Increase Amazon Sales 300% with Premium A+ Content

Jordan Buckner: [00:00:00] Amazon is an amazing platform for CPG brands to reach your customers where they want to buy. But as a seller, you know, there's a ton of tools on Amazon that you may be wondering what are the most impactful ones that are actually going to grow my sales. So you can invest your time wisely. Now there's been a lot of talk about premium A plus content for your pages and the impact it can make for you.

So I've invited on Daniela Bolzmann, a longtime friend and founder of Mindful Goods for this episode, as she and her team help brands create high performing Amazon listings and design the Amazon listings for Joyful Co. Daniela, welcome. 

Daniela Bolzmann: Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be back. 

Jordan Buckner: Yes, we have done a couple episodes together as well.

This is going to be a more intermediate level episode on Amazon for people already selling on the platform. Mostly if you're looking to just get started, I'll link back to some of the other episodes in our show notes, but this is definitely a great one to listen to as well. So Danielle, tell me a little bit, just like what is premium a plus content for those to get [00:01:00] their, Heather right round things versus just normal a plus content.

Daniela Bolzmann: Sure. So A plus content in general is going to be the content that once you scroll down on a product page on Amazon, it's going to be those big banners that you see. Oftentimes back in the day, a lot of brands were doing like big chunky blocks of text. And the reason why they were doing that with basic A plus content is because that there's SEO indexing that happens there.

So the difference between that and premium is going to be the ability to do more modern content like video content, carousels, hot spotting on images, and just to make it look more aesthetically pleasing in terms of using high quality content versus just static images and text. 

Jordan Buckner: Yeah, and I think this is a way of Amazon saying, okay, we are a search engine where people are like coming to the platform to search for things, but we also want to bring a little bit more of that website experience and going to a branded page where it's fun. It's interesting. It's informative and it's easy to read, right? 

Daniela Bolzmann: Exactly. Really premium A+ post content gives brands a chance to give that DTC look [00:02:00] to their product pages on Amazon and really stand out from the competition. 

Jordan Buckner: So before for premium, what were the requirements to get access to it?

And how has that changed? 

Daniela Bolzmann: Premium a plus content up until a few months ago was pay to play. So brands had to pay anywhere from a hundred to 200, 000 just to get access to be able to unlock that feature on their product pages today. If you have brand registry, which the only requirement for brand registry is to have a trademark.

Once you have submitted that to Amazon, you get almost instant access to unlock your premium a plus content. And there's a couple more steps. For that to be able to unlock it, which we have a guide that we can link in the show notes for you. 

Jordan Buckner: Perfect. Yeah, we'll definitely check that out on how to get access.

I was just talking to Daniela. We're getting access for Joyful Co right now. So that should be up soon. But you actually work with a ton of clients in the CPG space and they've helped get design and get them up and running with their premium A plus. It's a little bit more work. You have to kind of change the dimensions and maybe create new [00:03:00] content.

However, you've been designing content differently for premium and what features are available with it? 

Daniela Bolzmann: Yeah, that's a really great question. So the way that I like to think about it is it's like basic a plus content, but on steroids. So you can really get a full landing page effect where before what we would do is still try to give clients that landing page effect by stacking banners, one on top of the next and.

As you look at them and you piece them together, it kind of looks like one big, long image. The reason why that's important and the reason why it works for a lot of brands is because it's this huge graphic that takes up the screen and stops the scroll. So that's, the real big play that you're getting with this feature.

The second thing is that it's completely seamless when you go to premium. So in basic, you have like these. White gaps in between each image, so it really like doesn't give you that full effect of a landing page, but with premium, you're getting the seamless flow from one image to the next. You're able to add the carousels that go, you know, that allow shoppers to swipe to the right.

You're also getting a full scale ability to do a full [00:04:00] scale video, which is huge. Highly, highly recommend adding the video. Amazon says just adding the video alone to your premium eight plus should lift sales up to 9. 7%. They haven't released any data on whether upgrading from basic to premium, like what the average increase in sales is, we're seeing up to 300 percent increase in sales.

So this is something that I highly, highly recommend all brands do because right now it's free. We don't know how long it's going to be free. And it's super simple to unlock. So then the other thing that you can do in there, there's other modules, but those are the biggest ones. You can do hotspots, which means you can put these little dots on top of your image, which allows shoppers to engage with the image, hover over it and read a little bit more text, which can be fun.

It doesn't look the greatest on mobile. So I recommend only using that on one module, if any the big one is that you get an add to cart button on your comparison grid. So that one should alone lift your conversion rate because it's basically imagine comparing your product to other [00:05:00] products in your catalog.

And now you have an add to cart button that just gives one click ability to purchase. So that's huge. The other thing you can do is you can infuse your UGC content. So imagine a brand that has, you know lots of people Publishing different videos on Tiktok or Instagram about their CPG product.

You could then take those videos, assuming you have permission take those videos and you could put them in a scrolling video carousel inside of your Premium A Plus content. So that's a really fun way to be able to take content that's an asset that you already have and infuse it into your Amazon content to make it feel more custom.

Jordan Buckner: Oh my goodness, that's really great and sounds like a huge number of added benefits. We've been doing a lot of UGC content for Joyful Co and so I'm excited to incorporate that in there as well. In terms of like what you can do to make it most effective, how do you think about like which selling points to actually add into those A plus content modules so that you're going to really not only stop.

People from scrolling, but really for them to say, aha, this is the [00:06:00] information they need to make a buying decision. 

Daniela Bolzmann: Yeah, that's another great question. So inside of our intake form, we have kind of figured out the top 20 selling points on Amazon across the board. So we do is we kind of list those out for clients.

You went through the process. We're going to ask you pick out 20, give us your best set of information on why you think it's one of these top five. And from there, we basically because you, the thing is, you know, your product better than anybody, right? You know, the, the questions that people are asking you day to day, you know, all the things that are helping you sell your product.

The next thing that we do is we actually like to review the positive and negative sentiment of customer reviews, not just on your product, but really similar products to understand. What are the other questions that people are typically asking as they're thinking about this product, or what are the things that they're saying in a positive and negative light so that we know to address those within the content?

Also, if you notice that a majority of people, let's just say 60 percent of the comments are related to this one key factor, maybe something like what ingredients are in it. You want to make sure that that's one of your [00:07:00] biggest pieces of content that's big and bold, and it's the first thing in their face, right?

We know that that's true with CPG. So that's something that we always like to highlight, especially since a lot of new brands to market are coming out with better labels, cleaner labels in general, and you want to kind of hit home on that and show, not just show people the back of the label, but show people really that you're transparent about your product.

So from there. Another step that we do sometimes is we take the link to a product or to the content, depending on what we have, and we'll post it in PICFU and ask people, what's missing from this? What questions do you have about this? And just kind of get some group think around it to make sure we're thinking in the right direction.

But based on all that data, you can kind of aggregate and determine, like, what are the most important pieces if you notice there's a problem with your product. So, for instance sometimes let's just use a different type of product, like a product that requires assembly. People might not understand exactly how to assemble this.

They might be complaining, saying it didn't come with all the parts or you know, whatever, or something using them. Yeah. That is something that you can definitely [00:08:00] address in your content to let them know the answer to that question so that rather than them leaving a bad review, they can see that you've already addressed the negative comments coming in and this is how you solve for that, right?

Jordan Buckner: It's kind of funny, my wife buys a lot of stuff and she's like, wait a second, how does this go together? And we'll go to the page first for the product to figure it out if there's any solutions for it. And then only then it's like, okay, well, they don't show me either, so I might have to return it. But you can avoid that return if you make it clear.

Daniela Bolzmann: You can totally avoid that return. You can totally avoid that return. In the A plus content specifically, in your premium A plus content, the format that we typically follow, and I have a guide that I can share and we can hook it up in the show notes because you really, we have a story brand framework where we're really thinking through what is the USP right away?

Like, who is this brand? Let's introduce them to the people and just tell them what they're getting right away. And that's at the top of your first banner. The second banner is going to be the next biggest selling point or the first biggest selling point that you have there. And then you're going to address any other content that you [00:09:00] have.

So sometimes a lot of brands might have really great UGC content or videos, and those are so crucial to use as much as you can to do the selling for you. So what I'd recommend is looking through the modules that we use and the way that we structure the content in that guide, and then look at the assets that you have at your disposal to see.

What pieces you are missing and then start with what you have and make it better over time. 

Jordan Buckner: I think that's really great. How often should Brands be switching out their content if they're like should they be changing it for seasonally or seasonally or every Quarter every half a year just to like keep things interesting and new or should they try to keep it the same?

Daniela Bolzmann: So I think you should always be testing. First of all Amazon has a great tool called manager experiments where you can be testing your title, your bullets, your main image, your product image stack and your a plus content. Just in the last few months, they've added other options like testing brand story.

So see that the possibilities are going to be endless with this in the future. They're [00:10:00] basically teeing it up for brands to be able to manage their data and improve their product listings over time. Once you work with a service provider like us, for instance, at Mindful Goods, we're going to do 90 percent of the heavy lifting for you to get that content ready.

We're also going to give you multiple title sets, multiple main images. We're going to pre test those main images. We're going to get everything ready for you. But beyond that, the content that we create is done in a modular way. So let's say we recommended putting the video in the fifth banner down. Well, you might want to test putting the video on the first one, which you can absolutely do.

And you can test to see if that lifts your conversion rates anymore. So I highly recommend testing. The content after that, in terms of like doing a full refresh, typically we see the bestseller brands doing that about once a year at a minimum. In addition to the testing that they're doing on a quarterly basis.

Jordan Buckner: Awesome. Yeah, that's helpful because I think on one hand, a lot of work goes into creating really great images and graphics like that. And I do think it's important, like you mentioned, to like always be testing, but it doesn't mean you have to [00:11:00] recreate the creative every time. It might just be changing up the order, testing out different headlines or keywords, learning more.

And then, you know, even for JoyfulCo, we're looking at, we have a seasonal marketing plan. So it's a lot of our, here are the gift boxes are based around things like Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Christmas. So how do we change up the creative? So it's relevant to those different key purchase occasions so that people are like, aha, this is for this.

And it's. 

Daniela Bolzmann: If you know your product is a seasonal product, you can have one product image and one banner in your a plus that is dedicated towards that seasonality. So you just know every quarter you're focused on switching out just those pieces. You're not necessarily refreshing everything because that would just be a ton of work.

Also now on storefronts, there's the ability to have. Multiple what should we call it? Like multiple versions of storefront. So you can have your master storefront and then you could have, you could duplicate that and change it for Valentine's day, duplicate it, change it for another holiday, duplicate it, change it for another holiday.[00:12:00] 

And then it's all set for you for the whole year. All you have to do is just switch to the next version, maybe update anything that's outdated. But the work's pretty much done for you after you've done it the first 

Jordan Buckner: time. Oh, that's really cool. So you don't have to like take down your whole site or like redo just one version at a time.

You can just plan out the entire year. Yeah. I love that. So I think that's really powerful. And I know you mentioned a little bit earlier, but what's been the impact for brands that you've implemented for? I know you mentioned like up to 300 percent increase in sales. 

Daniela Bolzmann: So we're seeing up to 5, 000 percent increase in sessions and up to 300 percent increase in sales.

So it makes a lot of sense, right? That Amazon was gaining this before and making brands pay for it because it actually works. And, but here's the key thing. I don't think it's necessarily which modules you're using. I don't think it's necessarily like using this carousel or that carousel or all the nitty gritty things.

I really think it comes down to high quality content, period. So like you and I were discussing this right before we jumped on, you know, having that really like high quality set of imagery for your brand before you enter into a [00:13:00] content project or anything is so crucial, right? So like. When we do a brand project like what we did for Joyful, our job is just so much easier as a creative team to work with a base set of lifestyle images that is just gorgeous and stunning.

We saw the same thing with Momofuku and Iwi Life and these brands that are doing so well on Amazon. And it's because they invest in their basic content, like first , their lifestyle imagery, everything. And then they work with a team that knows how to put it all together like us for Amazon.

So. That's the really key factor. That's the differentiator between the content that maybe like Amazon is saying a 9. 7 percent increase in sales when they're reporting on premium a plus, but that's not really the true story because they're factoring in all of the brands that are selling on Amazon.

We're focusing with the ones that are focused on really high quality content, and that's why we're seeing what we're seeing with our data sets. 

Jordan Buckner: I love that. And I think what's really impactful as well, as we and working with you developed all the product images for our Joyful Co. Boxes [00:14:00] for Amazon, we're actually now going to be implementing most of that content, if not all of it on our Shopify site, just because Amazon, the way of thinking and way your team knows as optimized images for conversion, like quick education and conversion.

So we'll be able to, yeah. Leverage those on our Shopify site to increase conversion on there as well, which I'm really excited about. And we'll probably actually implement the premium A+ plus style content as well. I mean, a slightly different format for Shopify because we have more control on there because just really highlighting those selling points makes a huge difference.

Daniela Bolzmann: Yeah, it's funny. We have a lot of clients that come to us and ask us if they can use the content in other places. And we're like, of course, you know, 

Jordan Buckner: I love that. Daniel, thanks so much for being on today. It's been so helpful. So all our brands listening, if you are on Amazon and selling and looking for a way to boost your sales, definitely check out premium a plus content.

And my personal recommendation I've used it myself is working with Danielle and her team at mindful goods. I'm going to drop a link in there as well, so that you can save on your project with them. And I love it because all of your pricing is [00:15:00] transparent. It's up on the website. We'll include that link as well.

And you won't be disappointed. So thanks so much Danielle for sharing. 

Daniela Bolzmann: Thanks. Take care.