7 Strategies to Boost Your Ecommerce Sales With Facebook Ads
The growth and popularity of social media for marketing has been phenomenal. In just a few years, Facebook has become the go-to marketplace for many brands and marketers.
Facebook may have started out with the intent to connect you with people who are close to you. However, with over 2 billion monthly active users, it has rapidly transformed into the biggest social media platform in the world. This makes it a marketplace where brands can connect with 2 billion potential customers.
In fact, Facebook drove 18% of all web traffic in 2018 and was the second highest traffic driver after Google.
The best way to utilize Facebook for marketing is through ads. This can be a great eCommerce marketing strategy. Facebook ads can not only help you boost exposure but also help to boost loyalty.
The best part is that you can use Facebook ads at any stage of your sales funnel. With Facebook ads, you can reach your goals (greater engagement, followers, sales, or leads) by paying a minimal price as compared to other forms of advertising.
Here are 7 strategies to increase eCommerce sales with Facebook ads.
1. Find Niche Audiences
Most people use Facebook for the sole purpose of socializing and connecting with others. Very few categorically visit Facebook to make purchases. This is why you need to put your products in front of people who fully intend to make a purchase.
Targeting an audience who are not actually looking to make a purchase may not drive the outcome you desire. This can make it more difficult for you to increase eCommerce sales and drive conversions.
This is where Facebook’s targeting of ads comes in very handy. If you have an idea of who your target audience is, you can simply feed that information into Facebook to get started. You can target your audience based on locations, demographics, and interests.
For example, if you sell men’s apparel, you can exclude women from your targeting. You can also target men living in a particular geographical area. This is essential if you have a local eCommerce business.
If your products are sophisticated and belong to a particular niche, you can use the interests option to target. This can help you further narrow down your audience.
2. Create Brand Advocates
Brand advocates are people who are likely to spread a positive word about your brand. If your products are good, your existing customers can become your brand advocates. They will share good things about your brand in their social circles.
To create more brand advocates, you can leverage testimonials of your happy customers and use them to increase eCommerce sales. You can post testimonials on your Facebook page and run ads on them. When you promote these testimonials, there is a greater chance of people believing in your brand.
Leverage Influencers
To get even better results from this strategy, you can partner with an influencer. Influencers are people who have a large fan-following on social media. Their followers are keen to know their views and opinions about topics that relate to their niche. They trust their opinions immensely which makes influencers a key component of effective advertising.
You can partner with influencers in your niche and ask them to post reviews of your products on their Facebook pages. When the influencers; followers see them using your product, they may be prompted to purchase it as well. Using Facebook ads, you can then promote such posts and put them in front of even more people.
Ask your influencers to use Facebook’s Branded Content tool as this will allow you to run ads on their content. You will also be able to see how the post is performing so you can make any adjustments to your strategy.
To find reliable influencers, you can use platforms like Grin. You can simply search for influencers in your niche and contact them directly. Grin even allows you to send products to your influencers, pay them, check your ROI, and much more.
Image via Grin
3. Repurpose Old Content
Repurposing your existing content is a great way to create content for your Facebook ads. If you have some old content which received a large amount of engagement, you can reuse it.
If you think that posting it again may be useless, be assured that it does have a lot of benefits. By creating an ad using your old content, you can target a completely new audience. A post which has performed well in the past might perform even better as an ad.
When you repurpose your content, you also make the most of your content creation effort to increase eCommerce sales.
4. Reduce Abandoned Carts
According to Smart Insights, out of every 100 customers, only about 3-4 customers make a purchase. However, about 15 customers add products to the cart. This is a decent conversion rate.
Image via Smart Insights
However, to boost your conversion rate, you need to minimize the number of people who desert your carts.
Many people add products to their carts but don’t complete the purchases. These people may need a slight push to make a purchase. It is easier to convert them using Facebook ads, which are quite effective at reducing the number of abandoned carts.
In your ads, you can ask them if they’ve forgotten to complete their purchase. You can even include a photo of the products they’ve left in their carts to make it more familiar. You should also add a link to the products in your ad that encourages them to purchase your products.
Facebook ads can help you effectively re-engage people who have abandoned their carts and convert them to get higher conversion rates. To take it a step further, you can customize the ads and offer discounts too. This can be based on how recently they interacted with your brand.
You can increase the discount percentage to lure people who haven’t interacted with your brand for a while too.
5. Remarketing
As can be seen from the funnel, the number of visitors who land on product pages is high. However, only a small fraction of them add products to their carts.
Many people may not be convinced to make a purchase the very first time they see a product. You can create a custom audience on Facebook to target these people and create an ad.
These people have visited your page because they’ve had some interest in your products. You need to capitalize on such interest to increase eCommerce sales.
Image via Facebook
You can specifically target people who viewed your product but didn’t make a purchase. You can offer some discount to them as well. This can help to improve your conversion rates too.
A good idea would be to run these remarketing campaigns at the beginning of the month or on Fridays. These are the times when people usually get paid, and they may be more inclined to make a purchase.
6. Upselling to Existing Customers
A great way to increase eCommerce sales is by upselling to your existing customers. Upselling means selling additional products to your existing customers.
You can segregate your audiences in a unique manner. If someone has purchased products X and Y from you but haven’t purchased Z, you can target them for Z. When you target a person who has purchased from you multiple times, chances of conversions are greater.
This is because the person has already formed an opinion about your brand, and has already shown trust in you. These sales are usually easier, and you can go all out when you advertise to them.
In such cases, you can get a good ROI from your advertising spend. If you have a brand that is established and has a decent consumer base, you can try this. It is especially great for new product launches.
However, if you’re starting an eCommerce business from scratch, you can’t reap the benefits of this form of advertising. This is because you need a lot of previous purchase data to create custom audiences.
7. Build Lookalike Audiences
You can even utilize your customer lists to increase eCommerce sales. Facebook allows you to create lookalike audiences. These audiences consist of people who resemble your customers.
If you have a long customer list, it will help in creating a huge lookalike audience. More the data you have of your customers, more accurately you will be able to create your lookalike audience.
Image via Facebook
A smaller lookalike audience has greater similarity with your existing customers. Larger ones tend to have more variation.
To create a good lookalike audience, you should make sure that your customer list is perfect. You should have your brand advocates and repeat customers on the list. They will help your list be more effective.
If your content has worked with your customers, there are good chances that it might work with the lookalike audience too.
You can first showcase your content to your lookalike audience. Later, you can leverage remarketing and send them to your product pages to make the purchase.
Conclusion
There is no single surefire way to increase eCommerce sales. You need to employ all the above-mentioned methods and optimize them based on your results.
By being consistent and sticking to your strategy, you can achieve better results over time. Make sure to use Facebook analytics to check the performance of your ads.
Do you have any questions about any of the methods mentioned above? If so, let us know in the comments below. We’ll try our best to answer them for you.
You may also want to read: What Makes B2B and B2C eCommerce Different?
6 Tips to Consider When Updating Your eCommerce Website
How Website Design Influences UX of eCommerce Stores
Featured image: Copyright: ‘https://www.123rf.com/profile_dedivan1923‘ / 123RF Stock Photo
Shane Barker
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