the product itself, perhaps it’s time to create and share a video with a brief “how to” and the product in-use. 

Not only is video a great vehicle for tutorial-like information, but it also has the ability to affect consumers in a way that no other form of messaging can. A study done by a Harvard professor around how customers think, identifies a key factor around subconscious behavior: “Humans are driven by feelings. So if you want the consumer to remember your product or brand, they must be engaged and impassioned by the interaction with your company.”

As important as it is to highlight the features of your product, it’s also important to connect with consumers on an emotional level. Research has shown that when confronted by emotion, whether it be fear or joy, we as humans are programmed to take action. Identifying with a brand and how it’s communicating its message is vitally important in the sea of communication and messaging that consume our day to day … or in the sea of products available on Amazon! Video is a great way to stand out from the crowd and relate to your customer-base.

Preserving Account Health and Integrity

Aside from the value customer feedback offers your PDP development, it also serves as a flag of potential issues that could put your account at risk. Keeping tuned-in to your customers allows you to stay ahead of negative metrics that could impact overall account health - a very important factor, especially in Q4. 

Incorporating details in response to customer pain points allows for a more-informed buyer, which translates to lower return rates and aids in meeting Amazon’s account health metrics. Fewer performance issues allow for further peace of mind that your listing will not be impacted by a suspension or closure, which ultimately means more sales for you. 

The impact of not addressing customer reviews or messages that are highlighting repetitive issues is far greater than taking the extra time to focus on what is most important to your buyer, outside of price. Amazon’s metrics for account health are strict, whether you are an FBA seller or especially as an FBM seller because they want to ensure each customer is satisfied with the products being sold and that return rates are low.

Time = Money

Though Q4 is a busy time to prepare vital aspects of your business in anticipation of increased sales, small adjustments that take your customers’ questions and feedback into account can go a long way to ensure success and healthy account metrics for the holiday season and into the new year. 

At Bobsled, we have several ways to support your efforts and incorporate customer feedback and applicable changes to Product Display Pages. 

Our Research and Strategy Reports identify overall challenges and trends, including issues with customer reviews, buyer messages, and offers recommendations for updates that can be made to your content. We also provide full channel management services where we oversee our clients’ accounts end to end including operations, brand protection and marketing on Amazon.

Feel free to reach out today to learn more!