There are two important trends today's eCommerce businesses need to be aware of:
- eCommerce is increasingly a mobile and app-based experience
- Email marketing performance is declining as spam filters improve and users become "ad blind" due to the deluge of marketing emails hitting their inboxes every day.
This adds a new level of challenge for your marketing efforts - one tactic to consider is linking yout retargeting and lapsed user email campaigns together with social media outreach in order to boost your lead nurturing strategy.
Lead Nurture Facebook ads provide another way to reach your lapsed audiences, while also creating a richer experience to generate more conversions.
How To Reach Your Lapsed Audience On Facebook
Today's consumers are spending more time on Facebook than they are in their inboxes. Mary Meeker's 2016 Internet Trends report found that average time spent on digital has increased to 5.6 hours per day, while Facebook's own research indicates that 20% of mobile time is spent on the Facebook or Instagram apps.
To reach your target audience, you need to go where they are - within social media apps.
You can easily target your lapsed audience on Facebook by uploading a list of customers from your CRM or by using a 'Website Custom Audience' of users who didn't complete the checkout process, or users who've spent a large amount of time on your site (indicating very high interest). You can target lapsed users with Dynamic Product Ads of the items they viewed or added to their cart, or more items from the same product category to help them find what they were looking for.
Offering discounts to this retargeted audience can also be a highly effective tactic.
Here are three lead nurturing strategies for lapsed users using Facebook's retargeting features:
1. Sequential Lead Nurturing
If you have high lapsed user email open rates or older audiences (for whom email is still a popular mode of communication), you should create a sequential user experience where Facebook ads complement, and even play off of the email to lapsed users.
Example sequence: Day 1: email Day 2: Facebook ad Day 3: email Day 4: Facebook ad
Use language that makes the sequence obvious. This could even include having your Facebook ad say "check your email for your 15% coupon" and link to the product's page.
2. Strategic Targeting
Facebook's highly specific audience targeting enables you to upload lists of customers from your CRM. Upload a list of your cart abandoners with the highest-value products. Facebook will help you A\B test what types of offers or messaging is the most successful at converting these lapsed users. You'll then be able to see the results of your A/B offer test in just one day. Learning from this test can then be leveraged by your traditional email marketing tactic.
Examples of tests: various percent-off offers, dollar-off offers, timed sales (one day only), or messaging about limited product availability.
3. Improved Reach
Upload a CRM list of your lapsed users who didn't open your lead nurture email to ensure the retargeting message reaches them.
This tactic is advisable for reaching younger audiences who use email less than older generations.
More Conversions & Greater ROAS
Recently, an advertising agency improved the cost per acquired customer (CPA) by over 20% using these strategies for an eCommerce subscription service partner. The retargeted audiences had 2.8x lower CPMs. Leveraging this lead nurturing strategy increased the e-commerce brand's total retargeted audience reach by 36%.
Worth considering in your outreach process.