Guaranteed Holiday Advertising Wins
Are you spending money on Facebook advertising this holiday season? If not you should be.
Yes, it is more expensive this time of year, but while advertising costs are double conversion rates and returns on adspend are 3X-5X if you are executing your marketing efforts effectively. There is no other time of the year that customers are holding their credit card in one hand and actively shopping online with the other.
That being said, advertising during the holidays is expensive so you need to be properly prepared to dive in the dangerous murky waters. Ecommerce stores implementing and utilizing a well planned out advertising strategy often see 3X-5X return on ad spend for a reason.
You see, being successful with Facebook advertising is not about the amount of money that you spend. It is about "how" you spend the amount of money that you have and then compounding on top of that success.
Facebook has a limited amount of ad inventory space, so the price you pay for Facebook ads is largely determined by competition for the space that you are trying to advertise on. During the holiday season Facebook CPM rates are roughly 50% to 200% higher then non-holiday CPM rates. It will be more expensive to reach the same number of people.
What does this mean for the store owner? Well, it really depends on your business. If you live and die for the holiday rush, you should be seeing attractive returns, provided you’re optimizing and advertising to your audiences intelligently.
If your business isn’t seasonal, it’s possible you decided to sit the holidays out and come back with a vengeance in January when competition is decreased. Just don’t bet everything on an amazing post-holiday advertising plan as the return on ad spend during the holiday season can be much greater for those that plan accordingly.
The quality of your audience who you advertise to is more important then the size of that audience. We already went over that Facebook is going to throttle the amount of potential people that you can reach with your budget. This means you need to organize your target audiences accordingly - from most valuable to least valuable.
If you aren’t targeting the right audience — and many who join the crowd during this time won’t be — you’re more likely to reach people unwilling to click your ads and the more money you are going to waste.
If you have a very limited budget to spend on advertising here are three quick wins built around targeting warm audiences that every ecommerce store owner should utilize.
Please note: This exercise is only to showcase quick wins on a limited budget.
Stores With Greater Then 2,000 Customers Should:
Advertise to repeat customers. (They will convert like crazy.)
What's better then a customer? A customer that has purchased from your store multiple times. Most Shopify stores that have processed more then 2,000 orders should be segmenting their customer list and seeking out these high value customers. If you are handling customer service well and you sell great products realistically a 10% repeat average of 200 customers should not be out of your range. Create a list of these high-value customers and advertise only to them. Make sure to include copy and messaging in your ad that thanks them AND compels them to come back one more time.
Stores With Greater Then 200 Customers Should:
Advertise to all past customers. ( This audience will convert a bit less then an audience full of repeat customers, but they will deliver. )
Every store owner should know that the ROI is much higher when advertising to past customers then to new potential customers. If you have less then 200 repeat customers simply create one custom audience of all past customers.
Next, we move onto the new or smaller ecommerce store owner.
Stores With Less Then 200 Customers Should:
Advertise to all past customers and all customers that have added a product to their shopping cart in the last 180 days.
The problem that arises with smaller ecommerce stores is that they do not have a large enough audience of past customers to submit to Facebook to create a custom audience so that they can retarget them. So to resolve that, smaller stores need to create a custom list of past customers as well as all people that added an item to the shopping cart.
If you are a small store owner with less then 200 past customers simply create one single custom audience of everyone that has added an item to their cart in the last 180 days.
Below is a quick demonstration video for the smaller store owners.