If you’ve ever used Shopify to sell your stuff online…
… you know that sales can be hard to come by.
It’s not like Amazon, Flipkart or other e-Commerce platforms where people automatically find you when searching for other items.
With a shopify store, you’ve got to promote your store actively on social media & other channels to keep the sales flowing.
… but for most business owners, that’s a lot of hard work.
You have so many things to do like…
Managing inventory
Sourcing products
Listing them for sale
Delivering the products
Paying taxes
Managing the team
Running marketing campaigns to increase sales
And when the marketing campaigns don’t produce the returns you expect, you feel like giving up.
You feel it’s so much better to just put your products up on Amazon, Flipkart or on one of these e-Commerce portals & generate sales as they come by…
… and then offer discounts to get more attention in the marketplace & make your sales increase every now & then.
But you know that it’s not enough.
Slashing your margins, increasing your discounts – just so you can get a few extra sales from Amazon or Flipkart isn’t the reason you started this business.
You started this business because you had a dream…
… a burning passion to become a successful eCommerce business owner who makes MORE than enough money to live out her dreams.
… so you can finally have the freedom to do what you want, when you want & how you want.
If that’s you, there’s a way.
And I’ll show you how with Facebook Advertising.
If there’s one magical place on Earth that can send you more than enough customers & sales than you can handle today, it’s Facebook.
Facebook is a goldmine of customers for eCommerce Businesses.
… but if only businesses knew how to use it.
The problem is most don’t.
They don’t have the right strategy behind their advertising to promote their eCommerce Business.
They try something here & there, a few sales come by – but nothing much to write home about.
… and then they give up.
If you’ve ever done that, pay very close attention here.
We are going to show you how you can successfully use Facebook Ads to increase (if not explode) your Shopify store sales…
To take your online store and business to the levels that you’ve always wanted, you need to look at your business a little differently.
Most eCommerce businesses operate their store without clarity.
They don’t approach it like a business.
If it’s a business, it ALWAYS has to be about the numbers.
Whether you have a good business or a bad business, your numbers will show the proof.
… and there are 2 key numbers that you need to track in your business in order to be successful.
The Lifetime Customer Value
If there’s ONE number that all successful businesses track on a consistent basis, it would be this:
The Lifetime Customer Value
The Lifetime Customer Value is the total amount a customer would spend in purchasing products or services from your business in their entire lifetime.
The lifetime may feel like an exaggeration, but it’s applicable in the case of BIG companies like Apple, Amazon, Flipkart & Microsoft – because people can’t help but keep buying their products & services over & over again as the years & decades pass.
With smaller businesses, the customer cycle may NOT last a lifetime, but it will still last anywhere between a few months to a couple of years.
For example…
There’s a SAAS company that allows people to make simple websites & their software makes it so easy for a beginner to get started.
A typical customer stays about 6 months before they decide whether to move onto a high end enterprise solution or not have a website at all.
And their order value is $15/month – & so most customers spend a total of $90 on their solution before they pivot or not continue.
Similarly, there’s another Shopify store that sells Dog Food & Dog Supplements.
A customer usually first purchases their Crunchy Meat for about $30, and then places a couple more orders throughout the year.
… and sometimes, they end up purchasing several other products such as joint supplements, dental sprays, etc for their dog.
This ends up bumping the Lifetime Customer Value to be about $150 – $200 within a year’s span (with some customers spending over $400 – $500 on their dogs).
To succeed with your Shopify store & grow it to the levels that you always want, you first need to track your lifetime customer value & understand it clearly.
… and here’s the formula for calculating your LTV:
LTV = Total Revenue Generated / No. Of Unique Customers
When you have absolute clarity on this number, it makes it easier for you when you run advertising campaigns.
… because not all advertising & marketing campaigns is going to turn a profit for you from the get-go.
You’ll lose a lot of money when you get started…
… but when your total cost per acquiring a customer is less than your lifetime customer value & you’re able to increase that gap as much as possible, you’ll know that you have a GREAT BUSINESS!
The Target KPI or CPA Goal
The Target KPI or the CPA Goal is another important metric that every business needs to track…
… it stands for the total amount that a business can comfortably spend in order to acquire a NEW customer.
This is a metric that varies from business to business, and is also dependent on factors like:
Your cash flow situation
External funding
Lifetime customer value
Market size
Size of your product line
And so on.
A business with HUGE funding in a large market with a great product line can spend whatever they want to acquire customers.
An example for this would be Amazon or Uber.
They are tech companies with a lot of repeat customers in LARGE markets. They have lots of funding & hence, they can outspend everybody when it comes to acquiring customers.
Your regular medium sized business with great financials, good LTV & a decent product line can afford to lose $100 – $200 on the front-end in order to acquire customers.
… but smaller businesses on the other hand could at most…
Either lose a few extra dollars
Break even
Or NEED to be profitable on the front-end for the first sale.
So you’ve got to study your business financials & truly understand where you stand.
Take for example…
A Shopify store that sells Yoga apparel & Yoga items exclusively…
The most popular & profitable product they have is a Yoga Mat which they sell at about $40 – which costs them $15 to source & ship.
… and they make a profit of roughly at $25/ sale when they sell it via Shopify.
They don’t have a lot of funding & are running their business in their part-time.
To them, it’s important to make a profit on the front-end because that’s how they’ll be able to keep the cash coming in so they can advertise & make the sales roll.
In this scenario, they could spend up to $25 on the front-end to acquire a customer and they’ll break even.
… and ideally, they would want their CPA to be as low as $10 – $15 – so they make a $10 – $15 profit on every sale.
To start using Facebook Advertising successfully for your business, it’s important that you figure this out.
So take the next few moments to calculate your numbers & we’ll show you what you can do NOW to use Facebook Ads to grow your Shopify store sales successfully & profitably…
Step 1 – Setup Your Facebook Pixel The ‘Right’ Way
If there’s a magic wand today that you could wave and could send you more customers & sales than you can possibly handle…
… it would be the Facebook Pixel.
The Facebook Pixel is artificial intelligence in action.
Over the last several years, Facebook has been collecting data about people’s behaviors online & offline (and you know they’ve been in the news for the wrong reasons too).
… and all of this data has a purpose:
To understand what people buy, where they buy it & how they buy it
… so they can help their advertisers target these people successfully & profitably.
If you have the Facebook Pixel installed on your store, and you season it with lots of visitors & customers…
Facebook will compare your website audience against their extensive database & find similar pockets of audiences that are likely to buy your stuff often.
… and when you start running campaigns, the algorithm will automatically optimize your ad delivery to show ads to people who are more & more likely to buy from you.
You don’t even have to lift a finger.
You could generate sales ALMOST on autopilot *
(Doesn’t work all the time, but if you get it right, it can be a dream).
We’ve had client campaigns where we used to spend several thousands of dollars a day & they’d make several thousand dollars in profit each day & we wouldn’t even need to lift a finger to change the ads for several months in a row.
Step 2: Choose One Conversion Flow To Run Traffic, Test & Optimize
With most eCommerce & Shopify stores, they have more than just one product…
… and usually, these products are spread across various categories.
And whenever they run marketing campaigns, they usually try promoting several products together in the hope that it’ll get the sales rolling.
While that’s important, it becomes very hard to test & optimize your conversion flow when you’re distributing your spend & receiving small amounts of traffic across various product pages.
To make your marketing effective, we recommend that you choose to focus one product/offer a month, test/optimize that conversion flow, hit your conversion goals & then move onto another conversion flow .
To give you an example…
Let’s say someone had an online pet store that sold Dog Food, Dog Supplements & Dental sprays for Dogs.
Instead of running marketing campaigns trying to promote all of them, the optimal strategy would be to choose one product category.
Example, this month – you’d run traffic & create ads exclusively to your Dog Food Category pages.
Any sales for Dog Supplements & Dental Sprays can come organically, but with Paid Advertising – focusing on the Dog Food Category would be the key.
So here’s how your conversion flow would look:
Facebook Ad → Dog Food Category Page (Showcasing 3 – 5 top dog food products) → Individual Product Page → Add To Cart Page → Checkout & Thank You Page
Once you create this conversion flow – it’s super simple to create this using Shopify, you can now start driving traffic.
But before you begin driving traffic, we recommend tracking your conversion metrics across the funnel using a Conversion Tracking/Split-Testing tool such as Visual Website Optimizer.
Some business owners use Google Analytics, but GA is not enough for this purpose.
A conversion tracking tool is the right choice & it will also accommodate split-testing when you want to test price points, products, headlines & other content on your pages.
Suppose you ran traffic to the above conversion flow, here’s an estimate of how things would look like for most businesses…
Traffic from Facebook to Category Page → 1000 visitors
Clicks To Individual Product Page → 375
Add To Carts → 18
Product Sales → 5
Other Product/Upsell Sales → 2
So that means, for every 1000 visitors to your category page, you are getting:
Product Page Clicks → 37.5% CTR
Add To Carts → 1.8% of traffic
Product Sales → 0.5% of traffic
Upsell Sales From Original Product Sales → 40%
… which means – if you wanted 20 sales this month, all you have to do is send 4000 visitors to your product category page & you’ll end up with 20 core product sales and roughly 8 upsell sales.
As you observe these numbers, you’ll find that there are points of improvement that can be made at every step.
There’s only 27% of people who are adding products to your cart that end up purchasing your product.
This number, can be improved massively if you worked on things like:
• Cart abandonment marketing
• Scarcity offers on the Add to Cart page
• Retargeting ads for people visiting product pages/cart pages
You could bump that number up to 45 – 50% – which means for every 1000 visitors, you’ll end up generating 9 sales instead of 5 sales.
Similarly, the CTR to the product page & the individual content on product page can also be improved to frame people to buy sooner.
This is the advantage of choosing to focus on one conversion flow, establishing your metrics & testing to improvize those numbers.
You’ll know how much traffic to send to exactly generate how many sales you want & that’ll make it easy for you to generate sales predictably whenever you run marketing campaigns.
Step 3: Target Specific Interests On Facebook By Reverse Engineering Your Competitors
Facebook allows you to target the people that you want to reach based on the interests they follow or like.
With the Facebook Ads Platform, interests based targeting typically converts a lot better than age based or device based targeting breakdowns.
If I was promoting my Pet Store, I could easily filter out & target only interests such as…
PetSmart
Pedigree
Royal Canin
Best Friends Animal Society
American Kennel Club
And so on.
There are 2 ways to find these audiences…
Pick an interest that is broadly popular in your target market or a popular competitor.
You can hit suggestions on your Facebook Ads Manager to get similar interests.
Or alternatively, Facebook has an audience insights tool which will allow you to probe a little more deeper.
You can use either of these tools & make a compilation of interests that you want to target.
… and once you’re ready to start running ads, we recommend that you narrow down the no. of interests you target in an ad set so as to isolate which interests works best.
We usually recommend just one interest per ad set.
If you would like more specialized help on Facebook Ads Targeting, click here to find out how we can support you.
Step 4: Build & Leverage Lookalike Audiences
Whenever clients approach us to help them with scaling their campaigns, there’s one place that we always look at:
It’s the Lookalike Audiences.
Just as the name suggests, lookalike audiences are mirror images of a seed audience that you provide to Facebook.
Facebook maps the seed audience that you give, understands their behavior patterns & finds more & more people with similar browsing & shopping patterns so they can show your ads to them.
With most Shopify store owners, their lookalikes start and end with an email list & a customer list.
And that’s about it.
There’s so MUCH more that you can do with Lookalikes & when you use it the right way, you can reach infinite scale with your Facebook Advertising.
To learn more about how you can leverage Lookalikes more efficiently & how we can help increase your Shopify store revenues, talk to us.
Step 5: Leverage Cart Abandonment Retargeting
If you hit the Add To Cart button on an item on sites like Amazon.com or Flipkart & then forget to buy…
… you’ll know what I’m talking about.
There’s an annoying little pesky ad that reminds you that you left your order midway & it’s time that you came back & completed the order.
It can be creepy, but it’s also a GOOD deal when the offer to buy comes with a discount or free shipping.
… and this is vital for every Shopify Store owner.
Setting up cart abandonment retargeting has 2 parts to it:
1. Retargeting/Remarketing on ad platforms such as Google, Facebook & other places
2. Retargeting/Remarketing on email
There are benefits to both, and if you would like to learn more about how to setup cart abandonment retargeting with your Shopify store, talk to us & we’ll show you how.
Step 6: Use A Combination of Video & Image Ads
There are a couple of different ways to run your ad campaigns in an ad set…
One is to use exclusively image ads
The other is to use video ads.
Another (something that we highly recommend) is to use to a combination of video & image ads in an ad set.
When it comes to Facebook Ads, the key to success today is freshness.
Your ad needs to LOOK new to your audience every time.
… and the Facebook algorithm also expects their advertisers to have several creatives in place so the same ads don’t hit their users often & upsets them.
When you combine a bunch of video ads, image ads & also use the same videos with multiple thumbnails, you can maintain that freshness a little more longer before changing out your ad again.
But more than the images or the video, it’s the copy or the message that you’re using in your ads that will unlock your sales.
If you’ve ever been stuck & have had difficulty creating high converting copy, click here to talk to us & find out how we can support you.
Step 7: Leverage Custom Audiences For Retargeting & Lookalikes
Another secret weapon within the Facebook Ads platform is your Custom Audiences.
… specifically custom audiences of people who engage with your post, ad or video & custom audiences of those who like your page or visit your website’s pages.
You can use retargeting ads to engage with these people & get them to visit your store & buy again.
Another thing that you could do with these audiences is to create Lookalikes off these audiences.
We’ve had great success leveraging Lookalikes of Video View & Post Engagement Custom audiences.
If you aren’t using them, we recommend that you talk to us so we can show you how.
Step 8: Give Them A Reason To Give You Their Email Address
The secret to turning cold prospects into buyers & one-time buyers into repeat buyers lies in the follow up.
When you follow up with someone often, provide them information they like & build their trust, they are more & more likely to buy from you.
… and the best way to follow up is via email.
In order to do this, you have to collect their email addresses when they visit your website.
And people don’t give out their emails easily today – especially with so much spam & so many privacy issues.
… but if you give them a strong enough reason, people will still give you their emails.
For every business, the message that you use to get cold prospects to give you their email is going to be different.
Many shopify stores offer Free Shipping or a Discount on the first order as a BRIBE to collect their emails.
That’s one thing that you can implement.
… and if you wanted to take it up a notch, it may be better to create exclusive content that your target market can’t find elsewhere.
For example…
A Shopify Store selling fashion apparel to young women in the ages of 18 – 25 could create a curated a special Shopping Guide called on “How To Dress Like A Model on a College Student’s Budget” & offer this for free in exchange for prospect’s emails.
Once you have their email addresses, you could follow up with them every now & then with more content, promotions & other offers.
Step 9: Manage & Optimize Your Campaigns Effectively
When you start running your ad campaigns, not all of your elements are going to work properly…
Some of your ads & ad sets will convert…
Some of them won’t.
As an effective marketer, you’ve got to find what converts & continually test to find out more ads & interests that convert.
The best way to do this is to optimize your ads to your target CPA.
If your ads or interests don’t convert within the target CPA that you’re shooting for, then shut them off.
If they convert, then you scale them steadily & incrementally.
And then take the interests/audiences/ads that convert, study them closely & try to find more of those that are likely to convert like that.
Managing & optimizing your ads isn’t easy at the get-go.
… but if you understand the fundamentals & stick to a process, you’ll soon be able to scale your Facebook campaigns profitably & successfully.
If you would like to get more help on managing your Facebook Ad campaigns for your Shopify store, we recommend that you talk to us.
Step 10: Track Your Numbers, Improve Them, Rinse & Repeat
As soon as you start advertising & optimizing one conversion flow, you’ll start establishing some base-line numbers…
… once you have your base-line established, continue running more tests to improve your campaigns to hit your goals.
And then start running paid advertising to one more conversion flow (product category), test that, improve your numbers & move onto another flow (category).
As you do this over & over again repeatedly, you’ll be able to scale your shopify’s stores sales successfully & profitably.
… and before you know it, you’ll have a flourishing business that you’ve always dreamed of – with more than enough customers than you can possibly handle.
Need More Help With Facebook Ads To Increase Your Shopify Store Sales?
If you feel that you need more help & support with using Facebook Ads or other Digital Ad platforms to drive more store sales consistently & profitably, we recommend that you talk to us.
Our company, Zenquest Digital is a data-driven Digital Marketing firm that specializes in helping businesses build profitable & scalable eCommerce stores & digital marketing campaigns.
To learn more about how we can help you with Facebook Ads, click here.
