Right now, many brands are struggling to get decent results from advertising on social media and I’m seeing many give it up as an expensive lost cause.
In some cases, that’s the right move.
But for most of us, stopping altogether is a disaster!
Because, without TRAFFIC to our online store? Nothing else matters.
And if you’re serious about growing your business – you need to pay for it.
Because, if you want to grow your eCommerce business, there is no source of customers that is more consistent and scalable than paid advertising.
Facebook advertising is how many of my clients are seeing massive growth in their eCommerce websites from a handful of orders making pocket change each month, to very consistent, profitable monthly sales.
Of course, you also need to know you’ll get profitable returns on your advertising dollars, right?
And so the chicken and the egg scenario begins…
I see most small brands still tend to focus their advertising efforts on the new customer attraction phase of their advertising. And whilst attracting new eyeballs to your online store is incredibly important, it’s also the strategy that is least likely to generate a profitable return for you.
Whereas, there is an eCommerce Facebook Ad strategy that has the potential to completely knock your sales out of the ballpark!
This eCommerce Facebook ad strategy that I’m seeing work so incredibly well with my clients has changed the way we look at advertising and makes a 6x ROI on advertising spend look completely normal.
It’s my goal to help you avoid flushing your advertising dollars down the toilet!
Before we get into it today – I want to give you one last reminder to join me for my live Ecommerce Facebook Ad Workshop. During this live and interactive session, I’ll be sharing the 3 biggest mistakes brands are making right now with their paid traffic AND sharing the exact strategies we’re using to consistently generate high-quality traffic – with ease!
It’s completely free and you can register now by heading to catherinelangman.com/workshop
Alrighty then, let’s dive into the episode and talk about how to know your online store is ready for Facebook ads AND how to get started with a winning, profitable strategy!
Even now, in late 2022, one of the most effective ways to grow eCommerce sales is through Meta advertising (that means ads on Facebook and Instagram).
Which, for the sake of simplicity in this episode I will refer to as ‘Facebook ads’.
when it comes to sending paid traffic to your eCommerce website, you REALLY want to make sure:
(a) your brand is at the right stage of growth, and
(b) your website is ready for it.
If your website is NOT set up, ready to receive that paid traffic, you’re likely to find your ad results are expensive, or worse, just don’t work.
Is your brand at the right stage of growth for Facebook ads?
Recently, I heard a number of eCommerce brand owners discussing the topic of giving up Facebook ads because they’d heard how hard it is to get a profitable ROI.
They had been given this idea by a large, well-known Aussie skincare brand who had publicly stated they had stopped all paid advertising and not noticed any difference.
(This was a few months ago from the date of writing this article so I don’t know if that brand is still not noticing any difference…)
However – not all eCommerce brands are at the same stage in their business growth journey to make the same decision and still enjoy great results.
Here are the 3 key things to consider when deciding to pay for advertising (or not)
1. Are you a well-known brand or the world’s best kept secret?
The first consideration must be about your level of brand awareness and the size of your existing audience.
If your business is at a fairly early stage in its journey, chances are not many people will know about you yet.
And with no existing audience, you have no-one to sell to.
The fact of the matter is – without traffic coming to your website, nothing else matters.
It won’t matter how fabulous your products are or how attentive your customer service is.
If no-one knows about you, they ain’t buyin’!
Whereas, if you are a mature brand, you probably already have high volumes organic search traffic and a large email database, meaning you enjoy lots of free website visitors, repeat sales and word-of-mouth advertising.
What’s the best ad platforms for brand awareness vs traffic & sales?
You have multiple options here:
For brand awareness: Facebook/Instagram and TikTok.
For converting traffic and sales: Facebook/Instagram and Google.
2. Do you have a built-in replenishment strategy?
When you are a mature brand, you are likely to have a solid replenishment sales strategy in place.
Meaning – when a new customer buys from you the first time, you know they are likely to remain a customer for several years and purchase numerous times over that period.
Obviously this requires you to have a consumable product that needs to be re-purchased on a regular basis (like skincare), OR complementary products that prompt regular repeat purchases (like fashion).
It requires you to have built a large database of customers that you can use to drive sales using email marketing.
And it ALSO requires you to really thoroughly know your numbers.
You need to have clear visibility over your customer lifetime value: how long a customer stays with you and how many times they repeat purchase.
Usually, an early stage brand’s sales are not self-generating in this way. Because in the early stages, you need to acquire the new customers and email subscribers first.
Which means you need consistent traffic coming to your website.
Here are the top 5 things you MUST have addressed before you start sending paid traffic to your website!
1. Install your Facebook Pixel and setup Conversion API
I would hope this step goes without saying, but for the sake of stating the obvious, you really MUST have your Facebook Pixel installed on your website and you MUST have set up your Conversion API (CAPI is the way your website communicates tracking data back to Facebook ads).
Also, every Facebook ad account comes with one unique pixel, which is essentially a bit of tracking code that gets pasted into your website’s source code.
That may sound tricky, but is actually pretty simple on most websites. You’ll find comprehensive how-to guides on how to do this by doing a quick search on YouTube.
You also want to make sure you’ve set up and prioritised your Standard Event tracking within your Facebook ad account.
Basically all this means is, you’re asking Facebook to track not just clicks to your website, but also things like viewing products, add to cart, checkouts and more.
By tracking these events, you’ll be able to get very smart with your Facebook ads, and show specific messages to people who have viewed your product pages but not completed a purchase (for instance).
And by prioritising these events, you’re instructing Facebook on which event is the most important to your business. For an Ecommerce store, that is going to be Purchase.
2. Excellent on mobile
When you start sending lots of traffic to your website from paid Facebook ads, you should expect the vast majority of those visitors will be using their mobile to browse your site.
That means, it is IMPERATIVE that your website works really well on mobile!
As business owners, we’re usually looking at our own websites on our desktop computers or laptops.
And quite often, we don’t go all the way through the shopping cart checkout on mobile.
But you need to do these things – look critically at your site on mobile and test how easy it is to navigate and to shop on a mobile.
One of the best examples of an eCommerce website that is very well designed for the mobile experience is Birdsnest. I would even argue, this website works better on mobile than desktop! They have absolutely nailed a mobile-first web design.
3. Check your website’s bounce rate
A ‘bounce rate’ simply means, the proportion of your website’s visitors who immediately click away after landing on your site.
A high bounce rate is really bad – it means your website visitors aren’t sticking around for more than a split second.
So logically, it would be very wasteful to spend lots of money on Facebook advertising, if a really large portion of those paid visitors are just going to bounce off.
An average bounce rate for eCommerce is about 40%.
To find out what your website bounce rate is, check your analytics. (Some platforms have great inbuilt analytics, otherwise check Google Analytics.)
If your bounce rate is average or below, you have my blessing to start paid advertising.
If your bounce rate is above average, then you need to do some work first.
Often, one of the biggest culprits that causes a high bounce rate, is a very slow page load speed (especially on mobile).
You want to aim for a page load speed of 5 seconds or less.
To test yours, use a free tool like Pingdom or Google Page Speed Tools.
4. Check your website’s cart abandonment rate
Ever heard of the term, ‘shopping cart abandonment’?
It’s a pesky situation that is very common for eCommerce websites, and what it means is shoppers who have added product to their cart and begun the checkout process, but then they jump ship before handing over their cashola.
So, it goes without saying, having a really high cart abandonment rate is bad.
(Actually, it’s not ALL bad – it does mean that you have people who are interested in buying from you. But you gotta work out what’s stopping them from sealing the deal!)
The average cart abandonment rate for eCommerce websites is actually quite high at 68%.
You can find your abandoned cart rate by looking at your analytics, either within your website platform or Google Analytics.
If your abandoned cart rate is average or below, you’re good to go with your paid advertising.
But, if your abandoned cart rate is higher than average, you’ve got some work to do.
There’s no point spending money on ads if the vast majority aren’t gonna check out!
The number one reason shoppers abandon their carts is reaching the checkout and being slugged unexpected (or expensive) shipping costs. (I would also argue – slow shipping.)
And the second most common reason shoppers abandon their carts is being forced to create a new user account.
Both those factors are fairly easy to remedy – make sure you do before you start sending paid traffic to your site.
5. Great user experience (UX)
It still surprises me when I review eCommerce websites, to find there are quite a number whose website design and navigation is really confusing.
As business owners, we are very familiar with our own websites and our own products. We know exactly what we sell and where to find it.
I want you to take off your business owner hat for a moment, and take a look at your website (on desktop AND mobile!) from the perspective of a brand new customer.
When coming to your website for the first time, is it immediately clear what you sell?
Is the design clear and uncluttered?
Do your images show this clearly and are they inviting to look at?
What about your navigation, is that simple, uncluttered and easy to follow? Your top navigation should be all about shopping. Put things like your blog and about pages down in the footer navigation.
Do you have things like customer reviews to show how awesome your products are?
What are your product pages like? Do you have multiple product images? Is your add-to-cart button easy to spot? (Preferably in a contrasting color, and high-up the page – don’t make people scroll to figure out how to buy!)
Include trust symbols, such as secure payment badges, trusted payment methods and guarantees (if you offer one).
For a couple of great examples of eCommerce stores that have an excellent user experience, check out The Iconic and Birdsnest.
So once you’re confident that your website is ready to start sending paid Facebook ad traffic to it – how do you get started with the right ad strategy?
It’s never about 1 campaign…
Most small business owners are quite risk-averse when it comes to spending money on advertising.
And I understand it’s scary to commit to paid promotions when there’s no guarantee you’ll get a return.
So what do most people do?
In an attempt to conserve funds, they put up one ad trying to win over new customers.
The (somewhat misguided) expectation is that they can attract potential customers who’ve never heard of the brand before, and expect them to buy off one ad.
Especially in today’s digital environment, where consumer privacy is king and data tracking is difficult.
Remember these 3 important things
#1. Facebook is a social platform. People don’t go there with the express purpose of buying.
So hitting up those who don’t know you from a bar of soap with an advertisement asking them to buy from you is probably not going to stop them from scrolling their newsfeed!
#2. Think about how your customers buy. This is not the same as ‘how do you sell’!
#3. Don’t just rely on social media… You need to own your own audience.
The 3-part Facebook ad campaign
What’s the goal for your ad campaign? It’s to help your potential customers to make a purchase decision with you, right?
To achieve that typically means engaging with them before they buy, during their purchase experience, and after they’ve already bought.
Which is why I get my clients to run three different ad campaigns.
Ad #1: Capture attention & generate interest
The first thing you need to do to build your audience of paying customers is to get your brand in front of people who don’t know yet.
You want to exclude your existing customers, email subscribers and Facebook fans from this ad’s audience, and instead target people who look the most like them.
Ad #2: Retarget your warmest audience
Re-target to people who have engaged with your brand. The easiest way to do this is to re-target people who have already engaged with your social media content, visited your website and signed up to your email list.
This ad should definitely be aiming to close the deal! My advice to accelerate your results here is to include an incentive or promote a special offer, such as your email subscriber incentive.
Ad #3: Loyal customers are your most profitable
The most profitable phase to focus on is the loyalty phase. Existing customers are more likely to purchase and spend more money per transaction.
Use special deals, promotions, and complimentary products to increase retention and lifetime customer value, and show these ads to your past customers rather than to those who haven’t bought from you before.
These kinds of promotions should also be going out to your audience on email as well. Because when your audience see the same messages repeated in multiple places, it reinforces that message and they’re more likely to remember it and act on it.
Don’t make this mistake
Unfortunately, too many business owners think the sum total of their marketing efforts end when they get the customer to make their first purchase. So they never follow up with buyers or continue to add value or continue to make offers.
And they lose most of their potential profit because of it.
So remember, it’s always easier to get your existing customers to buy from you again, compared to winning over new customers all the time.
In the early stages of your business you obviously won’t have returning customers yet. But over time, you want to aim to get your returning customer rate up as close to 50% as possible.
Lastly, you MUST compliment your ads with email
Like I mentioned earlier, it’s not enough to rely on driving traffic from audiences on social media (organic or paid).
That’s the riskiest and least profitable way to do it!
These days, we need to think about social media ads with an ‘In / Off / Own’ approach.
That means:
- Build and engage audiences IN social media (using organic content and paid ads);
- Send that traffic OFF to your own website; and
- Get them to buy, yes, but importantly get them to subscribe to your OWN database.
Why must we do it this way?
Here’s the secret sauce for ya! The strategy that consistently sees my clients massively and quickly scaling up their sales and, importantly, their PROFITS.
Firstly, an email list is an asset that you own. You do NOT own your audiences on your social media pages and you can lose access to them at any time.
Secondly, email marketing is THE most profitable marketing channel you can employ in your business, generating 3800% ROI!
Thirdly, using the right tool for the job (Klaviyo for eCommerce email marketing) means you can feed your own email list back to Facebook (& Google) ads to provide more accurate data for retargeting ads.
And finally, you will always enjoy greater results when your customers see the same messages reinforced across multiple channels.
That means a potential customer receives an offer from you on email as well as being retargeted by your ads on Facebook.
And it also means, sending specific offers and promotions to your past customers via email as well as Facebook ads. This should be different to the newsletters you might send to everyone on your email list (remember, you’ll have lots of non-customers subscribed to your email list).
Want help to implement this in your own business?
There’s always 3 choices with any new strategy: keep doing the same as you’re doing now, learn how to implement your new knowledge yourself, or get some help from the experts.
So. If you’re serious about growing your brand online, but you want to shortcut that growth curve and learn how to do it without the hustle or overwhelm?
Whether you’re looking for training or coaching on how to get this moving in your own business, or you’d like to outsource to the experts, my team and I are here to help! So I’d love to invite you to book a no-obligation call with us and let’s talk about how we can bring your dream business to life.
Just head to https://www.productpreneurmarketing.com/lets-talk to book your free Ecommerce strategy session with us today.
So that’s it for today’s episode and I hope you’ve enjoyed it. If you did, I’d be forever grateful if you’d share it with one or two of your business besties. Especially if you know they’re looking to grow their brand or eCommerce store this year. It’s super easy to share – just click on the icon next to the podcast on whichever platform you listen to it, copy the share link and then send it in a message to your friends.
But now – have a fabulous day and week and I’ll be back on the show with you again next week!