In 2022, running a successful ecommerce store means building brand awareness. If you want to increase sales and grow your business, it's essential to find the right platforms to help you attract potential customers and bring them into your store.
Many DTC marketers choose to do their online advertising with ecommerce industry heavyweights like Amazon, Target, Etsy, or eBay, hoping to capture a slice of these brands' tremendous traffic. But don't overlook the social media giants — Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and TikTok — whose networks are some of the biggest in the world. In particular, using Facebook for ecommerce marketing strategy can be a cost-effective way to reach your target audience, improve conversion rates, drive sales, and grow your brand.
Why should ecommerce advertisers use Facebook?
Facebook offers several options to help businesses — ecommerce stores in particular — harness its network. These include setting up a Facebook business page, advertising on the Facebook marketplace, selling in Facebook Shops, using its business marketing services and support, live chat, and creating an advertising account for its many ad options.
Facebook ads are effective because of the number of users on Facebook, the range of audiences they target, and the level of insights you can obtain. Optimized Facebook ads that target the right audience can help you get the most out of your Facebook advertising strategy. Let’s explore these aspects more closely.
Breadth of users and target audiences
If you want to make your brand more visible to audiences and close more sales at your online shop, here are some research-backed reasons why advertising on Facebook can help you connect with the right people.
Facebook is currently the #3 most-visited website in the world, capturing two-thirds of social media market share with nearly 3B monthly active users. (1,2,3)
Facebook ads reach 63.7% of all Americans over the age of 13. (4)
Sixty-five percent of US online retail traffic now comes from mobile devices, and more than 81% of users only use Facebook on a mobile device. (5)
Facebook Insights
If you already manage a Facebook page, you're probably aware of the benefits of Facebook Insights. Insights can help you to gather knowledge about your existing marketing strategy by providing you with analytical data. You can learn who's liking your page, how well your videos are performing, which ads are getting the most clicks, what actions people are taking on your page, and other factors impacting your reach. Having access to these data analytics tools is key to optimizing conversion rates and your ROI.
Where should Facebook ads fit in my ecommerce marketing strategy?
As a marketing manager, you probably find yourself in a constant challenge to identify new potential customers, generate more conversions, sell more products, and meet your sales and revenue goals. You're likely spending a good chunk of your budget on paid search, but want more control over the volume and quality of your traffic. And you might be looking for ways to increase retention and customer lifetime value (CLV) for consumers who purchased from your company in the past.
In order to accomplish these goals, implementing a multifaceted Facebook ad strategy is a must. A diverse channel mix lets you monitor and allocate your spend toward the channels that are performing well, while letting you experiment to find which channels and strategies work best for your market, audiences, and buying seasons.
What are some different types of Facebook ads for ecommerce brands?
Let's look at some Facebook ads and advertising approaches that you can incorporate into your overall marketing strategy to increase conversions and traffic to your ecommerce website.
Multi-product ads
Multi-product advertisements on Facebook allow you to showcase multiple products within a single ad. These ads are useful since they offer your customers more options in the same piece of real estate. You can customize multi-product ads to present different benefits of a particular product you sell or to showcase new features or products.
Evidence suggests multi-product ads can offer marketers a good return on investment, improving conversions by showing more consumers a more relevant variety of products. Companies that deployed multi-product ads noticed an efficient cost per acquisition and a nearly 35% lower cost-per-click (CPC) rate. You can use multi-product ads as a standalone or as part of an advertising campaign.
Dynamic product ads
Dynamic product advertisements are a must if you're searching for an ecommerce marketing strategy with a high return on investment. These ads are a great way to engage with mildly interested customers by offering them customized ads based on their activity.
With dynamic product ads, you no longer need to create ads for each product within your catalog. Dynamic templates gather relevant information (such as product names, prices, images, etc.) from your product catalog and apply these details to the ad. If your ecommerce company is hoping to advertise hundreds or thousands of products, Dynamic product ads could save you a lot of time and resources.
You can choose to display single-product ads or multi-product ads to different users, depending on the types of products your shoppers view, add to cart, or purchase from you. To use Dynamic product ads for your brand, simply upload your product catalog to your Facebook Business Manager account with the details you wish to include. Add a custom audience Facebook pixel and adapt it to reflect your customers’ purchasing behavior. Then prepare a dynamic template that Facebook can use to automatically populate with the appropriate products and relevant information. Once your ads are set up, run them and note the results.
Facebook retargeting campaigns
Data suggests that on average, about 72% of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts after adding products to them. Without a prompt, only 8% of these shoppers will ever return to complete their purchases. A retargeting strategy is a way to remind these shoppers to return to your site in the near future and purchase those products they'd had their eye on.
Running an effective retargeting campaign (especially when combined with automated SMS abandoned cart campaigns) can help bring back at least 26% of online shoppers who abandoned their carts: that's a significant amount of revenue to recover! Retargeting ads have a click-through rate (CTR) that's nearly 10 ten times higher than standard ads, making them a high-ROI advertising option. You can close more sales with creative tactics such as coupons, time-sensitive offers, or free shipping.
Conversion tracking Facebook pixel
One way to measure audience reach is by installing conversion tracking Facebook pixels. These are small snippets of code that monitor users’ behavior when they're on your website. Facebook can use data from these pixels to improve your advertising campaign and build a lookalike audience for targeting your ads.
In order to get the best results with your conversion tracking pixels, install them well before running your first ad campaign. This will give Facebook plenty of time to learn about the various shoppers converting into customers on your company website, even if they're coming in from other marketing channels. If Facebook has not yet tracked conversions on your ecommerce website, it might be difficult for it to optimize conversions for your campaign.
Lookalike audiences
Facebook's power is in the breadth of its audiences and the vast amount of behavioral data it can collect on them. Lookalike audiences can be one of your most valuable and high-performing advertising tools. As discussed above, a Facebook pixel can deliver data about your current customers. Lookalike audiences allow Facebook to let you advertise to people who "look like" your current customers — shoppers with similar interests and behaviors. You could create a lookalike audience from conversion tracking pixel data or from your Facebook fans.
What makes a good Facebook ad? What is a good CTR for Facebook ads?
Research indicates that a good click-through rate for a Facebook ad is between 2-5%. If you're wondering how you can attain this or better with your own Facebook ads, studies show that good Facebook ads have characteristics in common that allow them to perform better than the rest. Let’s look more closely at some of these characteristics.
Targeted to a particular audience
It is always advisable to focus on audience quality instead of size because your goal is to lead users to engagement and produce conversions. Facebook is great in this aspect because it can target customers based on their interests, location, demographics, and more features. You can restrict an ad which is meant for women in their 20s to this demographic instead of showing it to another demographic.
Visually appealing
Visually appealing content is treated more favorably in the Facebook algorithm: it's also more likely to be remembered and shared by your customers rather than long sections of text. And high-quality images of your products aren't just aesthetically pleasing; they convey quality and value.
Interesting value proposition
Having an enticing value proposition is essential if you want to drive more traffic to your site. Explain to your readers why they should learn more about your company and visit your store. A good value proposition differentiates you from your competitors and excites shoppers.
Relevant
Customer expectations today are that businesses understand their preferences and behaviors. Brands that win the advertising game are the ones that learn their customers' likes and show them relevant products and calls to action. If you're showing irrelevant or generic ads, you're missing out on the opportunity to optimize the success of your advertising campaigns.
Clear call-to-action
Even with appealing, relevant, and valuable content, your ads can't succeed without a clear call-to-action. A good CTA uses attention-getting action verbs, tells your users what they should do next, and motivates them to take action.
What are Facebook lead ads, and what are some alternatives?
Facebook lead ads are a marketing tool for attracting leads who are only mildly interested in your products. These might be people who were scrolling Facebook and noticed your brand, but were hesitant to visit your website. Lead ads are essentially a form that collects user information (like name and email address) in the context of wherever on Facebook these visitors were browsing. Lead ads let users stay on Facebook while letting you collect their contact information.
As an alternative to Lead ads you might benefit from post engagement ads, which can help drive more engagement on your Facebook page, or instant experience ads, which showcase the purpose and features of your brand And if you have an upcoming event like a product launch or a store opening, an event response ad can build brand awareness among local users.
What are Conversational ads?
With conversational ads, businesses can encourage visitors to share first-party data — like a name, phone number, or email address — straight from a Facebook ad. Conversational ads have high ROI because they harness engagement on Facebook and transfer it to your ecommerce store, while helping you build your subscriber contact list for future marketing campaigns.
Facebook offers two types of conversational ads: click-to-messenger ads, and sponsored messages. With the former, you can direct customers to an automated conversation instead of sending them to a landing page. Sponsored messages, on the other hand, can be sent only to people who are already subscribed to your page on Messenger. The benefit of both types of ads is they can motivate visitors to perform actions based on the information that they share with you.
If you're looking for an advertising solution that has high ROAS (return on ad spend), even since the iOS changes that made Facebook's lookalike and retargeting ad data less accurate, look no further than Emotive's conversational ads. These are a great complement to SMS marketing because they help you collect valuable first-party data at the top of the funnel. By building up your SMS subscriber list, your text campaigns can drive even more revenue. Emotive conversational ads are a fully managed paid ad solution (our marketing services team does all the work) with higher opt-ins and lower opt-outs than traditional pop-ups.
Start succeeding with Facebook for ecommerce today
Whether you're an established ecommerce brand or just getting started with your store's marketing and advertising, we hope this guide has shared some useful tips. We'd love to help you kickstart your revenue with a full-funnel text marketing strategy: from acquiring new subscribers to engaging and converting customers to facilitating repeat purchases with streamlined, text-based payments, we're here to help.