The popularity of dropshipping is undeniably growing.
More and more e-commerce businesses choose this supply management method because of lower startup expenses due to zero need in storing the products and low running costs.
As a result, today, around 27% of retailers have already adopted dropshipping.
With this growing success, you can also observe the growth in competition, as often several dropshippers sell goods from one supplier or wholesaler, and have to fight for customers.
And what’s the best way to get customer’s attention?
Of course, social media platforms.
Many dropshippers use Shopify or WooCommerce that allow them to connect their shops to social media and use social media platforms to redirect customers to their e-commerce websites.
One of the most popular social media platforms for this purpose is Facebook, which, besides redirecting customers to your online shop, is also a great platform for running ads. It is for this reason that we are going to explain in the following article how to Build an Effective Sales Funnel on Facebook.
How Well Does Facebook Work for Dropshipping?
You might think that using social media for your online business is, without a doubt, a great idea. You can reach more people and improve the visibility of your brand substantially.
In reality, however, there are many obstacles when it comes to building a sales funnel for a dropshipping business on Facebook.
Obstacle #1: There Are Limits
We are used to perceiving social media platforms as something limitless. In theory, you can reach any market and sell your products to any audience you’re interested in.
The reality is different.
On Facebook, you can use Facebook Marketplace and buy & sell groups to demonstrate your products. These services, however, are only available in less than 50 countries.
As a result, you only can sell to your local community as you become limited by your location.
Obstacle #2: You Need to Work with Your Niche
Just like with other marketing strategies, building an effective sales funnel on Facebook means that you have to determine and work with a niche audience.
Within your niche, you need to be aware of your competitors and the average price point for the products, similar to the ones that you’re selling.
Your Facebook sales funnel won’t work if you try and target every audience. Not everybody will be interested in buying, for instance, the replicas of movie memorabilia from The Lord of the Rings.
Obstacle #3: Budget
Not all dropshippers have a big budget to run ads on Facebook, which, by the way, can turn out to be very pricey.
So, the lack of budget can turn to be a significant obstacle in creating an effective sales Funnel on Facebook, which means that you will have to rely on other marketing approaches that work for this social media platform.
Obstacle #4: Facebook Ban
Many dropshippers are aware of the 2018 Facebook bans. This was an effort taken by the platform to eliminate online businesses that scammed Facebook users. Facebook also received a lot of complaints from the users about the poor quality of products that they received, forcing the platform to take drastic measures.
So, any online business that uses dropshipping supply management method can fall under the Facebook ban, either for advertising fake products or due to the poor quality of the content that these business posts on Facebook.
Avoiding Obstacles and Building an Effective Sales Funnel on Facebook
For sure, Facebook is not like Instagram or any other social media platform in terms of building a sales funnel for dropshipping businesses. As you can see, there are quite a few obstacles that can make this strategy fail.
However, there are also quite a few things you can do to avoid these obstacles and build a rather effective sales funnel on Facebook.
1. Audit Your Audience
As you know, every marketing strategy starts with studying the target audience. Building an effective sales funnel on Facebook is no different – you need to know your audience well to figure out how to draw their attention to your products.
Let us show you how to audit your audience on Facebook with the following example.
Let’s say, you’re selling T-shirts with prints from the TV show Parks and Recreation. You have a shop on Etsy, but want to use Facebook to build an additional sales funnel and advertise your products.
To audit your audience on Facebook before building a sales funnel, you should follow several important steps.
- Launch a company page
Your first step would be to create a page that would represent your business on Facebook.
This step is also essential if you want to avoid the Facebook ban, as your Facebook page will be the main medium for you to communicate with the platform representatives if any issues occur.
- Audit Facebook interest groups
After creating your Facebook page, research Facebook interest groups and fan pages, where the audience shares the passion for the theme of your products.
You can join these pages to see what kind of content their audiences like the most. “This is also a good way to save you money when running Facebook ads,” says Jeffrey Phoeler, a marketing strategist at PickWriters. As you get general insights about what kind of content the audience in these groups likes, it will help you choose what kind of ads to run on Facebook to create an effective sales funnel.
- Analyze social traffic to determine your audience
To further study your audience and its preferences, try making a post in some of the groups you’ve joined to see how people perceive such posts and your product in general. Create posts that contain backlinks, which will help you track the activity and traffic.
After making a post about Parks and Recreation themes products in several of these groups, within a couple of weeks, we observed a noticeable increase in traffic.
Apart from that, a close analysis of post activity showed a growing interest in the product and the Facebook page:
Now, you need to work on narrowing down your audience by grouping it into cold, warm, and hot.
- Cold audience – people who have never visited your website. You don’t receive any social data from them and don’t know their demographics. You can still, however, advertise your products to them, but only based on one interest they share with warm and hot audience groups.
So, if you sell Parks and Recreation T-shirts, you can advertise your products to your cold audience under ‘TV show merch’ or ‘Merch from Movies and TV shows’ categories.
- Warm audience – these people haven’t visited your shop but are familiar with your product through different media.
For instance, they might have seen your post in Parks and Recreation interest groups, clicked to read your post, or watches your video.
- Hot audience – these are the people who’ve visited your online shop and might have even purchased your product before. This is the most engaged audience group, who often receive notifications from you about product updates.
With this information gathered, you can continue building an effective sales funnel on Facebook for your dropshipping business.
2. Audit Content Options
Now, as you’ve done audience audit and grouped it into cold, warm, and hot, it’s time to discuss content options for your Facebook ads.
There are several types of funnels on Facebook to choose from:
- Video ads: work great for the products that require additional explanation or demonstration. For dropshippers that sell merch, like the one mentioned in the examples above, videos can be used for Facebook ads that demonstrate new product collections.
- Image ads: this option is a staple for dropshippers who sell products like clothes, shoes, accessories, etc. Such content is self-explanatory, but the quality of the image impacts the perception of the ad, as such products require thorough and detailed demonstration.
- Messenger ads: this funnel launches an instant conversation between a dropshipper and a customer. This option, however, works well in a limited number of cases.
For instance, it may work for your warm audience group, where a person was about to buy your product but had questions about it, so left the cart abandoned. With Messenger ads, you can target this audience and invite them in the direct interaction with you, so they can resolve the issue they previously had.
Other Facebook alternatives for dropshippers also allow video and image funnels, however, with Messenger funnel also gives dropshippers an option to re-engage dormant segments of the audience. As a result, Facebook allows dropshipping businesses to build a sales funnel that effectively targets different audience groups.
3. Create the Funnel
As a result, based on the analysis of the audience and content audit, you can now choose your funnel.
When creating the funnel, you can customize your audience and make the ad target, for instance, the warm audience, who’ve only watched 25% of your video or viewed your product somewhere.
For your hot audience group, you can go with the Facebook funnel built on image ads. This is a great option for dropshippers to notify regular customers about product updates and new available merch.
How do you create an effective sales funnel on Facebook that would target the cold audience group?
You can target them through their mutual friends, who are already familiar with your product or buy the product from your dropshipping business regularly.
How do you allocate your budget to build an effective sales funnel on Facebook?
Dropshipping e-commerce startups, who only start advertising the products on Facebook, can start spending a bulk of their budget on ads targeting cold audiences. By doing so, you’re sort of testing the waters to see what will work for you.
As you move on and build your warm audience, you can make changes to your sales funnel. As a result, the nature of your Facebook ads as well, as you will start targeting the audience that is already familiar with your product.
Test different timeframes to see what works for each audience group, which doesn’t have to be too long if you want to save money. Your focus should primarily be on what works in terms of traffic and engagement.
Over to You
Dropshipping businesses can draw a lot of benefits from Facebook in terms of building an effective sales funnel. The only thing that matters is that you should do it consistently.
Audit and segment your audience, study their content preferences and work on building the funnel that corresponds to the level of the audience’s engagement.
Don’t forget that, in addition to studying your audience, you have to make sure that you find a reliable supplier. Someone who can source your products and ship them fast to your customers.
Yakkyofy is the only software on the market that can do this and much more! With us, you can completely automate your shop and find your products within a handful of minutes, selected for you from the best Chinese suppliers. In just a few clicks, you can automate your whole dropshipping business, from finding your products to fulfilling your orders.
What are you waiting for?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Donald Fomby is a communications professional with more than five years of writing experience. Donald is a content specialist at BestWritersOnline and is proud of an uncanny ability to explain the most complex subject in simple terms.