How to Boost E-Commerce Sale with Facebook Ads
Why Facebook Ads
Facebook is certainly one of the best avenues to create ads, as it has so many potential marketers and customers who are highly active all the time. It has very unique and detailed information about its users. Facebook provides you with various bidding options like bidding on CPC (Cost per Click) or CPM (Cost per 1000 impressions). You can also determine the bidding rate for your ad to be displayed to the target audience. Statistics reveal that Facebook ads can give up to 152% ROI. Read on to understand the strategies to boost your sale with Facebook Ads.
Types of Facebook Ads
Though there are different versions of Facebook ads, there are selective types of ads, which you have to be aware of for your e-commerce business. The ads discussed are applicable for news feed of desktop and mobiles. Sidebar ads are very restricted and do not actually require a Facebook page.
- Page Post Ads: The basic necessity for these ads is a Facebook account and a page. These are almost exactly like link posts or photos you create on a Facebook page for a status update.
- Carousel Ads/Multi-Product Ads: If you have more than one product to advertise, these are the best. These are useful to display your catalog or variations in the same product.
- Page Post Video Ad: It is another type of Facebook ad, which keeps automatically playing videos created in mute mode until the user unmutes the audio.
Based on your product design and type, once you choose your objectives like event responses, page likes, video views, etc., Facebook optimizes these ads to display them to the target audience who are likely to buy.
Strategies
Personalize Your Ads
You might have heard of a very popular term ‘Identify a buyer persona’ and target messaging to that person. This rule is applicable to Facebook ads too, as this strategy has brought in an ROI of over $10 million to Zappos’ Facebook advertising. You can follow Zappos’ strategy of using data from website, customer reviews and social networks to create multiple personas and create ads to target each of the personas with a specific product. Invest some quality time to identify buyer personas looking for your products.
Try Dynamic Product Ads
Dynamic product ads target reluctant customers with customized ads to bring them back to you, based on their activities on your website. This is believed to be one of the best strategies that offer the highest ROI. You might have experienced such re-targeting Amazon ads on your Facebook page for your recent visit to their specific products. Dynamic ads can create high click-through rate (CTR) and even high conversion rate, as the ads are extremely relevant to the targeted individuals. Earlier, these dynamic ads were acquired only through third party channels whereas Facebook is directly offering this to you. All you have to do is to upload and customize your catalogue, customize template, and place it in your website. You will be guided through every step of this simplified process.
Use Carousel Ads
Also known as multi-product ads, this type of Facebook ads let you display more than one product in a single ad. Carousel ads are said to produce higher CTR for your multiple image displays in the same ad. This works out to be highly cost-effective for your business with the advantage of enjoying high return on your ad spends. Carousel ads give you an edge in increasing the conversion rate, as there is high possibility of a customer buying, when he or she views relevant products together. You can use this type of ad to either display multiple products in your business or different models or variations in a single product.
Track Conversion
Tracking conversion is a significant step, as it directly reflects on your revenue generation. Make use of conversion-tracking pixel, which is a tiny code used to track customer behaviors on your website. Fix the pixel placed in the checkout page to track various customer actions, including the sale that happens. It is highly recommended to install the pixel way before you start your campaign, as this gives adequate time to Facebook to observe what type of customers are converting to actual sales and optimize your campaign for future conversions. A UTM tracking does not always track all Facebook clicks, as the default attribution model varies from user to user. You will have to request the web developer personnel to technically edit standard Facebook pixel in order to use ‘Purchase’ event and to import conversion value using relevant methods.
Find New Customers
Facebook has a feature called ‘lookalike audience’, which is an excellent way to find new customers who have same characteristics like your existing customers and are more likely to buy your products. It can be one of the best performing ways to target audiences for your business. Nevertheless, you will have to create a customer audience list on which the lookalike audience can be built through Facebook fans or from the tracking pixel data. The tool utilizes algorithms on Facebook to identify people with same interests and demography as that of your existing audience. You can, of course, target audience of varied demography and interests too to identify customers who would bring a sure sale your way.
Promote Your Brand with Facebook
Whether it is an individual or enterprise – everyone uses Facebook to connect and socialize and then comes the concept of shopping. Nothing can be a better platform than Facebook to build relationship with your existing and probable customers, and the best way to communicate is through ads that project the story of your brand. Studies by Adaptly and Facebook reveal that rather than selling, conveying brand messages through sequential ads can boost conversion rates to a large extent. One of the comparative studies of sequential ads and standard ads revealed the former to have 87% higher results. You may also choose to create unique videos to demonstrate the brand’s story. But make sure the videos are short and fast moving with clear message and value projected.
Build Strong Relationship with Existing Customers
One of the smart ways to improve upon customer relationship is through the Custom Audiences tool. This tool allows you to customize a list of target customers and display relevant ads, based on the list of emails, phone numbers, or Facebook ids of the customers. The tool aids in contacting and converting existing customers to become Facebook fans. For this, the Custom Audience tool requires you to upload your list of customers with an objective of displaying relevant ads. But while you do this, make sure you do not include the already existing fans in the campaign. You may also use the newsletter subscribers or list of dedicated customers who recommend your products, to create a custom audience and reward them with promos and offers.
Create Proper Landing Page
One of the creative ways to capture the attention of visitors via your Facebook ad campaign is to create a landing page with less distraction and focused content that can talk about few of your important products. Readers must not feel you are selling; instead, they must be interested in the content, which feels like an interesting story. This method works especially well if your page is visited through one of the targeted ads. Studies revealed that PPC traffic directed to a landing page with no distractions had almost 105% more conversions than standard landing pages. A landing page with click-through feature also allows you to edit headlines without having to touch the product page. It is important for you to project consistent messages across your landing page and ads.
Use Proper Images
The visual impact of an image has a huge influence on the buyer’s behavior. The quality of the image can directly boost your ROI and clicks, while the image features can influence the CTR to be almost predictable. Focus on the following key factors in your ads:
- Give importance to the products more than your company logo, as it is what people look for.
- Ensure product details are clear in the images.
- Focus on minimum key elements and give a clear product display while avoiding clutter.
- Avoid far shots, as this can bring down CTR.
- If there are human images in your ad, ensure they face the text in the ad, as this would direct the viewers’ eyes towards the text almost involuntarily.
Give Reason to Click on Ad
To have your viewers click on your ads, you must make it enticing with few captivating concepts like:
- Most often humans tend to procrastinate actions. So, to make them click your ads, you can post a limited offer, for which they have limited time to act and thus create a sense of urgency to click.
- You may also mention that the items are running out of stock and only the last few pieces are left to give them a gentle nudge.
- You may post some consequences of missing out on the deal.
- Use words like clearance, only today, last opportunity, act now, hurry, ONLY, limited time, etc.
Just see what is more relevant and appropriate to your ad, the occasion, and target the audience accordingly to make it more appealing.
AIDA Model to Improve Ad
AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Though your images might increase the CTR, it is ad copy that actually converts the views into sales. Since Facebook gives you a word limit of 90 characters, you ought to make the most of them and here is where the AIDA model comes handy while writing the copy:
- Attention: Creating a capturing headline has to be your key focus. Come up with creative ideas.
- Interest: Create an interest in the viewer by providing benefits of your product.
- Desire: What you write must create a desire in the viewers that would make them click on your ad. It could be an offer or an introductory sale that is limited, etc.
- Action: Most viewers do not act. To make them act, make it easy by providing a ‘call to action’ button where they can simply click. It could display ‘shop now’ or ‘learn more’, as these are the best CTAs according to Adroll.
The secret behind AIDA model is to grab attention, create interest in your products and persuade action.
Don’t Forget Emails
Observe your customer behavior closely to categorize them based on their buying pattern. There are people who buy more number of low value products, less number of high-value products, and the rest who buy only when there are offers and sales. Collect the email database based on each category and upload them into the Facebook custom audiences and post relevant ads for each of the segments. Send out different messages at different times to motivate each group differently.
You may also reach out to the Facebook viewer through emails with engaging content and regular reminders to remind them of your online store. On your landing page, you may even place some offers for signing up. To make signup simple, you can add a popup form or a sign up from just above or just below your content or in a sidebar. But to get to this stage, the Facebook ad has to be effective.
Try Different Call to Action Buttons
Though the ‘shop now’ button works well for eCommerce ads, you must explore and test other CTA buttons too, to boost conversions. Test other buttons like ‘Learn more’, ‘sign up’, ‘book now’ etc. and see what works the best for you. Repeat customers who have already shopped for your products are well aware of your products and services and would anyway buy. It is the new customers who have to be motivated to act. Based on the type of product and the stage at which the action button is placed, the mood and behavior of the buyer would be influenced. Hence, you have to explore different CTA buttons.
Conclusion
It takes longer than usual to convert Facebook customers and you ought to keep them engaged through segmented email funnels and retargeted campaigns. But remember - for all your efforts, Facebook ads certainly work and most of the e-commerce owners can vouch for it. If your ads are not delivering the desired ROI, it means you have to focus on making them more relevant and give strong reasons to your visitors for clicking. Understand all the relevant strategies and focus on one at a time to improve upon your existing approach to make your ecommerce business a huge success.
