To improve the content on their blog, Shopify sent out a survey earlier this year to see what merchants were struggling with most. While people were (self-proclaimed) experts at “Coming up with ideas for what to sell”, the top two headaches were “Getting traffic to your store” and “Converting visitors on your site into buyers”.
This is not surprising. The online marketing world is a massive jungle. And with more tools on offer than people to use them, we are getting some serious paradox of choice vibes.
So instead of boasting about new tools, I want to give you a Marketing setup you can replicate for your store. The difference is understanding how the tools work together and how they guide your store visitor to a sale.
The Marketing Funnel
The marketing funnel is the conceptual representation of the steps a visitor will go through before becoming a customer. For the sake of this article, we will consider the top of the funnel someone clicking on your ad for the first time on Facebook. The bottom of the funnel is that person then actually buying something from your store.
To make this a bit more graspable, let’s look at a related concept: AIDA (Attention — Interest — Desire — Action). It’s another way of showing a visitor’s journey to a sale. You can increase the chances that someone will become a happy new customer by touching on as many points along their journey.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Marketing funnel, here and here are some articles I recommend.
Understanding & using AIDA
The general idea is that people often need more than one interaction with you before they buy your product. An example from my life: I saw an ad for a MELLER watch. The watch itself wasn’t my thing but I liked the simple design, so I clicked on it. I browsed through their collection and found a black watch with a brown leather strap that appealed to me. Then I got an email that needed my attention and forgot all about the watch. About a week later, I see the black watch that I had found in my Facebook feed and a 15% discount code if I buy in the next 24 hours. Well damn, they got me.
The number of interactions someone needs will be different depending on the product and brand, but the idea is the same. Get people’s attention first, then foster interest and create a desire for what you’re selling. That means for you, just throwing ads at people and getting their attention isn’t going to cut it. You need to take them by the hand and guide them through the funnel. Luckily, we have tools that can make this a lot easier for us.
I will not go into this here, but you definitely need the Facebook Pixel setup in your Shopify store. You need this to gather the relevant data on your visitors. There’s a great tutorial on how to do that here.
Here’s a graphical depiction of the Marketing setup I will take you through. It’s a basic but very effective setup that can get you great results.
Getting traffic with Lookalike Audiences
Even the most refined marketing setup is useless if it doesn’t have people in it. You need to get the ball rolling by getting some traffic to your site. As soon as people visit your site, they are in your Marketing Funnel, and you can reach them again later on.
But how do you know who to target with your ads? Who will click on your ad and visit your store? If you know your niche very well, you can do generic targeting according to interests and demographics. There is a simpler solution though — Lookalike Audiences. These are people who look like another group of people.
Facebook offers some very useful tools for merchants to make it easier for them to find new potential customers. For example, you can upload a list of your current customers, and Facebook will find people who are similar.
For our Marketing setup, we will use the Shopify App Looga, as it creates strong Lookalike Audiences for you with a few clicks. During installation you need to choose the country in which you want to run ads (you can create as many as you like). You will end up with an audience that contains new people who are similar to your best customers.
Example Lookalike Setup
Create a Traffic campaign in Facebook. On Ad set level, you can define the audience. Here you can select the Looga Lookalike Audience that Looga uploaded to your Facebook Ad Account.
I won’t go into the details of creating Facebook ads, as there are plenty of resources that cover that already. I can recommend these Ad templates from AdEspresso for inspiration.
Once your campaign is active, make sure you track it’s performance regularly. The important metrics to look at are cost per click (CPC) and click-through rate (CTR). As a general guideline, try to keep your CPC under $1 and CTR above 2–3%. If your CPC gets too high, try choosing a larger Lookalike percentage in Looga. I’ve seen this work very well as you increase the reach of the audience.
Retargeting with Kit & Dynamic Ads
Once you have people browsing your store, they are in your funnel. Thanks to the Facebook Pixel, we can find and target these visitors again at a later time.
Usually, your visitors will even tell you what they like by looking at products in your catalog. Facebook tracks who looks at which product and you can retarget these people with the exact products they looked at. This is a powerful way of reminding people how much they actually want this one product they saw on your page.
Example Retargeting Setup
For this to work on autopilot, you need two apps: Kit and Facebook Product Feed by Flexify.
Kit will make it easy for you to manage your budget and will create the ads for you automatically after a quick initial setup. The Facebook Product Feed app will sync your Shopify product catalog with Facebook. Adding products to your store will also make them available for Facebook ads.
There are excellent guides on how to setup Kit here and here. The skill here lies in creating dynamic ads that are appealing. Facebook will use your product images for the ads, so make sure those are of high-quality.
Wrap up
In my humble opinion, this is the minimum setup that every eCommerce shop should run. It doesn’t really matter what you sell, you’re going to have some kind of Marketing Funnel. Wouldn’t it be silly not to use the tools available to us?
Any questions or feedback? Would love to hear what you think in the comments!
Links to the apps:
* Looga
* Kit
* Facebook Product Feed
