AfterCOVID eComm: 5 Ways to Add Empathy to your Paid Social Strategy

COVID-19 has, without doubt, made an impact on e-commerce over the past months.

Right now, in some areas, social distancing restrictions are loosening. But don’t expect consumers will rush back to stores just yet. Researchers believe consumers will still be focusing on staying safe and will shop-from-home well after things get back to “new normal”.

Knowing this, brands should really update their 2020 eComm strategies to capture the increase in online spending coming over the next two quarters.

A key theme emerging for e-commerce brands is consumer “empathy”. Is the brand showing empathy or being human during this time. In fact, how do you align your brand communication strategy to show empathy for what people are feeling these days while also staying relevant and engaging?

Apart from seeking empathy, customers are also looking for new and personalized messages in the post COVID world. Brands need to segment, target, and interact with customers in an entirely new way to achieve this.

Today, we are sharing with you five plug&play playbooks you can use to maintain growth in 2020 on paid social. Feel free to jump around and explore the 5 ways to ramp up your revenue on Facebook and Instagram.

Create video ads for a large number of products and discover warm audiences

When you target a broad audience at the top of the funnel, you’re targeting various types of users. Offer different reasons to buy the same product. That way, you will unlock the buying potential of these pools.

People have various reasons for buying, and that’s fine. By leveraging different points you will recognize WHAT works for WHO.

Explore WHAT works for WHO with automated Google Analytics category bestseller ads

Expect lower CPM, warm audiences from video views, and winning messages.

Typically, good video content is expensive to produce. It’s priced per final video. Sometimes the campaign based on presenting products through various videos can cost higher than the actual media cost.

If that’s the case, use dynamic creative to significantly cut production costs and automate campaign management.

Use motivators to address low margin products

Shipping costs went up dramatically during COVID19. This affected sales volumes. How do you get rid of low margin products and stay profitable?

Address new motivators and get a positive ROI for low margin products. Offer free shipping for orders over $XX price.

Use free shipping as a motivator to get a positive ROI for low margin products

What you can do here is to group products you want to get rid of in a live catalog and address free shipping in ad creative. When a low margin product is sold out, an Ad for that specific product will stop.

When we talk about DPA retargeting, add a custom label for free shipping products. Enhance Ad with special free shipping design and uplift CTR.

By automating ads for low margin products, you will increase sales by 28% and maintain a positive ROI.

Convert visitors with more engaging retargeting

E-commerce marketers can agree that pound for pound, Facebook DPAs give you the most bang for your buck and are super powerful.

Unfortunately, hitting the audience with the same ad over and over again creates ad fatigue so your ROAS will drop. If you retarget visitors soon after they engage with a product, you should really engage them with a personalized, tailored, and eye-catching offer.

For example, you can add discounts as a dynamic creative overlay on recently engaged products. Using product sets, Watch a porter and Paprcuts have run ads that target users who recently viewed products, offering a special limited discount just for them – in a visually enticing format.

Offer special limited discount label, before after price at bottom of the funnel

By using custom design in Ad templates, invite users to claim an exclusive offer and lower CPA 2.5X than average.

Create a sense of urgency

Did COVID19 cause a situation where you have products for too long in stock?

These are a good fit for a clearance sale. How about clearing your inventory with a booster campaign? The booster campaign will help you target warm users with special offers.

Set up countdown timers or call to action cues for how long the promo will last. If you are already doing this on your LPs, that’s awesome. Why not carry over that logic into your ads?

Create a sense of urgency with countdown ads, display the remaining number of promotion days

By creating a sense of urgency, you will clear your stock and boost ROAS 12X with shorten time to activation. The key here is to add the urgency ticker to all your products that fall into that logic.

Test Creative Faster

The rest of the e-comm budgets in 2020 are going to be spent on performance-focused campaigns. If you’re spending high budgets on social, at a certain point, you’ll hit plateaus.

Your audience will start to saturate, and your metrics will fall as a result.

What’s the solution? Fast creative testing.

Testing at scale helps you to recognize the most important messages by hitting users with different motivators as:

• free shipping vs. fast shipping
• test percentage off vs. showing
• the old and new price

Find out WHAT works for WHO on a same product, within the entire product portfolio

Test and iterate different messaging across the product portfolio. Test through creative and Ad targeting. Find out WHAT works for WHO!

With creative testing, save costs for tons of creatives with different motivators. As a result, you will reduce ad fatigue 3X and save 20 design hours per week.

Remain competitive after COVID19

During the COVID19, our e-comm customers increased their ad spend by 46% on social. They focused their budgets on performance.

Are you ready to move to the performance side, eh?

If you fail to keep up to date with ad tech, you’re missing out on chances to ramp up your revenue on social. Getting involved with technology will help you to:

• save costs with automation
• scale creatives, not budgets

These changes might make or break your strategy for the rest of 2020. Create ads that speak directly to consumers, show empathy for the situation, and get noticed to stay competitive.

HUNGRY FOR MORE?

Many retail companies are trying to sell their products in different markets.

But, there’s a little problem with that.

Not all markets will react the same when seeing a campaign. There are important ethical and cultural differences we need to consider.

When personalizing your Facebook campaigns for different countries and cultures, the most basic and most effective thing you can do is create multi-language campaigns.

Grabbing attention using the native language of your audience yields better results and ensures your offer and message are well received.

Read how to create a scalable language localization system.