Facebook Ads for Customer Acquisition and Retention

Do you use social media to nurture relationships with your customers? Want to reduce customer acquisition costs?

Want to learn How to Scale Up Facebook Ads for Customer Acquisition and Retention Successfully? 

Trust me on this; being utterly aware of this business trajectory may help you avoid devoting the bulk of your marketing efforts and resources to customer acquisition.

Advertisers on Facebook have a plethora of targeting and campaign tools at their disposal. Unsurprisingly, businesses of all sizes — from small mom-and-pop shops to Fortune 100 corporations — use Facebook’s advertising platform.

While having an abundance of advertising options is a marketer’s Disneyland, it can also make getting started intimidating.

If the massive ad options get you overwhelmed, review the following six categories of Facebook ads and learn a thing or two about how they might be applied to your business and customer acquisition & retention journey.

#1. New traffic generation ads

Whereas retargeting is beneficial, it is ineffective unless you are driving high-quality visitors to your site. It’s usually a good idea to create a Facebook campaign to attract new clients. I refer to this as a first contact point advertisement because it is likely the first time the person watching the ad has heard of your business.

For clarity, we’ll use an example of a traffic generation ad from DreamCloud Sleep, in which they announce their brand and product to their audience:

Since you don’t know who’s reading your ads, this type of ad often has a lower click-through rate (CTR) and a higher cost per click (CPC) than retargeting campaigns.

However, there are a couple of strategies to reduce costs and improve the performance of a first-touchpoint ad.

Graph search & Audience Insights

Facebook offers advertisers a robust set of free tools. Audience Insights enables you to access mamographic, behavioral, and interest information on all Facebook users.

You can enhance the utility of this data by filtering it by specific sites, interests, locations, and demographics.

Enter your competitors’ website URLs into Audience Insights to gain further insights into your potential target audience.

This search will yield a wealth of information on Facebook users who like your competitors’ pages, which you may use to target your first Facebook advertisements.

The Lookalike Audience

If you already have a client or prospect list, you can quickly import it as a new Custom Audience in Ads Manager.

Once that audience is created, it can create a Lookalike audience of 2-20 million people. This new audience will consist of Facebook users most similar to your current clients, making them more targetable.

The A/B test

A/B testing your Facebook ads is always a good idea, regardless of ad type, but it is crucial to test your first-touchpoint ads. Create two or three copy variations and another two or three creative variations for a new campaign. These variants should be tested on a variety of audiences.

You do not need to spend a fortune to achieve this well. You can invest a few bucks per day for a week in each variation and then assess the results. Increase expenditure on your top-performing text, creative, and audience after examining the data.

Begin small and iteratively when advertising on Facebook. Experiment, track outcomes, and iterate. The Facebook ad types discussed in this article could serve as the basis of a long-term social media marketing strategy for your company. After you’ve finished reading, it’s time to begin testing!

#2. Customer thank-you ads

As you probably know, many business owners have the poor habit of focusing all their marketing efforts solely on converting leads into customers. This is a massive error.

It’s a lot easier to convert a new customer into a recurring customer than to convert a cold lead into a new client. And acquiring a new customer is frequently substantially more expensive than retaining an existing one.

As such, it’s necessary that you, for instance, advertise in your store’s thank-you section. For two days following their purchase, new consumers see an ad including a 30-second video of you personally thanking them for their business.

These ads generated substantially more engagement and organic reach per impression than any previous ad you’d run.

The objective of this ad is to increase brand loyalty and client satisfaction. Surprisingly, it also results in a significant increase in the number of first-time consumers who become repeat customers within, say, two days of their initial purchase.

Take this a step further by establishing a customer loyalty program that fosters these ties and increases repeat sales.

#3. Existing customers’ new product ads

As indicated here, business owners frequently devote insufficient marketing resources to their existing customers.

It’s incredible to realize that the probability of making a sale from a new customer is 5–20 percent, and from an existing client, 60–70 percent, according to SignalMind.

What’s more astounding is that recurring customers spend an average of 33% more than new customers, and that 80% of your future income will come from just 20% of your current consumers.

Given the data on repeat consumers, it’s a no-brainer that the first ad you run when launching a new product should be an announcement to existing customers.

HelloFresh employed this strategy to advertise its new sub-brand, Green Chef. They collaborated with influencers to distribute targeted Facebook ads to their existing consumer base, introducing the brand’s latest addition.

#4. Abandoned cart ads

According to Baymard Institute data, over 70% of customers abandon their carts. In other words, for every ten consumers who add an item to their cart, approximately seven will abandon the transaction.

How do you entice these shoppers to return to your store to complete their purchases? With retargeting, you may target these users with a highly targeted Facebook ad. These ads frequently include an incentive, such as free delivery or a discount, if the user returns to complete their purchase.

I’ve discovered that incorporating a humorous video into this type of ad yields much more spectacular results. At one point, I ran an abandoned cart ad for my Lint removal store that featured a 30-second video of me explaining to the audience that abandoned carts have feelings and are distressed when left behind. While this may seem trivial, this campaign generated a 20x return on investment.

#5. Dynamic ads

Dynamic Ads (formerly Dynamic Products Ads) links your store’s product catalog with your Facebook Events Manager & Facebook Pixel.

When prospects visit your site and then log into Facebook, they will see an ad featuring the exact products they were viewing on your site. As a result, the ads people see are highly tailored and pertinent.

Multiple-product line Carousel ads on Facebook are dynamic ads that promote a collection of merchandise from your online store.

Each product includes a caption, an image, and a link to the product’s destination URL. According to Facebook, advertisers who utilize the carousel ad type save 30–50% on acquisition costs and 20–30% on click costs (CPC).

Additionally, you can create specific audiences for your carousel ads. This might help you curate more focused product sets for your audience.

For instance, your website may provide product categories. You can create carousel ads for various categories and display them to users who have visited websites in that category.

Utilize the Product Catalog Sales objective when creating a Dynamic Ad. I’m sure it will rapidly become one of your favorite sorts of Facebook ads. The following explains why:

The accomplishment of multiple objectives

 You can target four distinct audiences with dynamic ads:

• Added to cart but not purchased
• Viewed but not purchased
• Cross-sell products
• Upsell products

The ad will be optimized for each objective automatically based on the audience you’ve chosen. Again, this saves time and yields better results.

Run Campaigns in perpetuity. 

You’re probably aware that updating your creative can be time-consuming if you run several ads. With dynamic ads, you can set and forget. Keep an eye on performance!

Exceptionally personalized 

If you run a dynamic ad, the copy remains the same for everyone who sees it, but the creative is unique and tailored to your website’s viewers’ behavior.

Improved outcomes

Numerous of Facebook’s most prominent marketing partners have seen great results with dynamic ads. According to Facebook, Wayfair exceeded its customer acquisition goal by more than 20% due to dynamic advertising.

It’s simple to see why the ROI is so high, given that it’s the most personalized, targeted, and relevant ad organizations can run—short of designing a separate ad for each Facebook user.

#6. Lead ads

The lead ad unit simplifies collecting email addresses and building email lists. Your prospects can join an email list, among other things, with as little effort as it takes to like or share a post with this ad unit.

The advantage of the lead ad unit is that Facebook automatically populates most fields a prospect would usually have to fill out manually. This decreases friction, increasing their likelihood of following through.

Lead ads are an excellent alternative if you want to expand your email list. You can automate by connecting your lead ad to your email service provider via Zapier. New contacts get added to one of your lists and incorporated into a custom automated procedure.

You can check with our additional resources about Facebook advertising, which include:

How to Scale Up Your Facebook Ads On a Healthy Return on Ad Spend (Here)

Common Facebook Ad Mistakes: A Look At How to Avoid Them (Here)

Bottom line

Facebook accords you access to a slew of targeting and marketing capabilities in the age of social media. Businesses of all sizes use Facebook’s advertising platform, from small mom-and-pop businesses to Fortune 100 businesses.

Advertisers who run carousel ads save between 30% and 50% on acquisition costs and between 20% and 30% on click costs.

Converting a new customer to a recurring customer is far easier than converting a cold lead to a new customer.

Over 70% of customers abandon their carts, according to Baymard Institute data. Around seven out of every ten buyers who add an item to their cart abandon the purchase.

You can advertise your new sub-brand by engaging with influencers to send targeted Facebook advertising to your existing customer base.

A new traffic-generating ad is a first-contact ad, as it’s usually the first time the viewer has heard of your business.