Are you constantly searching for fresh approaches to boost your business’s conversions? Absolutely!

You’re likely always looking for innovative ways to drive conversions. Successfully marketing involves cultivating relationships gradually, and sales funnels are instrumental in this process. This guide presents a five-step plan for crafting a conversion-focused Facebook sales funnel. This will allow you to foster stronger connections with potential customers and achieve improved results.

1. Align Your Campaigns with Your Target Audiences

People primarily use Facebook to browse, share content, and connect with friends and family, not necessarily to shop. Our goal as advertisers and business owners is to generate a high volume of conversions swiftly. However, this isn’t always realistic, especially when engaging with colder audiences who are unfamiliar with your brand. We need to begin with an introduction and gradually nurture these leads through the sales funnel.

Start by segmenting your audiences into cold, warm, and hot categories. Cold audiences, being unfamiliar with your brand and having no prior interactions, demonstrate low buying intent. Building familiarity and trust is crucial. With increased touchpoints, these users warm up, progressing through your sales funnel towards conversion.

Facebook provides a helpful visualization of this funnel, categorizing campaign objectives within Ads Manager:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Conversion

These campaign objective segments help determine your audience’s position in the sales funnel and the most suitable campaign type based on objectives and costs.

Testing conversion-focused campaigns with cold audiences is discouraged due to their high cost and low conversion likelihood. Awareness campaigns are the most budget-friendly. Costs generally increase as you progress up the list, reflecting the prospect’s value and intent.

2. Re-evaluate Conversion Campaigns

Beyond their higher cost, there’s an algorithmic reason to avoid initiating campaigns with conversion campaigns.

When selecting a campaign objective, opt for an easily achievable one to satisfy Facebook’s algorithm. Provide the system with ample data for optimization and success. Facebook recommends securing 50 goal completions per campaign weekly for optimal results. While previously set at 50 goal completions per ad set weekly, the shift to Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) necessitates achieving this at the campaign level.

Meeting this goal completion target enables the system to optimize more efficiently with more data, rewarding you with lower costs. Conversely, targeting a cold audience with a conversion campaign without hitting 50 conversions weekly leads to inflated expenses. Facebook struggles to identify the ideal audience for your ads, hindering conversion maximization. In such scenarios, begin with awareness or traffic campaigns for colder audiences and gradually move them down the funnel.

3. Conduct a Content Audit

What content do you currently possess, and what’s needed to populate your funnel? Analyze your existing content to determine what resonates with different audience segments. For colder audiences, utilize or create introductory content suitable for awareness campaigns. Brief brand story videos have proven effective for this purpose.

As users warm up, test traffic campaigns directing them to your website. This could involve directing them to your blog for educational and engaging content or to a lead-generating landing page featuring valuable resources like ebook downloads. Guiding users to your site early on enables Facebook Pixel tagging, expanding your remarketing campaign pool. Consider incorporating lead generation or shopping opportunities here, as driving conversions through traffic campaigns can be surprisingly effective and cost-efficient.

Once your audience is considered hot, make the final push for conversion. Experiment with existing ads or create new content highlighting unexplored product or service features, authentic customer testimonials, or special offers as incentives. Even if sales aren’t your primary focus, remember that you don’t necessarily have to slash prices, although it can be beneficial. Offering free shipping, if feasible, can be remarkably persuasive.

In the current online shopping landscape, consumers often anticipate free shipping, thanks to Amazon’s influence. Offering free shipping, whenever possible, has consistently shown positive impacts on conversion rates, especially for ecommerce businesses.

Content that emphasizes urgency or limited availability also encourages prompt purchases.

Video content in remarketing campaigns can be highly effective in securing conversions. They leave less room for interpretation about your offerings than static images, managing prospects’ expectations by clearly demonstrating how your products or services function.

4. Explore Alternative Cost-Effective Strategies

Having revisited your conversion campaigns and prepared your content, let’s explore alternative strategies. Here are supplementary campaign types to save money while building relationships.

Traffic Campaigns

As previously mentioned, traffic campaigns are often favored over conversion campaigns for smaller accounts. They can achieve the 50 events per week benchmark at a lower cost. Since conversion campaigns aren’t universally effective, identify what aligns best with your budget and goals.

In these campaigns, warm audiences are directed to product landing pages with a clear call to action to make a purchase. Optimize for landing page views instead of link clicks. This indicates a higher likelihood of users engaging with your content, boosting conversion chances.

Add to Cart

Struggling to drive purchase conversions? Try optimizing your conversion campaign for “add to cart” instead. This often provides Facebook with more data for optimization, ultimately increasing conversions.

Messenger Ads

Although generating lower volume for us, the costs were justifiable for acquiring lead conversions. For Indow Windows, we successfully drove conversions through Messenger ads at a significantly lower cost per lead than website visitor targeting methods.

These ads prompt users to send a message, offering three pre-set responses: a free quote for lead acquisition, an FAQ page link, or direct contact information. By placing the desired call to action first, users naturally gravitated towards it, leading to conversions.

5. Implement Cross-Funnel Calls to Action

Your calls to action should evolve across the Facebook funnel stages. For top-of-funnel targeting, experiment with a “Learn More” button during the awareness phase with cold audiences.

As audiences warm up and progress down the funnel, test relevant calls to action aligned with your content and goals.

If your hot audience hasn’t converted yet, “Shop Now” often proves effective. They’ve had time to learn about you, possibly comparing products elsewhere. This is your chance to secure the conversion through a remarketing ad.

All current options are listed below:

Fuel Your Facebook Sales Funnel

Armed with the fundamentals of building and utilizing a Facebook sales funnel, start populating yours. Begin with colder but relevant audiences. Use cost-effective, objective-driven campaigns, engaging content, and suitable calls to action.

As audiences descend the funnel, adjust content and goals until you achieve your desired conversion rate. Remember, slow and steady often wins the race in social media advertising. Embrace the relationship-building aspect of Facebook and reap the rewards as you achieve higher conversions at lower costs!