#257 – Read Amazon Buyers Minds – A Split Testing Expert is Here to Offer Advice

As Amazon sellers (or as human beings), one of biggest challenges is understanding that our perspective and sense of aesthetics is not the only one out there. If fact when it comes to packaging, product design, or color, many of our customers might possess completely different sensibilities.

That’s why today on the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Chief Evangelist, Bradley Sutton welcomes Justin Chen, the Co-Founder of Pickfu, and one of the leading experts on using split testing to clarify marketing efforts and better identify customer niches. 

Justin says that he and a partner built Pickfu as a side project to get unbiased feedback while doing a redesign on another business. Almost immediately they understood that the information would be interesting and valuable to other entrepreneurs. As soon as Amazon sellers saw how effective it was, paying customers soon followed.

Now, in partnership with Pickfu, Helium 10 has built and released Audience. Helium 10’s Audience incorporates split testing abilities that gives Amazon sellers the instant target market feedback to help them make informed decisions on their listings.

Listen in to find out more about Justin, Pickfu, and how to take advantage of Audience’s split testing power.

In episode 257 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Justin discuss:

• 01:30 – A History of Pickfu
• 03:00 – Finding a Customer Base
• 04:30 – Pickfu Success Stories
• 08:15 – Images Come First
• 09:00 – Bradley and Justin’s Split Test Quiz
• 10:30 – Optimizing Bullet Points and Descriptions
• 13:00 – Voice-Over Split Testing?
• 16:10 – Packaging Matters
• 18:00 – Don’t Forget to Test Against Your Competitors
• 20:10 – A Pickfu Personality Test
• 22:00 – How Pickfu and Audience Makes Sure that the Data is Solid
• 26:00 – Perception is Important    
• 30:00 – Split Testing for Amazon Live  
• 32:30 – Don’t Just Rely on Your Own Instincts – Validate!  
• 34:00 – How Do Pickfu and Audience Target Specific Niches?
• 38:15 – Here’s Where to Get More Info on Helium 10’s Audience and Pickfu

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Podcast or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley Sutton: On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about all of the numerous ways that Amazon sellers can do split testing to get direction on key aspects of your listing branding and other things that could have a huge impact on your bottom line. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the Amazon world. We’ve got from this side of the world, sometimes I say, oh, here’s a seller, or here’s a person from the other side of the world, but I got somebody who’s probably a couple of hours away from me here in California, Justin, co-founder of Pickfu. Justin, how’s it going this morning?

Justin: I’m doing great. Yeah. Happy to be able to share again.

Bradley Sutton: Yes. It’s been almost two years since you’ve come on. We’ve been talking about Pickfu for so long and it’s so cool to be able to announce that we have those functionalities inside of Helium 10 now under Helium 10 Audience. But today I just wanted to really just do a deep dive into all the reasons why somebody should use a program like this and talk about maybe some personal things and stories and ones that I’ve done personally. And that you know about people who have had success. And so let’s just hop right into it. Pickfu, like how long have you guys been around now?

Justin: Yeah. Pickfu’s been around a long time, it was a side project that my co-founder John and I built years ago when we were building a different business. I’m a colorblind developer. So, my opinion on design is not always great. And so we built Pickfu to get unbiased feedback on a redesign that we were working on. And so, it provided a lot of value to us when we were building our other business. And so we kind of figured that other entrepreneurs would also benefit from it. So, that’s kind of where the origin of the product came from. And that was years ago before FBA was a thing.

Bradley Sutton: Yup. Would it be safe to say that it’s not like you, and your co-founder there had Amazon sellers just in mind, as soon as you create this as you said, it was mainly for yourself, but when you first even knew that you were going to, to start sharing this out there, I mean, I’m assuming neither of you guys were selling on Amazon at the time, right?

Justin: Yeah, that’s correct. Yeah. The whole market of Amazon sellers was new to us. It was an interesting learning experience, just understanding what FBA was, and is, and kind of the issues that all the sellers have. And I think the more that we researched it and started understanding the journey of a seller, there are so many opportunities for testing. There are so many important decisions that sellers are making on a daily basis that really should have some kind of data behind it.

Bradley Sutton: Absolutely. Absolutely. And do you remember that light bulb moment? Like where you’re like, well, all of a sudden it started trending. Why was it that podcast that it started blowing up or like before then people would like email you saying, oh, this was great for Amazon. I mean, I’m assuming there had to have been something because Manny had to have discovered you guys somehow himself.

Justin: Yeah. Yeah. There were already a few customers that were doing it and we just thought they were selling stuff on their own store or whatnot. And I think after, I think there was someone that was probably in the Helium 10 group or something that mentioned it to Manny, an existing customer. And so, that’s kind of when it clicked and we discovered that, oh, okay, there are a lot more than the customers that we had. And so, it did make a lot of sense, especially since a lot of sellers are selling a lot of different products, there’s a lot of things that you’re iterating on. And a lot of times you’re not necessarily your target customer, right? Like you’re selling what’s maybe interesting or trending or where the opportunity is. And so it’s even more important than to get feedback.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Let’s talk about some success stories. I’ll talk about some things that I’ve done. People have seen me on Project X, we highlighted Pickfu on the coffin shelf and the egg tray, and different things, but let’s go to a bigger scale. Those are just small products, but I’m sure you’ve had some bigger customers even, and it doesn’t matter what size of the customer or what we’ll talk about people of all sizes, but I’m just curious, what’s like one of the stories that sticks out the most where somebody running a Pickfu poll just gave somebody some like astronomical benefits to their bottom line. You ever heard of anything like that from your customers?

Justin: Yeah. Yeah. We were at a conference kind of early on and someone was, I think they were selling journals. And they really didn’t know what color to stock. This is a common issue, right? You’re going to sell a few variations of your product. And so, they tested it, I think they were going to do just like kind of a mix of all of them. Right. Which is that’s a good approach, but they tested on Pickfu and it was kind of overwhelming and in one color. And so I think they just stock all of that color and it sold out. And so, that’s awesome. Like you’re not sitting around with inventory that didn’t sell. And so I think that feedback was really helpful to them to make sure that they had the right confidence to choose the color to stock. Obviously, there are other colors that might sell as well, but you can’t argue with selling out of that first batch immediately. In another one, we did a case study with a CPG brand called Yes Bar. They’re kind of like one of those protein bar-type things and super simple, main image tests. We didn’t, they agreed not to change anything about their title and all the other listing aspects. And they just ran a few Pickfu polls, just altering their main image, adjusting things like the positioning of the product and how things were laid out. And just from a couple of tests like that, making that change, they saw an immediate 12% increase in sessions and the Pickfu tests cost like 85 bucks, right. So like super high return and that’s just going to continue to perform well. So, those are like some pretty simple ones. Obviously, we’ve got a bigger case study with Thrasio, where they’ve rebranded their– I think it’s their marquee product, angry orange pet deodorizer using Pickfu, and using the results of that test, they were able to relaunch, uh, the angry orange brand. Um, you know, it went from a couple of million to, I think now it’s like, at the time that we last did the case study was a $20 million revenue brand, just based off the rebranding and being able to launch new product lines off the new branding that they created, and validated with Pickfu.

Bradley Sutton: Cool, cool. That’s great. Now I think a lot of people when they know about Pickfu and now the new Helium 10 Audience, understand the basic concepts of split testing. And then the main thing I think that would come to people’s mind is let me test a main image and rightfully so, that’s probably one of the most no-brainer things to start out with is that main image is so important on an Amazon listing because that’s the first, and sometimes only thing somebody might see in the search results, that your title and your image right there. And if you don’t catch our attention and the competitors do, you might not even get a clip on your listing. What I’d like to do right now is you give me something that you know Amazon sellers can and should use with Pickfu or Helium 10 audience. And then let me see how fast I can come up with a scenario in which they could use it. For example, you would just say the main image, and then I’m going to say kind of like what I just did about how you would show three different white background images and see which one would catch the most attention. So, after the main image, what would you say is the next thing that people most can use Pick Fu for?

Justin: Yeah. So I guess along the lines of the main image, you would probably do titles.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, title. Let me see. Yeah. All right. So I can definitely, I’ve used that myself. How, as an Amazon seller, I would have different keywords at the beginning, especially since Amazon truncates titles on mobile and on desktop, I would test which keywords are at the beginning, perhaps that would catch somebody’s attention. And that’s actually part of something, a big podcast series I’ve been doing lately called the Maldives Honeymoon is how important the keywords are in the title as far as your search rank goes. And so if you do that’s important. Yeah. Like, Hey, let me get some important keywords that are in my title for my listing, but guess what, maybe you’re making the algorithm happy, but if you’re choosing keywords that don’t make sense, or that seems keyword-stuffed and are not appealing to your target market. Well, guess what, guys, you might be shooting yourself in the foot because the Amazon algorithm is not the one who’s going to buy your product. It’s a buyer. So, you want to make the buyer happy too. So, absolutely title, I think is super important. What else you got?

Justin: Description.

Bradley Sutton: Alright. You tell me how people have used description. That’s something I haven’t used Pick Fu for.

Justin: Yeah. I mean, you could do just variations of descriptions that you’re thinking about. So just testing A versus B, you could do bullet points and have each option be a bullet. And when you’re testing multiple things with this tool, our respondents actually rank their preferences. So that way you can make sure that your most important bullets are at the top, right? Like you could put every option as a different bullet and just see what you’re ordering, and you could drop off a few of them, like the ones that aren’t performing well. So, I think that’s an interesting way. And going back to titles actually, for all these tests, it’s not just testing your own variations against each other, right? Obviously, you want to iterate on different ideas that you have, but in the end, testing it against you, that competitor’s titles or the competitor’s descriptions, or the competitors’ main images, that’s ultimately what the final test is going to be on Amazon. Right. So don’t forget to, okay. Like, don’t be just be happy. Like, oh, we came up with a local maximum of this title and it’s one on one against all the other variations we came up with. Now let’s pit it against what they’re actually going to see in the Amazon search results, pick some of the top competitors and test it against them.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, alright. Cool. Something on your website I had seen before too, and that was kind of new to me, is brand. So, there’s another one that I don’t have experience on. So maybe you can share how Amazon sellers have actually used Pick Fu for, I mean, I’m assuming is it their image or their brand name?

Justin: It’s all of the above. I mean, it’s the brand name that they may sell a product under. So a lot of times they may describe what they’re going to be selling and then ask which brand do you like, which brand name do you like after you settle on the brand name, you would test the logo. I mean, this is all, if you’re starting from scratch. We had a customer recently who wrote in and said that he was planning to do a whole new brand for a product that he was going to do, but he decided to like, well, let me test to see if the brand that I already have, like would work with this product. And it actually tested very well. So, he told us that he saved a ton of money and not having to go through the whole process because he kind of validated with Pickfu that the existing brand he had would actually fit really well with the new product that he was thinking about. So that was a really interesting validation. But yeah, if you think about any aspect of starting a new business or a company, the naming, the logo, if you’re planning to have a domain for maybe a standalone site, like obviously testing out the domain names as well, that’s a really popular use case across all of our entrepreneur customers.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. Okay. Here’s the one that when I saw it, when we first launched Helium 10 Audience, this is something that I didn’t even see in Pickfu before, maybe it’s in your new refresh, but one of the options was, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be only for Amazon sellers. Maybe it’s not for Amazon sellers, but a voiceover. What’s that about?

Justin: Yeah. So, you can test all kinds of different media options, not only text or image, but you can actually upload video or audio clips. And so, obviously, if you’re working on video variations, you could test those. But yeah, a lot of times when you have video, you do have a voiceover. And so we’ve used this ourselves, even when we’ve been creating explainer videos and that kind of stuff, we’ll get some talent on voice.com or Fiverr or whatever, and we’ll test it against Pickfu and see, like we’ll have them read the same snippet of texts and just see what our audience likes. And that’s actually how we’ve chosen the voiceovers for a lot of our videos. And so, that’s a great way, you could test out different video, thematic approaches, right? Like maybe it’s like a fast-paced one, or maybe it’s a little bit slower and you could have your video guy kind of test out different variations there. Yeah. So it’s a lot of different opportunities there with different media.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. Cool. Let’s see. What about when I see it talks about the website? Are you talking about they’re testing different URLs, or you’re actually sending people to different websites, splash pages and they’re picking it, or what is the website option?

Justin: So, there are a couple of different ways you could test a website and the website could be like your Amazon listing, right. You don’t necessarily have to have a separate standalone website. An easy way to do this, especially if you don’t have any variations or any idea of what you want to improve, that you could just do kind of like an audit of your existing Amazon listing and just put your URL there. You don’t have to compare it against anything. I think that’s another thing that most people don’t know about Pickfu, is that you can just get open-ended feedback. You don’t have to always compare A versus B. So, if you just do one option and say, Hey, take a look at this listing for coffin shelves, and what questions or concerns do you still have? And so what they’ll do is they’ll click over. They’re not supposed to take any action. So don’t ask them to like, click on how full or buy something or whatever. They’re only supposed to look at things and we direct them to do that, but they can take a look at it. They can look at your images, they can read through the copy. And it’s really interesting because it’ll surface areas that maybe you thought you were addressing, but maybe not enough. Right. So people may ask like, oh, is this washable, like, is this edible, whatever, like all these questions will come up and maybe you need to just focus more attention to the description. Maybe you need a secondary image that kind of highlights, certain aspects. And so it’s a really good way just to get ideas of, okay, it’s kind of like when you’re sitting next to a customer and they’re looking through your listing and they’re confused, like this is exactly that right for 50 random people.

Bradley Sutton: Let’s see– your turn. Give me something that people use.

Justin: Packaging.

Bradley Sutton: Packaging, packaging. I haven’t used that, but absolutely, I can completely see that that’s actually something that’s harder to change than a lot of these other things. We talk about title and brand and image. And even if we were split testing on a live listing, like once we get the data, boom, I’m going to snap my fingers and I’m going to just switch it over. And I have not lost, it’s not going to take any much investment, but if you just go with your own packaging guys, and it’s not great, and you find that out. I mean, how much is that going to cost you to scrap all your other packaging or you’re just going to have to wait until all the packets– a thousand, 2,000, 5,000 units you have in Amazon [inaudible] without before you can redo it. And that whole process takes like two or three months. So imagine if you found out that another kind of packaging is 50% better or more appealing to customers than your original packaging. This is great. Before you even make the packaging guys, do two, three options. People talk about what’s that website, is it 99 designs or something that people– where you can like get a whole bunch of submissions. So use a website like that, or have your designer, maybe you’ve got your own designer on staff and then have them make a few options, throw it up on Pickfu. And then, if all of them are kind of like a similar score, like here they all got a score of 50 while you know that, hey, your designer is actually pretty good. And then no matter which way you go, you’ll be good. But there’s a lot of situations where I bet one of your packages is just going to have double the positive reaction as the others. And so this is the perfect thing to not do after the fact, but before you even start, I really liked that one.

Justin: Yeah. And definitely don’t forget to test those designs against your competitors, right? Because even if they’re all equally good against each other, maybe one of them will stand out differently when you do the search and find all the competitors that you are going to be competing against, right. Like this is the ultimate test and test it out against your competitors. And there are so many products that packaging is really what matters the most, right. Nutritional supplements are one where packaging is such a key factor. Right. Because they’re very similar, right. If you’re searching for protein powder or something like that, and you’re scanning through so many different variations, packaging is what is usually the first thing that catches your eye.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Here’s one advertisement. Like how have– I mean, are we talking like the copy on your sponsored display ad, or is this more general for off Amazon advertising? Or how do people use Pickfu for advertising split testing?

Justin: Yeah. Both of those things, so, yeah, definitely copy. But I would say that this is more for off-platform advertising if you’re going to be doing display ads or anything like that. And you’re working on marketing creatives. A lot of times people will ask if, not only iterating to see if which one looks good but there’s an interesting question that we’ve seen a lot of advertisers ask that does this, asking if it resonates. I’m trying to go for trustworthy, like does this marketing creative resonate with you as a trustworthy company, something like that. So I think it’s very interesting to just do an open-ended test sometimes on these things. And you can do that for main images, or even infographics as well, but like, if you’re going for some kind of emotion, then that’s an interesting way to test it is like, Hey, does this make us look like a trustworthy company or a caring company, whatever it is that you’re trying to go for it.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Cool. These have all been pretty serious ones, but Pickfu was also kind of fun too. Let me just share a fun thing. A couple of the fun things that I’ve done recently, I put out a Helium 10 Audience poll with a picture of me, with a picture of Kevin King, and a picture of Tim Jordan and said, Hey, if these three were offering to teach you how to sell on Amazon, which one would you, or who would you want to be your instructor the most or something like that, any guesses who won? If you were on the other side of that Pick Fu audience, who would you have chosen?

Justin: I’ll take Tim.

Bradley Sutton: And that’s the one who won guys, Tim Jordan won. And it was hilarious to see the responses, like for me, people were like, oh yeah, this is, we want to pick him because he’s such a young and tech-savvy looking guy and this and that. I was like, yes, my backward hats are actually working for what I wanted. But that actually brings up another point. Is that the way that Pickfu and Audience work? You’re not going to have a bunch of bots out there who are just like picking random eeny, meeny, miny, moe, A, B, or C, and then just doing this kind of like mindlessly talk about what are the requirements on the other side, your audience that is being pulled. What are you guys telling? That’s a side that we don’t actually see on the seller side. Like what are the requirements for them to get paid? Because they’re all getting paid to do this, right?

Justin: Yeah, that’s right. So, we’re tapping into a panel of US respondents and we do pay them a stipend for their participation and answering the polls. They’re required to agree to a nondisclosure agreement. So, that your creative assets are protected. And we instruct them to do it very quickly actually. And so, that’s why we tell people like, you shouldn’t link off to like some 20 question survey or go ask them to watch some like 30-minute movie or something like the whole point is that these are like snap judgements, right? Like you’re trying to understand very quickly, what’s going to appeal to people. So we do tell people, try to do it as quickly as possible. There is a timer as well. And so, they’re trying to do things quickly, but they do have to give a written explanation why and that is kind of the most important aspect of their response. And so with that, re-indexing explanation, we’re able to judge both with machine learning and with human editors, whether or not they’re kind of genuine in their responses. And so, we do put all of our responses through quite a bit of validation to make sure that people aren’t just saying like this is best. There’s something like that. Like, that’s not very helpful, right? So, we’re trying to make sure that they’re giving a true explanation why, and we’ve routinely kicked people off the platform that aren’t abiding by it. So, any feedback that people give us on our responses, like feeds back into the system and yeah, it helps make it a better experience for everyone.

Bradley Sutton: All right, guys, a quick break for the BTS. Bradley’s 30-second tip. Here we go. All right. This was just launched on Amazon a couple of weeks ago, and people have always asked, like, how can I see who’s left me a bad review, or can I contact somebody who left me a bad review in order to have a chance to make it right? Well, before the answer was always, no, you can’t do that. You can’t find it. Amazon protects everybody, but no longer, if you’re brand registered, go into your brand dashboard in our customer reviews, anybody who’s left a one, two or three star review, you are now able to contact them with the help of Amazon. You can even find the order that resulted in that bad review, and you can offer them a refund. You can offer them a replacement. You can just start a dialogue on how to fix the problem. This is unprecedented as something that Amazon sellers have been asking for for a long time that just came on. So guys, make sure, take advantage of that. If you want more details on how to actually do that, go to helium10.com/blog. Helium10.com/blog. I wrote a big article with instructions on how to do that. Just type into the search articles, function, how to contact customers who left you a bad review, something like that, and instructions will come up. So guys take advantage of this. This is a great move by Amazon to help you deal with those negative reviews.

Bradley Sutton: I think we’ve talked about most of the more common use cases and even some uncommon, but, well, let’s go to the more uncommon, like what are some kind of unique things that maybe aren’t even advertised as an option on Pick Fu and Audience, as far as a use case of how to, or what to poll, what are 7some unique use cases that you have heard of that maybe we haven’t talked about today?

Justin: Yeah. I mean, I think it could really be any aspect that’s creative. I mean, one that we, I don’t even think is listed on our poll builder is just like simple things, like product inserts. I know a lot of people do stuff like that. And obviously, that design matters and you’re making a lot of creative decisions there. We use it internally for anything creative as well. So we’re going to prosper. And we’re going to be at the booth right next to you guys and all the stuff that we designed for Prosper. Obviously, we do it through Pickfu, just to test out designs and all that kind of stuff. So, really anything that you’re going to be printing or producing, and you’re putting some creative thought behind it. It could go through Pickfu. So, I think your profile picture one was a good example. We actually see people do that for LinkedIn all the time, actually testing LinkedIn profile pictures, or it could be your online dating pictures, kind of anything that you’re going to be putting out there where perception matters. We see all kinds of interesting products obviously coming through. And they kind of run the gamut from, obviously we’ve got a lot of industries from authors to mobile games, but even in the product side, we’ve adult products come through and romance novels. And so all kinds of fun things are being tested.

Bradley Sutton: Are they testing like the cover? Like, should we use audio for what’s that about?

Justin: Yeah, a lot of cover tests, testing different models, obviously for romance novels, it’s kind of like nutritional supplements, right? Like you’ve got to have a good cover that captures the imagination. So we see a lot of that kind of testing. Yeah, super creative.

Bradley Sutton: Interesting. Interesting. Now, I mean, something you were just talking about just actually stirred up my creative juices. Let me run a scenario by you here. You talked about at the booth, how will we be at Prosper. So first of all, guys, if you’re listening to this before July 13th, make sure to come out to Vegas, even if it’s last-second, guys, I’ll tell you one thing right now, quick storytime. My entire professional life was changed by going to an Amazon conference last-second way back in 2016, I was literally listening to a podcast and I had just left the company I was working for. And they were like, Hey, you know what, here’s a special to come to this event, it’s like $900 and we’ll give you like $200 off. And it’s in Chicago. And I was like, you know what, let’s do this. And so I went to the drop, everything went to that two-day conference, Amazon conference, and it pretty much changed my whole perspective. I had no idea what Amazon selling on Amazon could do until I went to that conference. And I was pretty poor at the time. I even slept in my rental car. Because I didn’t want to get a hotel in Chicago. It’s kind of expensive. And that just set me on this journey. And I made connections there that I still have to this day and you never know guys what going into an Amazon conference can do. So what Justin was talking about there, about how we’re at the Prosper show and they have the booth next hours. That’s in Vegas. It’s on July 13, I believe it is the first day. So I’m not sure if this coupon is going to work last second, but give it a try guys, go to helium10.com/prosper. You might get a hundred dollars off the Prosper show, but even if you can’t, I still suggest coming and we will also have a big social where there’ll be a few hundred Amazon sellers. Justin will be there. I’ll be there. That’s on the 13th. So, if you guys want to take a selfie with Justin, go to helium10.com/rockout, and you can get tickets to that Helium 10 social. But anyway, the thing that stirred my imagination there was, I remember before talking about conferences, I think it might have been at the women’s empowering conference a while, but I don’t even know if you were there Justin. Probably not. I mean, I don’t even know why I was there. It was a woman’s conference. I remember you guys were doing it live. It was so funny. You guys were doing live Pickfu polls. You had these big cardboard cutouts. That was like a fake Pickfu frame. And then you would take pictures with people and then what you would do is you actually uploaded that picture or like the pictures of three people, to a live Pickfu audience. And then like you did funny things. Like who would you most rather punch or something?

Justin: Yeah, I think, yeah, I think we had one with you who would win in a bar brawl or something like that.

Bradley Sutton: A bunch of stuff like that, but it got me thinking like, something that I haven’t really dived much into actually at all is what’s it called? I think Amazon Live where Amazon sellers can go live. Almost like kind of QVC style talking about their products. But guys, if you are one of those who are going live, that is something that could get engagement way up, like once you start getting the audience, has your live, throw up something like, Hey guys, how would you much rather use this? And then we’re going to run a Pickfu audience on this, or we’re going to run a Helium 10 audience, or a Pickfu poll. And let’s see those of you who are live on the chat, which one do you think is going to win. And then at the end of this broadcast, because these things actually, like within an hour, most of the time you’ll have all the replies.

Justin: 30 minutes to an hour. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah, 30 minutes or an hour. You’ll have all the replies, but there’s another use case that we just invented right here. I don’t even think that anybody’s used this before, but anybody using Amazon live, see how you can run a live poll while you’re live and then use that to get likes and engagement with the viewers actually on Amazon live.

Justin: Yeah. That’s awesome.

Bradley Sutton: All right. Any other use cases you can think of?

Justin: Well, it’s funny because along those lines, we actually do see a lot of agencies, they’ll run live tests during their meetings with their clients, just to show that the creative output that they’ve created does test better. Right. Because a lot of times they just want to prove it like, oh, maybe the customer’s skeptical, or they kind of like the version that they already came up with. But when the agency or the consultant comes in and they create this new design, they want to prove it. And so they’ll just start a Pickfu poll, maybe it’s a 30, 60-minute meeting and they’ll just start at the beginning of the meeting and say like, Hey, here’s what we did. And here are the 50 people who are validating that it is better than what you have. And that’s how it was really fun to use because it blows everyone’s minds and it makes agencies look great.

Bradley Sutton: Absolutely. One of the things that people, when I’m invited on other people’s podcasts or webinars or things is a common question is, Hey, Bradley, what do you see as one of the biggest mistakes that Amazon sellers make? And I think one of the things, probably one of the top three answers that I give is that the Amazon sellers are usually too haughty. And they think that they know everything about their product and they think that they’re the experts and they don’t need to ask anybody for any help. And I see that as a problem, always because it doesn’t matter how you use your own product or your own perception. Hey, yeah. Great. Be passionate about your product, become an expert in your product, but at the end of the day, don’t rely on your own knowledge because the way that you search for products, the way that the color that you like for packaging, the title that most would resonate with you is not always the same as what overall your target audience would be interested in. So guys don’t rely on your own intuition. I’m not saying don’t use your own intuition. I mean, you got to be savvy, as an entrepreneur, but always validated guys. And you know what sometimes you guess what your intuition is going to come to be right. But Hey, if it’s going to cost me 50, 60, $70 to go validate that, I guarantee you, if you do 10 of these half the time, what you might’ve picked is probably not what the majority of your target audience is going to pick. So guys don’t rely on your own knowledge. Use either Pickfu or Audience to do that. And speaking of that, we didn’t even talk about this, but I just mentioned your target audience. Talk about some of the targeting that you can do inside of Audience or inside of Pickfu to really just make sure that you’re not asking a 75-year-old man about the color of women’s underwear, that they would most like, or something like that. So like how can you target who is even responding to the polls?

Justin: Yeah. So, by default, it will do a kind of general audience first come first serve. But yeah, you can do targeting on all kinds of different demographic and behavioral traits. So, obviously, age and gender are huge ones for most products. But we also have things like behavior. So do they drink beer? Do they drink wine? Do they take nutritional supplements or beauty products, kind of all these different kinds of things. Exercise frequency is a popular one. And so, all kinds of different behaviors are targetable and that will definitely help you hone in on your target audience and the feedback that you’re looking for. If there’s not an audience here that you think would be suitable, like obviously you can let us know and we’ll try to build it. But a lot of times you can kind of back out of it, right? Like maybe we don’t have rodeo attendees, which was actually someone asked us like, oh, do you have people, can I target people who attend rodeos? Which would be awesome, but no, we don’t. But maybe you can kind of extract or like who attends rodeos and maybe try to go by some of those demographic traits or something like that. So, you can approximate it sometimes even if you can’t get the exact audience that you need. But the last point I’ll say about that is that sometimes people make the opposite problem and they think they know their audience too. Well, kind of like what you were saying about making the decisions around the product itself, but oh, I assume this is my audience. Well, if you start going to niche, like you may be gathering feedback to a narrow of an audience. And so I always tell people to, you may want to step back and kind of be a little bit more open about it because there are some products where the purchaser is not always the user and that kind of thing. Right. So you kind of need to keep an open mind about who your potential audience who the buyer is going to be, and then who’s actually using it.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. Excellent, excellent, excellent point there. Super important, we actually, I actually gave this, one of my BTS is my Bradley’s 30-second tips a few weeks ago about well, how do I even know who my target audience is? If it’s something that’s not completely obvious guys, how would you even know? Well, here’s the thing like coffin shelf, I mean, I know somebody who likes Gothic things, obviously, it would be in the coffin shelf but is it, does its SKU by gender? Does its SKU by age? Does its SKU by education level? Like, I wouldn’t know those things offhand. So what I did was I went into my brand analytics on Amazon since I’ve got brand registry and I was able to see my existing– I’ve been selling for a year already. I was able to go in there and see like, wow, it’s actually females from the ages of 20 to 30, who actually have college degrees. Like it gave me all of this information that I can actually filter by in Helium 10 Audience or Pick Fu. So I can really hone in on that target market and get very relevant because if you don’t use these filters, you might have somebody giving you their honest opinion. And it’s probably a good opinion on it, but they’re not even the people who are seeing your product. So guys, don’t just think this is just let me click two buttons and I’m going to get the exact answer. You can actually go wrong by using Audience and Pick Fu if you’re not doing it in the right way. So, I mean, for me the most no-brainer thing, like if you’re an Amazon seller and you’re trying to use Pickfu or Audience, the first filter, I always choose every single time. Which one do you think that is?

Justin: Amazon Prime shoppers.

Bradley Sutton: Amazon Prime shoppers. That’s so cool that you guys have that. I was like, Hey, my customers are Amazon Prime members. So I want to make sure that this person who is responding here is an Amazon Prime member, but don’t stop there guys. In most cases, you can go a little bit deeper, like, unless maybe you’re talking about the brand or something, just like very general. But even in that case, maybe I only want people commenting on my brand logo or something who are in my target audience. Anyways, Justin, the last question that I think everybody always has is we’ve got a lot of international customers here, so what’s the plan for Helium 10 Audience or Pick Fu who’d be able to just start polling customers in other countries, be it Japan, or be it for Amazon Germany, UK, et cetera.

Justin: Yeah. I mean, that’s actually the main thing on the roadmap right now is international expansion. So, I don’t have a timeframe for you yet, but just know that we are working on it.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. Cool. All right, guys, if you’re wanting to get more information, obviously, if you are already a Helium 10 member, just go into your dashboard and hit listing optimization and Helium 10 Audiences right there. You can start it up. It’s a separate feed. You don’t have to subscribe to it at all. It’s the same cost as if you were on pickfu.com. If you’re completely new to this concept, you want to just find out a little bit more about it, go to helium10.com/tools/audience. And if people want to maybe reach out to your team, Justin, to get some more information or maybe give you some ideas or ask more questions, how can they find you on the inter webs out there?

Justin: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they can just, they can write in to us at pickfu.com. They could always reach out to me on LinkedIn, or on Facebook.

Bradley Sutton: Awesome. Justin, thank you so much for joining us. We’re just starting on this journey here together now with Helium 10 Audience is going to be great to like a year and a half from now, look back and see. I’m sure we’re going to have a lot more success stories on how people have been using this to help their Amazon businesses.

Justin: Yeah, definitely. Looking forward to it.

Bradley Sutton: All right. We’ll see you at the Prosper Show.

Justin: Yep. Sounds good. Thanks.