We recently worked with a creative entrepreneur who has a successful online business selling her creative design courses, guides and printables.
Using only email marketing and organic social posts, she wasn’t reaching enough of her audience even though she was active and consistent online.
She knew her products could sell all the time – if only they could get in front of the right people!
LESSONS LEARNED
Developing a very successful e-commerce campaign for this client reminded us of the following:
- Untapped Instagram followers are invaluable–and that goes the same for any untapped warm audience. Most often, your best audiences are those who already like, know and trust you.
- You never really know which strategy will perform best, keep your assumptions from standing in the way of your success and look at the data. We wouldn’t have expected brand new cold audiences to outperform established, warm audiences, and yet… this time they did!
- Test EVERYTHING. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for Facebook™ marketing. What works for one client likely won’t be the best solution for another. Testing everything from audiences to ad creative to platform and ad placement–and everything in between–is the key to us getting the absolute best return on our client’s investment.
THE STRATEGY
Although this entrepreneur had been focused on timed course launches, we knew her creative guides could be sold year-round.
As we dove into her strategy, we focused her Facebook™ ads on learning more about the buying behaviour of her ideal customer by:
- Selling to existing audiences
- Attracting new customers
- Split testing ad creative & placements
Selling to Existing Audiences
Her Instagram following was largely untapped. This means most of them had likely never seen her guides before!
We began targeting the client’s warm audiences to see how much potential was left for them to purchase.
We quickly discovered that her Engaged Facebook™ Fans audience was the top performing warm audience, bringing in sales for as low as $2.40/purchase!
Attracting New Customers
Although we had strong warm audiences to target, we needed to expand to cold audiences if we wanted to reach our sales goals. We tested Lookalike audiences and a variety of interest-based audience targets to put her products in front of fresh faces.
The results were astounding!
Running Facebook™ ads to cold audiences was more profitable than targeting her warm audiences! Cold audiences were converting into purchasers at at cost 22% lower than her warm audiences. The average cold audience cost per purchase was $2.69 compared to $3.36 from her warmer audiences.
As we started to scale this creative entrepreneur’s campaigns, she could hardly keep up with inventory levels!
Split Testing Ad Creative & Placement
Since creativity defines our client’s work, she was more than willing to work with us to create ad creative that fit the platform we were running ads on.
Through split testing static image ads versus video ads, we found that video ads on the mobile platform were driving the most sales. In fact, 94% of purchases originated on the mobile platform.
We split the campaigns out between Facebook™ and Instagram placements and discovered that Instagram ads were generating sales at a cost 35% lower than Facebook™ ads.
Entering the holiday season, we tailored our ad creative to appeal to the gift buyer. This actually brought cost per purchase down in the week leading up to Christmas, which is a time when e-commerce advertisers frequently see higher costs!
THE RESULTS
- 10.68 Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)!!!! This means for every $1 our client spent on advertising she made $10.68!
- Increased monthly passive income by almost 1000% <<< we are for real here!
- 304% increase in sales of her creative guide
After successfully increasing sales of her guide, our client gave us the reigns to use Facebook™ advertising to promote her brand new product offering. Based on the ad creative and buying behaviour trends we uncovered, we were able to deliver consistent results for both products.
With this drastic increase in passive income, our client was able to spend more time with her family and less time stressing over how to scale her business.
Best of all, the products she put her heart and soul into developing are getting into the hands of MORE passionate buyers.
