How We More Than Tripled A Company’s Return on Investment

A low cost per click isn’t a good indicator of the success of your online lead generation strategies. Without a return on your investment, your ad campaigns will fail. Here’s how we helped a furniture company make massive improvements, and what you can learn from it.

If there’s one thing that all Facebook Ad users want to know, it’s how to boost sales online.

Facebook Ads offer you the chance to reach a wider audience than ever before. But they come at a cost. You have to spend money to get your ads onto people’s newsfeeds.

That means making a return on your investment is the key priority.

Your ads have to deliver a sizeable enough income to make the campaign a success.

That’s something that many people forget when using Facebook for small business owners. They’re too focused on their cost-per-click (CPC) rates to understand that it’s cost-per-acquisition (CPA) that’s the key metric.

Growth Marketing Systems worked with a client that had been struggling to pull their CPA down. These are the lead generation marketing strategies that we used to achieve amazing results.

Slashing the CPA by Two-Thirds (And How We Did it)

An established online furniture retailer came to us with a simple issue.

They wanted to get more out of their Facebook Ad campaigns. They’d already built ads into their digital marketing strategy. But the leads they received came at too high a cost.

They needed help to drive down their CPA so they’d make a better return on their investment.

They even presented us with the figures that they wanted to lower. In January 2018, their campaign achieved the following:

Average CPA – $64.63
Average Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) – 5.99x

Most businesses would love to achieve almost 6x ROAS. But this store knew they could do more.

The Challenge

The aims of slashing the CPA and ROAS were the two biggest challenges that this company presented to us.

But they had other goals too.

They wanted to retarget customers who’d almost gotten to the end of their internet marketing sales funnel before dropping off.

Plus, they wanted to build some buzz around their brand. Some of their ads needed to build brand loyalty and perhaps even turn some customers into advocates.

This was more than a simple Facebook Ad campaign. The store needed a set of lead generation marketing strategies within the context of the campaign.

Our Solution

We split our solution into four sections:

Retargeting
Getting People In-Store
Brand Loyalty
Brand Advocacy

Here’s what we did for each.

Retargeting

The retargeting campaign focused on using online lead generation techniques to bring back lost sales.

Our aim was to create a campaign that split the company’s ad timelines based on the average order time. This would give us more control when it came to ad delivery.

This meant focusing on dynamic ads. We used these ads to target customers who’d dropped out of the sales funnel at the shopping cart stage. The ads featured the products they’d added to their carts, which boosted relevance for each recipient.

This played into our advanced retargeting strategy and led to $5,000 in sales for less than $200 spent.

Getting People In-Store

Retargeting alone isn’t enough for successful online lead generation. We needed ads that would pull new people to the company’s online store.

Several Facebook Ad tools helped us to achieve this. We used Lookalikes to search for new customers who have similar profiles to existing customers. However, we also created ads for a broader audience. This allowed us to specifically target one audience segment while building awareness in a larger segment.

This strategy saw us constantly testing and analysing the ads to see which provided the most valuable traffic. We examined how many people looked at products or added them to a shopping cart. Most importantly, we looked at which ads pulled them in and refined the rest of the campaign around that data.

During this process, we also tested Facebook Ad’s Carousel feature. Using products from the store’s catalogue, we created carousels of single products and product collections. Again, constant testing and refinement helped us to get the most out of these ads.

Brand Loyalty

The brand loyalty campaign actually moved away from using Facebook Ads.

Instead, we used Facebook Messenger to talk directly to recent buyers. Each buyer received a quick message to let them know that the company could answer any questions they have about their new product. It also provided them with relevant contact details.

This simple message achieved something important. It formed a connection with each customer by demonstrating that the company wanted to do what it could to make the customer happy.

In this respect, it worked as an online lead generation tool as well. A happy customer is more likely to make another purchase.

Brand Advocacy

The final step of the campaign aimed to get people talking about what they’d bought. After all, Facebook is a powerful tool for raising brand awareness. We needed ads that encouraged people to share brand-related content.

This would hopefully entice new customers into the internet marketing funnel.

We created ads that targeted those who’d made purchases during the last 90 days, though we excluded those who’d bought within the last 30.

The ads offered a chance to win a voucher to anybody who shared a photo of their recent purchase in use. All they had to do was take the photo, share it, and tag the business.

In one fell swoop, these ads created a bunch of brand-related posts that pulled new customers to the business.

The End Result

These campaigns came with the main aim of driving down ROAS and CPA.

And we delivered amazing results. Between 20th May and 18th June 2018, the campaign achieved the following:

Average CPA fell to $21.95
Average ROAS grew to 18.15x

But that’s not all that the campaign achieved. Over 15,500 people visited the furniture store’s landing page during that month.

All told, they generated a revenue of $163,387.72 from 410 purchases.

And that’s just the start. Constant refinement may make these campaigns even more efficient later on down the line. As the campaigns collect more data, the ads become more effective.

Now, you need to know how to use our techniques to boost your online lead generation efforts. Here are three tips to get you started.

Tip #1 – Use Dynamic Ads

Personalisation is a huge bonus when you’re trying to figure out how to boost sales online. If you understand what your customers want, you can create relevant ads to target them.

That’s what Facebook’s Dynamic Ads tool offers. We used it as part of our ad campaign and the ads helped us to achieve purchases from customers who’d almost dropped out of the sales funnel.

Dynamic Ads allow you to promote your products directly to the people who’ve already shown interest in them. When used to its fullest, you can link the tool to the products in your online store.

Here’s the best part.

You only need to create a Dynamic Ad campaign once. Once you’ve linked the campaign to your store, Facebook Ads does the rest of the work. It will keep sending Dynamic Ads to hot leads. Plus, it pulls pricing and availability data from your store too. This ensures the accuracy of the ads.

You control how much you invest into the ads too. Plus, you can pause them at any time.

Use Dynamic Ads to make sure you’re not missing out on customers who still have an interest in buying from you.

Tip #2 – Retarget Lost Leads

Dynamic Ads is just one of the methods that you can use to retarget lost customers.

But why would you want to do it in the first place?

Our case study highlights a big reason. Our Dynamic Ad retargeting campaign delivered $5,000 for a $200 spend.

That’s an ROAS of 25x.

But there’s more. The average display advert achieves a click-thru-rate (CTR) of 0.07%. Retargeting ads multiple that CTR by 10 to achieve a 0.7% rate.

Better yet, retargeted customers are 70% more likely to buy something than brand new customers.

Despite this, many businesses don’t use retargeting as one of their lead generation marketing strategies. They’re constantly chasing new leads instead or reigniting leads that almost led to sales before.

Use your ad data to locate the customers who almost made a purchase. Retarget them with personalised ads to pull them back into your internet marketing sales funnel.

Tip #3 – Experiment with Carousel Ads

Most people think of the static sponsored ads that pop up in their news feeds when they think of Facebook Ads.

But Carousel Ads offer something different, which is why we experimented with them.

Carousel Ads allow you to highlight several products or services in the space of one ad. This allows people to scroll through several offers, thus increasing the chances that they’ll see something they like.

The stats for Carousel Ads also point to their effectiveness. Kinetic Social found that good Carousel Ads result in up to 10 times more clicks than static Facebook Ads.

This makes them ideal for businesses that sell large numbers of products. But Carousel Ads have other uses too.

For example, you can use their scrolling nature to tell a story or offer up a quick how-to for one of your products. Alternatively, you can use Carousel Ads to highlight different aspects of a single product. For our furniture client, this could include showing a piece of furniture from multiple angles. Or, highlighting the various features that the piece has.

Don’t assume static is the only way to go with your ads. Carousel Ads lead to more clicks and can provide more information about your products to potential customers.

The Final Word

The quality of an ad campaign affects the results you get when using Facebook. For small business owners, a focus on retargeting customers and creating engaging ads is the key.

Bog-standard static ads often don’t do that. But if you use the tools that Facebook provides, you can draw on your data to create more effective ad campaigns.

There’s plenty more to learn about creating great Facebook Ad campaigns. We recommend that you do the following to get started: