Customer Acquisition Using Facebook Advertising

This campaign helped me acquire new email subscribers for $0.07/ea and purchasing customers for $1.31/ea. from cold traffic.

As outlined in my profile on LinkedIn, this campaign was ran as a customer acquisition funnel for my woodworking business, Heart Of Timber.

There were two objectives:

1. Build email subscriber base
2. Acquire purchasing customers

At the time I didn't have much of an email marketing strategy, but knowing that this was a test, I wasn't focused on the content I would be delivering yet until I knew I had people to send emails to.

My hypothesis was that if I could acquire email subscribers, then I would be able to sell products through email rather than paid traffic, at a smaller cost. That has been the strategy for many marketers for some time now - build your email list, then you "own" that traffic. The theory states that if you can send someone who is already familiar with your brand an email, you won't have to pay to get in front of them with another social media ad, or Google product re-targeting ad. Instead, you'll just do an email blast and hope your open & click through rates are high enough to convert to sales.

Early into the test, people were taking me up on my offer, which was an encouraging first step. The messaging went something like this;

"Hi, I'm Alex. I'll give you this free Idahanger, if you'd help me out with shipping and handling." The video was around a minute in length, so clearly I'm paraphrasing here.

People were then taken to a landing page that I built inside of ClickFunnels where they could input their email and name to get access to the deal. At best, the conversion rate was 58%, meaning over half of the people landing on the page were opting in to be added to my email list.

According to Sumo.com - the top 10% of marketers average 4.77% opt-in rates from their own websites. This opt-in rate is from people who are already on an organization's website, so the comparison may be slightly different. However, even if the average conversion rate is 25%, this campaign landing page was converting cold traffic at twice that rate.

After people opted in for email marketing, they moved to a pre-loaded shopping cart (meaning one of the free Idahangers was already in their cart) and they could proceed to checkout. With small tweaks to the shipping and handling price, the best result was from a $4.95 shipping & handling rate. Ultimately after sales tax, customers would spend just north of $5 on my eCommerce store and receive their free hanger a few weeks later.

Over the course of 35 days, this campaign yielded 308 new customers who took me up on the offer, >1,300 new email subscribers, and nearly $2,000 in revenue. The best converting audience within Facebook was females, on a mobile device ages 18-24. The email opt-in CPA (cost-per-action) was $0.04, although I only have a screenshot of the data at $0.07/signup (see below) In Facebook Ads Manger terms, the complete registration standard event cost per conversion.

Overall, the results of my customer acquisition campaign were something I had as a portfolio builder, and I was continuing to grow my business because of it.

Something I've learned from this test was that much of an acquisition campaign depends on the value you're offering above the color of your CTA (call-to-action) buttons or thumbnail image in the video. People will only watch a percentage of your video at the top of the funnel if you're offering them something they value. This campaign was targeted to Idahoans, and the offer of an Idaho-shaped trinket proved to be something they would pay $5 to have shipped!

Am I saying that the optimization and calibration of your campaign isn't important? No, of course not. I like testing colors of CTA buttons and copy in ads just as much as the next marketer. My learning was that none of that fun "ninja" stuff will matter without giving value to the customer first.

Thank you for taking time out of your day to read through this. If you found value in this, or would like to talk more please share it with someone who would enjoy it or leave a comment!

If you'd like to chat more in depth with me about this campaign, or maybe you're designing a campaign for your organization, please contact me on LinkedIn or on alexjangard.com