Facebook, Instagram… social media in general.
Using these platforms can be a fantastic way to create brand awareness, leads and even sales for your ecom store. Many years back, you could create a following on Facebook and your posts would be seen by almost the entire reach of your audience on that platform.
But that was then…
These days we don’t have it as lucky anymore. Facebook is very much a pay to play system. Using it in the correct way can really get your brand exposure to your ideal customers and grow your business much quicker than using free methods.
I’m all about getting free traffic that converts, but what I don’t like is all the time and energy involved in building a business organically.
Why not have both?
Use organic methods to grow your business, but use ads to make things move faster! With paid traffic, you can build systems to help with cart abandonment’s (which happen a lot as you may know), scaling out to acquire more customers for your brand etc
Facebook ads are great for driving more customers for your ecommerce store and in today’s content, I want to offer some tips when it comes to running ads for your brand on this platform. Running ads can be done at any stage of your sales funnel.
Let’s go over 10 tips you can implement to drive more sales. I’m not talking about the basics. I’m talking about how to really make your ads the best that they can be.
Use Eye Catching Creatives
First up on the list is the use of attention grabbing creatives that draw your target audience to engage with your brand and offer. It’s important that you use high quality images and video.
People tend to scroll through their Facebook feeds quickly. So you’ve got to do your best in terms of getting your target audience to stop scrolling.
A good eye catching creative will help get your target audience’s attention. Images and video can produce a lot of engagement all by themselves. If you combine powerful words, phrases and numbers, you can increase the likelihood of your ad getting better attention.
Think eye catching colours, brightness & shapes. Try to avoid images or video that are the same colours as Facebook (blue and white) The reason for this is because they tend to blend in and users on Facebook won’t notice them.
Images of happy people within your creatives can help create an emotional connection. Please bare in mind that most people are used to seeing real pictures of their friends and family on Facebook, so cheesy stock photos won’t cut it.
Your best bet is to use real images or real people. They tend to get more clicks.
Install the Facebook Pixel on Your Website
Another important thing you need to do is install your Facebook pixel onto your website. Doing so will allow you to track your visitors and customers actions, giving you much better targeting and conversion rate.
As you run traffic to your stores pages, the pixel will be able to acquire this data and learn alot about the type of visitor that will purchase from your store. This is incredibly valuable because Facebook learns about the type of person that is likely to become a customer of your store from the Facebook platform.
Over time, you’ll be able to program Facebook to find more customers for your store when you run ads, making it that bit easier to generate more customers for your brand. I’m sure you can see the power of that now.
The pixel will also help you to target your visitors and customers based on events they take on your site. To give you one example, you can target those visitors with ads who have added to cart, but didn’t make their purchase. This is laser targeting to audiences based on certain events they take with your site.
Again… very powerful and very important to have your pixel installed and working before you switch on any Facebook ad. You’re simply not using the Facebook ad platform to its full potential without using the pixel as part of your advertising campaigns.
Create a Custom Audience For People Who’ve Already Viewed Your Product Page
As part of the laser targeting that Facebook allows when working with the pixel, you can create custom audiences that have taken certain actions on your site. So for those that have viewed a certain product page, you can retarget them with an ad to have them revisit what they were already viewing in a previous visitor session on your website.
This is all about trying to nurture these visitors into committing further with your sales funnel. The next step of your sales funnel after viewing a product page, is to have the visitor add the item(s) to cart.
You see very few people will purchase your product the first time they land on your site.
Data suggests that 98% of visitors on your website won’t purchase during their first visit. This is completely normal behaviour. When was the last time you came across a brand online that you never experienced before and purchased their product the first time round?
Probably not many…
So what you want to do in this case is be able to reconnect these visitors with your brand on multiple occasions. This will allow them to get more familiar with your brand. Creating more trust, authority, credibility and influence with them over time.
As long as someone has checked out your product page, you know they have some interest in your product. Using custom audiences will help you to convert these visitors into customers.
When creating these custom audiences, exclude people who are already customers. What this means is you’ll be targeting only people who have viewed your product, but who haven’t made a purchase yet.
Now you can use this custom audience to provide a custom ad targeted only at this specific product view audience.
An example for an ad might be offering a small discount like 10% off, or added value in some way. Add some urgency by making the offer for a limited time only. This can really boost conversion rates.
Don’t Forget To Retarget Those Cart Abandonments!
Yes that’s right!
Using the pixel data, you can target those guys who have visited your product page and added items to their cart, but never completed their purchase. As an ecom store brand, you should be well aware that cart abandonment is a big problem.
Data from the Baymard institute has suggest’s that almost 70% of visitors who get as far as adding an item to their cart will abandon it before checking out. That’s a HUGE issue for shopping brands online and you need to seriously consider a solution that will recover those lost sales.
Apart from using email marketing to influence your prospects and customers to shop with you, you can use Facebook ads to retarget those visitors who have abandoned their cart. This is a very effective way of recovering shopping cart abandonment’s.
The people who abandon their carts may only need a small nudge to complete their order.
With Facebook ads, you can easily create an ad asking them if they’ve forgotten to buy your item. There are various reasons why people don’t complete a purchase. They get distracted, they are hit by hidden fees, the purchase process is complicated etc etc…
For your retargeting ad, be sure to include a picture of the item and link it to the product so they can finish the order easily. Using clever copy within the ad is a smart move as it helps to communicate their incompleted purchase and influence them on returning to complete the order.
Pro Tip: Don’t leave it too late to run your cart abandonment ad. People who abandoned their cart yesterday will be easier to convert than someone who abandoned their cart several weeks ago.
If you are trying to influence shoppers to complete their order from a while back, you’ll need to stack more value on the offer to guide them into purchasing with you. This is because the mindset, the excitement of making their purchase with your brand has dissolved and has fallen down the pecking order so to speak.
So your best bet is to get your retargeting ad running sooner rather than later so you don’t lose out on recovering those shoppers who abandon their cart.
Use Facebook Ads to Upsell & Cross Sell To Your Existing Customers
So you’ve managed to funnel a certain percentage of visitors from the top of your funnel and influence them into making a purchase with your brand online.
Good job!
Why not try upselling these customers on a better version of what they have purchased. Or perhaps cross selling them on different items that will deliver a better end result? Doing this will help to increase your average order value and life time value of your customers. It’s a smart move if it makes sense to do so.
You can achieve all of this by using Facebook ads. Just like you segment your customer and prospect list on email, you can also market specifically to your customers using Facebook ads.
As you know, someone who has purchased from you already is more likely to trust you and your brand. It’s easier to sell to existing customers than a new one. Data tells us that 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers. You can boost sales and get a great return on your ad spend by doing upselling ads.
Create a Look-a-Like Audience of Existing Customers
Facebook ads and the ever important pixel you install on your site allow you to target similar people on their platform to those that have purchased from you in the past. The pixel collects data on your website from those visitors who have purchased from you. It learns more about the different customer avatars that purchase from your site.
After 100 plus customers that the pixel records, it is then able to understand who purchases from you and will be able to acquire more of these types of avatars on the Facebook user base platform.
Can you see how powerful that is?
If you have repeat customers and brand advocates already, make sure you include them in the list you use to build your lookalike audience. The Facebook ads platform gets smarter as time goes by and really helps you as the advertiser to target similar people to those that have taken certain actions on your site such as added items to a shopping cart, or find similar people who have purchased from you in the past.
Build Out Your Referral Program
If you have a referral program (You should have a program like this to develop more customers), why not use Facebook ads to promote your referral program? As I am sure you are aware by now, Facebook ads can do wonders for acquiring new customers and sell to existing customers.
Why not run ads to all customers and offer them an incentive when they refer one of their friends to your store as a new customer?
Design the incentive in such a way that both your existing customer and the new customers they invite to your store, are both rewarded with store credit or a discount on their next/first purchase.
This will motivate your existing customers to purchase from you again and help you acquire new customers for your store.
This makes things a win-win-win for everyone involved. Your shopping brand generates more revenue & customer’s, and your customer’s are rewarded via a discount or store credit on their next purchase with you.
Run a Giveaway Using Facebook Ads
Running the likes of giveaways and contests on Facebook and Instagram can be a great way to generate more following and sales for your shopping brand.
Your fans love to win things… everyone does!
You can use Facebook ads to really accelerate the growth of the giveaway. The important thing to bare in mind when running giveaways is that your offer needs to be an attractive one. Adding a dollar value to the offer you are giving away really helps to demonstrate its value.
We ran a giveaway contest at Halloween time and it did pretty well. We used an application at the time called gleam.io and we had a Paw Patrol offer that got plenty of attention.
We used a small budget for Facebook ads to get the ball rolling and it didn’t disappoint. We offered a coupon code after we announced the winners of the giveaway via email and that generated sales for our campaign. This way everyone who participated got rewarded.
In the end we received more followers, more leads and generated revenue from new and existing customers. All because we combined Facebook ads with a good quality giveaway.
Use Catchy & Engaging Ad Copy For Your Facebook Ads
We talked about using good creatives to help draw your target audience’s attention and engage with the ad further. Creatives are just one part of the puzzle for your ad. Another important factor in the success of your ad is the copywriting you use.
The words you use to engage your audience matters!
When you write any sort of copywriting for your brand, you always want it to engage with your target audience. Your Facebook ad is no exception. It’s even more critical that you capture the attention of your prospect with the first few words.
This is because with social media platforms like Facebook, the user base is not looking for anything other than acquiring news from friends, family and perhaps a few other interested third party sources. So your ad needs to stand out from the crowd and make the user stop scrolling.
You do this by getting their attention on the creative and the adcopy. Your copy and the image/video within the ad should tell a story that speaks to your ideal customer.
You can make your adcopy stand out by:
1. Asking a question
2. Using Emojis
3. Explaining a benefit
4. Telling a story
5. Call out a problem
Show your audience that you understand their pain point or issue and how clicking on your ad will offer them a solution.
Build Your Email List Using Facebook Ads
In the same way you use Facebook ads to acquire customers and retarget customers to purchase from you again, you can also generate leads for your store using this social media platform.
Typically it’s cheaper to acquire leads for your store than actual customers, but you gotta learn to nurture your leads with great value in exchange for their hard earned cash.
The best way to approach this is by Offering something of value to your audience using a Facebook lead generation ad that motivates them to sign up for your email list. Alternatively you can use an optin landing page. You’ll get less leads coming through, but the quality of those leads will be better.
Offer a discount, a free gift, a free app to download or even a trial offer of your product.
As you give value to your subscribers in the form of your offer, you can nurture more value to them over time. This will turn these subscribers into customers as they begin to know, like and trust you over time.
Bonus Tip:
Use a Good Call To Action
The bonus tip I want to offer you is something I see brands get wrong. Your call to action is a very important element within your advert. It’s there to encourage your audience to take that micro commitment from viewing your ad, to taking action and clicking/tapping a link or a button within the ad that takes them to what you are offering.
Facebook offers various call to action buttons for you to choose from. For ecommerce, the best ones to use are “Shop Now”, or “Learn More”. If you are doing a giveaway or email sign up etc, you should be testing options such as “Learn More”, “Sign Up” or even “Download”.
Make sure that you choose one that is relevant to your brand, goal and ad campaign.
This appears obvious, but over the years I have noticed brands that mess this up within their advertising. Your text, headline, description, and call-to-action need to be consistent.
When you are not consistent with your ad, offer and landing page, you run the risk of confusing your audience and this will no doubt lead to poor conversions within your funnel. If your adverts call to action creates confusion, you’ll receive less clicks to your landing page.
To Conclude
These tips above should help you to generate more sales from your Facebook ads. The type of ad you use varies depending on the goal you set for your campaign.
The thing with any type of media buying on ad platforms like Facebook, Google etc is that you need to be flexible and test various elements of your ads. You should be testing different creatives such as video or image.
Test different types of campaigns too!
Start out with images as they are easier to produce. Make sure they’re appealing to your ideal customer, as this helps to get your customer to stop scrolling and digest your ad further.
Don’t forget to use your pixel! This is VERY important to the success of your marketing campaigns. You should target customers based on their interests, actions taken on your branded site and even those who abandoned their cart.
Be sure to target Facebook users who are similar to your customers. (Lookalike audience)
Create ads for your current customers to upsell them or tell them about your referral program. Try a giveaway to acquire more social media followers and sales.
If you need our help with running your Facebook ad campaigns, be sure to reach out! We’d be happy to have a chat with you about this.
