A lot of entrepreneurs are trying their luck with online shopping these days. Thanks to the vast number of digital services that small business owners can use on their own, it’s easy to understand why. Whether it’s easily setting up your own online shop with Shopify, managing your customer relationship with a CRM platform as simple as Pipedrive, automating marketing processes with Zapier integrations without even knowing what an API is – E-commerce marketing strategies have become pretty simple for a determined business owner that is willing to crack a few (E)books and learn.
One of the most dominating digital platforms that a small business owner can use is Facebook’s Ads Manager. Facebook has created a relatively easy-to-use advertising platform, which allows small business owners to reach out to their target audience, with the right message at the right time. On the other hand Facebook users are so curious to get maximum followers to stay on the top and many of the users keep looking for opportunities to buy real Facebook page likes to enhance engagement quickly.
Accurate campaign objectives, automatic bidding, constant AI optimizations, excellent targeting options and a lot of room to show off your creative products – it’s no wonder that 80 percent of small businesses use Facebook for E-commerce marketing strategies.
However, as incredible as Facebook can be, it’s crucial not to ignore the theoretical elements which constitute the very process of online shopping, and it’s essential to study them. Study them hard. Simply put, you can be a tech-wiz-Facebook-ads-genius all you want. Without learning about your customer’s journey and strategizing accordingly, your E-commerce business is most likely to hit a bumpy road, to say the least. If you’re one of the many E-commerce managers who think that setting up 1 or 2 Facebook ads with a 1% lookalike audience is good enough to keep your online store open for business – keep reading.
Let’s Start with Some Unpleasant, Hard Facts:
- The bounce-rate benchmark for E-commerce businesses stands on roughly 40%. That means that on average (and keep in mind this study included major franchises), a maximum of 60% of your users will click anything in your site and not bounce back after a few seconds to whatever they were doing beforehand.
- For every 100 potential customers, 67 will abandon their cart and leave without purchasing. Think about how many users you’re managing to get into to your online store, not bounce back, find something they like, have the money to purchase, be willing to take action and add an item to their cart – and from the ounce that’s left, toss 67% in the garbage can.
- The inevitable result: the conversion rate of online shoppers worldwide as of the 1st quarter of 2018 stands at 2.59%.
The main thing you should take from this is that you got a lot of work to do if you ever want to reach a CR of 2.59% and make that number count for your online business.
Luckily for you, there are many ways to go about and keep your E-commerce marketing strategies growing. Here you’ll find 3 strategies accompanied by some tools that will help you utilize them. We picked these 3 for you to start with because, in our opinion, they’re the most crucial. Each tool comes with a link to a technical “How To” guide for installation.
One Last Thing Before We Dive in, in Order to Use these Strategies You Must Have the Following:
- A Facebook Pixel set up and installed in your site.
- A Facebook Business Manager account.
- A Product Catalog in your Facebook Business Manager account.
Once you have all that up and running, you can start getting your hands dirty. Here are 3 E-commerce marketing strategies your Facebook funnel has to have.
Understand Your User’s Website Behavior And Recognize Optimization Opportunities
Before we delve into how to get more quality traffic out of Facebook, we need to talk about the traffic’s destination: your online web store. This is important regardless of what platform you’re using for advertising, but even more crucial when using Facebook. Why? Because Facebook users are shown ads based upon their interests, not their intent, which means they are harder to convert and are more likely to bounce.
Think of a user that knows what he wants, actively searches your product on Google and finds your website (assuming you have an excellent SEO strategy working for you). Now compare that to a user on Facebook who was just looking at some funny cat videos 5 seconds ago and all of a sudden stumbles upon your ad. Who do you think is more likely to convert?
Budget sizes change from business to business, but if you’re a small E-commerce business owner looking to grow your business on Facebook, it’s very likely you have to make every penny count. Your site must be a smooth, bug-free, amazing experience for Facebook users on both desktop and mobile. Otherwise, you’d just be wasting your budget.
Besides building a positive user experience in your site, you must emphasize the quality of your products. If your products don’t present themselves perfectly (yes, perfectly) to a Facebook user, you will lose a lot of your Facebook traffic. Remember, this is not a customer walking into your store with an intent to buy something. You must win them over while keeping in mind that they know there are a lot more brands like you out there.
So where do you begin? Simple: find out where and why your current users are leaving your site. Think about how beneficial it would be if you could see a chart which clearly shows that 95% of your users abandon their cart. Now you know there’s a huge problem specifically on your checkout page, which allows you to focus and start investigating with a tremendous advantage.
Here are Just 5 Potential Reasons for Users to Abandon Your Online Store at Any Time:
- Your website / a specific page on your website is taking too long to load
- There aren’t enough CTAs and user guidance
- The page is not mobile friendly
- Your products are much more expensive when compared to your competitors
- You don’t have enough customer reviews
And there’s more where that came from. To understand your user’s behavior on your site, you’ll need some tools. We recommend you immediately read the guides we’re attaching and start implementing these tools right away.
Google Analytics
Pretty obvious, and for a good reason. This is the most basic tool you’ll need to understand your user website behavior. Google analytics allows you to see the number of users interacting with your site, the number of sessions those users create in each page, the screens or web pages that they visit, and much more.
Here’s an absolute beginners guide for installing Google Analytics step-by-step by Moz!
Hotjar
It’s one thing to analyze quantitative data about your site, but you need to complete that analysis with more qualitative data. For example, wouldn’t it be nice if you could record the actual activity of your website users and watch them later? Well, good news – you can do that, and a lot more, with Hotjar.
Get to work with this guide to Hotjar!
Retarget Your Audience With An Automatic Sales Funnel & Dynamic Ads
Remember that 67 % of users who abandon your site with their cart full of products? You need to bring them back to your site. According to Wishpond, up to 70% of web visitors who are retargeted with display ads will convert on your site. So we think it’s pretty clear why you want these users back. Many Facebook advertisers implement their retargeting strategy by simply building one campaign that targets their homepage visitors. That’s not enough.
An Absolute Automatic Funnel with a Multi-retargeting Process
In many cases, this is what separates the pros from the armatures. Since Facebook has made it so easy for advertisers to use their platform, it’s easy to be competent when it comes to building a campaign, while being a total marketing noob.
Let me very clear here: building 1 or 2 campaigns with cold/warmish targeting will not get you good results if any. The customer’s journey is a long and complex road with inevitable roadblocks. Help the customers bypass these obstacles by sending them the right message at the right time, or you will lose them along the road. Whether you’re an experienced advertiser with hundreds of marketing blogs in your bookmarks or just an SMB trying to get a business going – this task is always a pickle. Luckily for you, Social Media Examiner has made a complete step-to-step guide for that exact purpose, and all you have to do is do exactly as they say:
Naturally, the hard part comes when trying to create awesome creative, but this guide will give you the template you need to get started.
Dynamic Product Ads
Facebook’s Dynamic Product Ads is a must-have tool if you want to have a significant ROI. This feature presents ads with the exact products your users abandoned in their cart on your site. This tool has had an overwhelming impact on the world of E-commerce advertising and has helped countless websites to bring back those customers and convert them into paying customers. Here’s a complete setup guide on AdEspresso.
Leverage Your Customer’s Loyalty With Reviews And Referrals
A good sales funnel doesn’t end with a nice conversion, it repeats itself endlessly with the help of loyal customers who bring more quality traffic. It’s a known fact that online reviews and reputation management dramatically improve online traffic, both quantity-wise and quality-wise. When you think about it, this concept is very intuitive. Think about yourself when you look for a specific product. What is most likely to make you choose a specific brand – a Facebook ad or a recommendation from a known person?
When E-commerce businesses successfully find a way to automatically leverage their customer’s love for their product, the results are very likely to be astounding. Moreover, Since PPC is the primary go-to method that business owners go to when trying to generate traffic, using your own customers as free agents is a perfect alternative growth hack. No bidding wars, no stress over CTR numbers, no competition. You’re at your own playing field.
Finally, the cherry on top: according to a research made by BigCommerce, when a consumer interacts with a good review, they are 58% more likely to convert, generate 62% more revenue per site visitor, and by 3% more per order. In other words, organic traffic that has been generated from customer reviews is not only free, but it is also perhaps the most valuable kind of traffic. However, automating this process is not as easy as it might sound. Otherwise, every E-commerce business owner would be doing it.
There Are 3 Major Challenges an E-commerce Business Will Encounter When Trying to Use this Strategy:
- Getting customers to actually write the review.
- Getting customers to share the review once they’ve written it.
- Getting customers to build well-designed, high-quality reviews that would look appealing.
So how do you manage to do all this? With Yotpo.
Yotpo
In Short, Yotpo Enables You to:
- Drive your customers to easily create amazing, well-designed, high-quality reviews and ratings and share them on social media.
- Build loyal customer relationships that encourage the customer to actively reach out to friends to achieve referrals.
- Automate all of the above as an integral part of your sales funnel, including analytic tools and constant optimization.
In this case, you don’t need a guide, you just need their amazing customer service that will take your hand and walk you through everything, as you watch your sales grow. To schedule a demo and let the magic begin.
In conclusion, using Facebook as a source of traffic might seem easy technically, but achieving ROAS results that will actually grow your business requires a lot of work. Start with these 3 strategies to set up your E-commerce marketing strategies and start watching as your hard work truly pays off.
