How to Leverage Facebook Marketing to Boost E-commerce Sales?

Running an e-commerce store in 2020 is not an easy task. The competition among online retailers is so high that you must always come up with something unique to stay on top. With the rise of technology and social media, even consumer behaviour has changed rapidly over the years. E-commerce businesses have to prepare themselves to keep up with ever-increasing customer expectations.

Influence of social media on consumer behaviour

According to Statista, India was one of the fastest growing online retail markets in 2019, with the number of digital buyers expected to reach approximately 330 million in 2020. Social media has gained momentum like never before in such a way that around 74% of consumers rely on social networks to make purchase decisions. Even a report published by Hubspot suggests a similar kind of trend. According to Hubspot, around 71% of customers are more likely to make a purchase decision based on social media referrals. 

But the interesting fact is that among all the social media platforms, Facebook alone influences around 52% of consumers’ purchases. By analysing all these figures, we can infer the fact that social media platforms have a significant impact on the way consumers’ spend their valuable money. Realising this fact, many e-commerce marketers and social media experts have already started making use of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. to promote their products. 

Since we have now realised the influence of social media on consumer behaviour, let’s move on to discussing how Facebook marketing can help in driving e-commerce sales.

Facebook marketing for e-commerce

According to Statista, Facebook has active monthly users of over 2.6 billion in the first quarter of 2020. With such a massive number of active users present, Facebook is currently the biggest social network service in the world. With such a massive number of active users present, Facebook is currently the biggest social network service in the world. Facebook, with such a strong user base, a carefully devised Facebook marketing strategy, can help e-commerce businesses to reap big results. 

Following are some of the ways in which e-commerce businesses can make the most use of Facebook marketing.

1. Getting started with Facebook e-commerce

To begin with, the first thing you have to do is to set up an advertising account for your business with Facebook Business Manager. Facebook Business Manager allows you to manage ad accounts, pages and users who are working on it.

2. Facebook Sales Funnel

In 2019, Facebook accounted for around $67.37 billion in net ad revenues. Facebook ads provide lots of options that help businesses to get more customers. Having a proper sales funnel on Facebook is what sets a successful brand apart from others. But creating a sales funnel that works for your e-commerce business can sometimes be a complicated task. Poor ad creative, weak targeting, lack of tracking and wrongly tracked metrics are some of the mistakes most e-commerce businesses make while doing Facebook advertising.

Without further ado, let’s discuss in detail various Facebook ad campaigns that e-commerce businesses can make use of to boost sales and revenue.

Figuring out the right ad objective and the right target is the two most important things every business should do before creating an ad. Ad objective is the actions you want your targeted users to do when they come across your ads. 
Facebook breaks up these objectives into three categories, and they are Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. There are various other options coming under each of these three categories. The table shown below will give an idea about the various options coming under each category.

Awareness Campaign

The objective of this type of campaign is to increase awareness of your brands. There are two objectives available under the awareness category, and they are,

Brand Awareness – This campaign is helpful for e-commerce businesses who are looking to increase their brand awareness among people. It is not meant for any engagement or purchase purpose. Small businesses with limited advertising budgets may not find this type of ad campaign useful while big brands can make use of this campaign category to put their brand in front.

Reach – Reach objective is used to show your ad to a maximum number of people in your targeted audience list. This campaign is useful for small e-commerce businesses who want to show their products to a maximum number of people.

Consideration Campaign

Consideration campaigns help e-commerce businesses to boost conversion rates and increase their sales. There are five objectives associated with this campaign type, and they are as follows,

Traffic- Traffic objective helps to drive people to any URL that you choose. URLs can be of your website or any of your products pages.   Businesses can drive traffic to their website and can tag them with pixels so that even if they didn’t convert, a business could retarget them with various other offers. Retargeting is an excellent marketing strategy that helps to increase conversion rates.

Engagement- Engagement campaigns are meant to reach people who are more likely to interact with your ad through likes, comments or even shares. Optimizing the campaigns for engagement purpose can also increase your business page likes. People engaging with your content can further increase your post reach by making it displayed in the news feeds of other Facebook users who follow the person that initially interacted.

App Installs- App installs objective helps send people to stores from where they can download your e-commerce app. This category of the campaign can help e-commerce businesses to increase the number of downloads for their mobile application.

Video Views- Video views category allows you to share your business videos with the targeted audience. Videos can be anything related to your products or services. The objective of this particular ad campaign is only to get more people to view your video and not to get conversions.

Lead Generation- Lead generation campaigns are the perfect solution for generating leads on Facebook without driving traffic to your website. With lead generation objective, you can capture user information such as name, phone number, email id, etc. These collected data can be used later for various marketing purposes. You can even input the emails obtained to a CRM to provide promotional offers to your leads or for retargeting purposes.

Messages- Message objective helps e-commerce businesses to drive conversations. Ads will be delivered to people in the target list who are more likely to get in conversation with your business. Clicking the ad opens up a chat in the messenger, and this category of ads can help in engaging with your customers.

Conversions Campaign

Conversions campaigns help e-commerce businesses to boost conversion rates and increase sales. There are three objectives in conversion campaigns, and they are,

Conversions- Conversions objective is used to drive people to take some specific actions on your website or app. While creating the ad, you can select where you want the conversion to take place, be it your website, app, or anywhere else. Targeting the right set of audiences is the crucial factor that can determine the success of the conversions campaign. You can set the targeted audience as people who installed your app. You can even share sufficient conversion data with Facebook to accurately optimize the delivery of your ads. To maximize these campaigns, ensuring your Facebook bio reflects your brand identity and value proposition is essential. When users click through to your business page, a strong bio can reinforce their interest, provide clarity about your offerings, and drive them closer to conversion.

Catalog Sales- Catalog sales objective allows you to promote products from your product catalog. For this purpose, you need to integrate your product catalog with Facebook. The product catalog is nothing but a list of products that you would like to advertise on Facebook. Product ID, name, description, landing page URL, image URL etc. are some of the parameters that you need to add while creating a product catalog. You can visit the catalog manager page to start setting up your product inventory. You can also sync your e-commerce platforms such as WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, etc. with Facebook ads managers to make the process easier. After setting up the product catalog, you can head to the ads manager section to set your catalog sales campaign.

Store Traffic- Store traffic objective helps businesses to guide people to their physical store if there is any.

3. Tracking your website visitors

Facebook e-commerce campaigns play a crucial role in finding new leads and buyers. But these ad campaigns can turn disastrous if not properly tracked—this where Facebook Pixel comes into action. You can generate Facebook Pixel from the ads manager and implement it on your online e-commerce website. The only thing you have to do is to place the Pixel’s base code on every page where you want to track the conversions. The benefit of Facebook Pixel is that it helps marketers in the conversion tracking, i.e., to track the activities of your website visitors. These tracked conversions will be available in the Facebook analytics dashboard, which can later be analyzed to determine the effectiveness of your e-commerce campaign.

Benefits of Facebook marketing for e-commerce

Facebook is the largest social media platform and can bring in lots of benefits for your online e-commerce business. As a result, no marketers can ignore the potential reach of Facebook marketing. Mentioned below are some of the benefits of using Facebook marketing for e-commerce.

1. Strengthen your online presence- With 2.6 billion monthly active users, Facebook is undoubtedly one of the best platforms that help to create an online presence for your brand. Posting informative content on the Facebook page that can grab users’ attention is the easiest and best way to increase your brand’s presence online.

2. Increase customer retention- Keeping your existing customers engaged is the most challenging thing every business faces. Facebook is one of those places where most of your existing customers will be spending their free time, hence engaging with them is a lot easier through Facebook. Such kinds of engagement can offer a great customer experience, thus resulting in better customer retention.

3. Increased sales and revenue- As discussed above, Facebook ad campaigns are a perfect way to drive quality traffic to your website, increase brand awareness and engagement. All these can result in increased sales, which in turn brings more revenue to your e-commerce business.

After reading the blog, everyone might have got an idea about how crucial Facebook marketing can be for your e-commerce business. As mentioned at the blog’s beginning, Facebook marketing alone influences 52% of consumers’ purchases, and many marketers have already started using Facebook for their business growth.

Everyone has an idea about Facebook marketing and its capabilities, but only a few know how to get the best out of it. If used properly, Facebook marketing can easily help you in doubling up your profit.

You can get in touch with us if you are looking for a perfect partner who can help you with Facebook marketing.