Gaining Pre-transactional Contacts

Before we get started, it’s important to understand what a pretransactional lead (or contact) is, and why they play a critical role in your business growth. It’s easy to spend your time focusing on making sales or promoting coupons to draw people to your site to immediately buy. However, a lot of value lies in the ability to get to know someone before they become a customer. By understanding what someone’s needs are and being able to provide a solution (maybe it’s just a quick tip and not even a product), people will begin to trust you and see you as an authority in your field. Later down the road when they need more advice or are ready to make a purchase, they’re going to turn to someone they trust first: you. Not only does this help extend your reach and raise awareness, but it also helps to generate loyal buyers. Putting in the extra effort to form a personal relationship from the start will result in more valuable customers in the long run.

Understanding LTV:CAC

For eCommerce, it’s important to get past the idea of just making the immediate sale. As marketers we want to think about the entire lifetime value of a customer (LTV) compared to the customer acqusition cost (CAC). Although it’s ideal to have the lowest CAC as possible, the long term benefits of a higher LTV:CAC outweigh the small amount of money you would save early on. By initially investing more in the customer, you are setting your company up for loyal, returning buyers, rather than one time customers.

Let’s look at Starbucks for example. Across 5 customers, the average spend per visit was $5.90 - seems pretty great for a coffee shop. But consider that the average customer lifespan for Starbucks is 20 years. Looking at how often a customer buys from Starbucks, that’s an estimate potential of about $14,099! Thus, instead of acquiring more customers to spend $5.90 just one time, Starbucks focuses significant marketing budget on gaining loyal customers who will stick around and keep purchasing to surpass their acquisition costs and generate much more lifetime revenue.

How To Plan Your Facebook Strategy

First Things First: Create a Plan

1. Quantify Your Goals: Use your current Facebook analytics to determine goal target clickthrough, prospect to contact, and contact to customer conversion rates. Having set numbers will allow you to easily analyze your results.
2. Review Your Buyer Personas: In order to increase your number of customers through Facebook, you need to be reaching the right audience. Study up on who your ideal audience is and the best ways to target them.
3. Create a Unified Campaign: What you do on Facebook should go hand-in-hand with the rest of your marketing in order to maintain a cohesive brand image that resonates well with your audience. Make sure what you’re posting and offering on Facebook is integrated into the rest of your marketing efforts.

Create a Content Calendar

Creating high quality Facebooks posts and offers requires time that you may not have. The solution to this is to create a content calendar that includes what you want to post and when you want to post it to Facebook. Use a social media publishing tool to automate your posts. This will help ensure you have a consistent flow of content being published, even when you’re at your busiest.

Your calendar should include everything from specific offers to industry information you want to share with your fans. Don’t forget to schedule posts that promote your latest blog content. Your goal should be to publish diverse content as frequently as possible without sacrificing quality. This way you can focus your daily efforts on working leads, interacting with fans, creating new posts, and monitoring your analytics.

Taking Fans From Facebook To Your Website

Quality Content

People are inundated with emails, Facebook posts, and tweets, and need a good reason to visit your website. The most effective way to drive traffic from Facebook is by providing them with the high quality content that they want to read. This will not only get them to your site, but it will keep them there, and coming back. With all the noise on the internet, how do you make content that will stand out and reel the reader in? Here are a few tips:

• Use images to make your content visually interesting.
• Listen to your audience and write what they want... it’s not all about you.
• Include data to prove your point and give you more authority.
• Provide examples so your audience is able to easily understand your point.
• Make sure your content is relevant to your industry. As much as people enjoy humor, they’re there for specific content.

Link Back to Your Website

While having a lot of Facebook fans makes you look great, it doesn’t directly impact your business growth. That’s up to you. Once you have your content, it’s time to use that to entice your audience to go past your Facebook page and spend time on your website.

The best way to do this is by offering an irresistible call-to-action (CTA) that takes a fan from Facebook to a landing page. This opens up the opportunity of turning that prospect into a contact simply by providing an offer. Post a variety of offers, from limited time promotions to content to specific product details, to ensure you’re engaging people at all stages of the buying process. Just make sure the offer you provide is aligned with your business goals and brand identity.

It’s absolutely crucial to have links to your external site on Facebook. While memes and other images are great for developing a company personality, they don’t move people through the marketing funnel and turn them into customers.

Creating Dynamic Content

For eCommerce, it’s especially important to use dynamic content to really give your buyers exactly what they are looking for. Each contact that views a CTA or visits your website should see material that is directly related to their interests and needs based on previous interactions that person has had with your company.

Take Amazon, one of the largest eCommerce sites for example. Each person that logs onto the site sees a completely customized homepage with products they are likely to be interested in. Determine what you want to show people by using data you’ve gathered from page views, forms, and previous purchase history of your contacts.

Using dynamic (or smart) CTAs within your website is another way to make nurturing your contacts through the marketing funnel more effective. Dissect the data about your contacts to create CTAs that correlate with what they will most likely be interested in purchasing.

Creating Clickable Calls-to-Action

A quality CTA will entice your Facebook fans to take that next step and visit your website. While HubSpot customers can customize CTAs within the software, noncustomers can try designing CTAs using our free templates for creating professional looking buttons in PowerPoint. The offer should be clear and lead directly to a landing page where the prospect can fill out a form to download the offer. CTAs can be placed in both organic and paid Facebook posts by inserting your offer button and linking to the related landing page.

How to Create a Sleek Landing Page

The key to creating your landing pages is to make them straight to the point, so the viewer knows exactly what you’re offering and what they’re supposed to do. To accomplish this:

1. Be Consistent: Whatever you offer in your post and CTA, have the same message and offer on the landing page. You want people to solely focus on what you’re offering and immdediately know the next step they should take.
2. Keep it Clean: Don’t clutter the page with navigation bars that redirect back to your homepage and social media sharing links. The only option your prospect should have is to get your offer.
3. Make Your Form Simple: Tailor your form questions to the type of offer you’re making. Don’t scare off your top of the funnel prospects by asking questions that are too personal. Start off with the basics, then ask more detailed questions as contacts continue to return to your site.

How to Create Effective Forms

Using a landing page with a form will allow you to collect critical information from your Facebook fans that will not only turn them into contacts, but also help you track their interactions with your company later on.

It’s critical you collect appropriate data with each offer you give. This means including different form fields depending on where the contact falls in the marketing funnel. While you may only ask for name and email address when you’re promoting a first time visit 2-for-1 offer, you should ask for more detailed information when it comes to an ebook or more in-depth content.

Progressive Profiling

If possible, use progressive profiling (smart forms) to make filling out forms less of a hassle for your contacts. This way, the next time a contact goes to download something else, they won’t have to waste time filling out previously completed fields. This will also allow you to ask new questions to find out more about your contacts and current customers, letting you provide them with more customized deals and content in the future.

Let’s say you’re an electronics company, selling everything from laptops, cameras, and TVs to video games and movies to accessories. By finding out more in-depth information such as what type of movies someone is interested in, you gain the ability to send them more offers and materials centered around items they are more likely to purchase based on their interests. This will help to keep people coming back to your website to make repeat purchases.

Post-Facebook: Turn Contacts into Customers

Perfect Your Contact Nurturing

You have people in all stages of the marketing funnel going to your website and downloading offers, but how do you actually turn them into customers? It’s all about properly nurturing your contacts. It’s time to take the data you’ve collected about your them through forms, analyze it, and put it to good use.

This means knowing exactly what your contacts want whether they are at the top, middle, or bottom of your funnel. Take this information to generate the most effective content for each group and deliver it in an effective and efficient way. You can do this by setting up workflows of customized emails -- allowing you to easily keep track of each contact-- while carefully maneuvering them from one step of the marketing funnel to the next. The following pages will cover various ways to divide and track your audience so you can determine and provide exactly what they’re looking for.

Automated Workflows

Set up workflows that will send automated emails when someone completes a form or when a contact is added to a smart list. This is a reliable way to make sure you’re following up with every quality contact that is coming in. For example, when someone signs up to get a deal on a particular item you could send them a follow-up email that includes more information or product suggestions that relate to what they just downloaded.

Setting Up Workflows

Customize each step in your workflow to fit the needs of the contacts in your list. Do this not only by personalizing offers depending on the type of contact (this is where your dynamic will start to come into play), but also the number and frequency of emails you send. For example, you could create different workflows for contacts that converted on different offers. Then provide different follow-ups for each group, giving them the most targeted and relevant information.

Segmenting Your Workflows

Want to get the most from all your CTAs, landing pages, and forms? Segment your automated workflows in order to personalize emails to each of your segments. Do this by adding people with different traits to different smart lists and triggering workflows for each list. This way you’re creating more targeted follow-ups than you would by reaching all prospects from Facebook in one shot. Here are some different ways you can break down your workflows to make your emails more relevant to your contacts.

Study Your Analytics

After working to keep up your Facebook posts, create eye-catching CTAs, publish sleek landing pages, and segment your contacts, you need to make sure everything you’re doing is working to generate more customers. By using the a marketing analytics tool, such as HubSpot Sources, you’ll be able to easily quantify your results. This way you can see which CTAs and landing pages are producing the best results, and which ones are falling short. This will allow you to alter your posts and offers in order to get the most effective results. As a marketer, analytics will also help you determine your ROI and prove that Facebook is having a positive impact on your business.

By staying up-to-date on your page performance, you can track each action a Facebook fan takes, and how many are actually turning into contacts and customers.

Using this data, you can better optimise your CTAs and landing pages to meet your goals. Find trends from your most successful offers and include similar tactics in future campaigns.

One way to check your analytics is by using the HubSpot social media tool. Easily track how many people clicked on each post and how many of those prospects turned into contacts and then customers. You can delve more into your fans reactions by clicking on a specific post to see all interactions that have occurred. Use this data to perform a sentiment analysis on any post and get a clear understanding of how various posts resonated with users.

Be sure you break down your visits, contacts, and customer analytics to see which campaigns benefited you most. This is a great way to understand how your overall Facebook presence is contributing to new customers. You can also examine conversion rates (visits to contacts and contacts to customers) you’ve created to identify trends and patterns amongst your target audience. Discover not only how people got to your website, but also which sources are generating the most customers.

A/B (Split) Testing

Another way to gather and use marketing metrics is by testing different versions of your Facebook posts, CTAs, and landing pages using A/B (Split) Testing. With this method you can change variables in order to determine specific characteristics that make offers perform better or worse. Use differentiating tracking tokens so you can easily see the results of your A/B test. Use the results to determine what is most effective with your particular audience.

Here are some variables to test:

• Headline
• Action words
• Image
• Time of Day
• Audience (e.g. target the director of marketing vs. the CMO)

Closing The Loop On Your Facebook Marketing

Now think back to the beginning of this book. Do you remember the importance of increasing your LTV:CAC? You can analyze various metrics from your marketing efforts to determine the average LTV:CAC for a customer you acquire through Facebook. The formulas below can be used to calculate your ratio and determine how much value you’re getting out of each customer. Note that while there are more accurate and complex methods to calculate LTV, the formula below is sufficient for most companies.

ROI: Are You Getting the Most Out of Your Time and Money?

You’ve put both your time and money into planning, executing, and analyzing the perfect Facebook strategy, but is it really worth it? Whether looking at paid or organic Facebook posts, you need to determine what your ROI is in order to know how much you’re gaining in comparison to the other media outlets you’re using.

To calculate your ROI, simply compare the cost of your efforts on Facebook (whether that’s media spend or employee salaries) vs. the revenue that was brought in directly from Facebook. Create different tracking urls that include the label “Facebook” for each offer, so you know exactly how many people clicked on each offer directly from Facebook. Having a tracking and analytics platform in place is vital so that you can know exactly how much revenue is being generated from Facebook.

Once you have a clear understanding of your success or struggles on Facebook, you’ll be in a much better position to either scale the channel or rethink your strategy. Without proper tracking, however, you’ll never be 100% sure whether the resources you’re dedicating to Facebook are worth it or not.

Conclusion.

After reading this ebook, you should be confident in your understanding of some of the best practices for using Facebook to not only generate new contacts, but to also close sales. When used effectively, Facebook is a great platform for increasing your ROI and helping your eCommerce company grow to its fullest potential. It takes some time and testing to get things perfect, so keep trying even if you don’t immediately see the results you want. Make adjustments until you determine the perfect formula for your business. Go put it to the test!