If you’ve read anything about Facebook ads for e-commerce, you know that these two are the perfect combo to scale your business.

However, that’s easier said than done, and chances are you’ve already spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on Facebook but are nowhere near scaling.

But all that’s about to change.

In this article I’m going to show you how to reach thousands of targeted prospects and turn them into customers by using a simple two-step Facebook funnel that all successful e-commerce stores are using right now.

You’ll learn how:

• the two-step funnel works (theory),
• to set it up for your store (practical), and
• to troubleshoot and scale (practical).

How the two-step funnel works

This strategy is broken down into two parts that I call:

1. Awareness phase
2. Action phase

The awareness phase consists of reaching as many targeted prospects as possible on Facebook and showing them your product or service. At this phase the primary goal is to generate trust and a positive first reaction.

As you’re an unknown business, you need to create some sort of a relationship before customers are willing to hand over their hard-earned cash.

If they buy your product at step one, great! But that’s not the goal, and it should not be a metric you follow too closely.

The reason why e-commerce store owners struggle to run successful Facebook ads (or ads in general) is because on their first interaction with a new prospect, they pitch their product.

Consumers don’t like being sold to in this way, and with the amount of advertisers on Facebook, using the in-your-face approach on your first interaction will lead to negative ROI ads.

It’s like asking someone to marry you on the first date – it’s too fast and too weird. I’ll discuss exactly what you should serve them at this step later in the article.

The action phase is when we ask the prospect to make a decision. The decision can be to buy your product, visit your website, or hand over their email address in exchange for a lead magnet.

This is where you make your pitch, not before.

Step 1: Setting up your video campaign

Step 1 is all about getting as many eyes on your product or service as possible for as cheap as possible.

The more people you reach in the awareness phase, the more people that will take up your offer in the action phase.

Of all the Facebook objectives you can choose, video views will provide you with the highest reach for every $1 spent.

I’ve seen people use website clicks and page post engagements (PPE) in the past to some success, but to maximize your reach, video views is the way to go.

You can reach two to five times as many people with a video on Facebook than PPE or website clicks because the prospect, after consuming your video, stays on Facebook to consume more ads (it’s why Facebook makes it cheaper).

And that’s fine for us, because remember what I said earlier: we’re not too bothered about them buying the product right away; we want them to consume our content and leave with a positive impression about the brand or product.

You don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars on video creation, either. It just needs to be short and touch on any of the following points:

(Source)
Here’s an example from EasyRentCars who use a super-short video to reach their audience (click here to view video):

Their video most likely cost them under $40 to produce.

Here’s another example from L’Opera Italian Restaurant (you can view their video here):

Again, this video most likely cost under $40 to produce.

If you use Facebook, you’ll probably have videos like this all over your newsfeed – it’s because they work! Again, you don’t have to spend lots of money on videos; you can shoot one with a good cell phone and by simply touching on the sections shown in the table above.

While I like both videos above, I recommend you keep your videos between 12 and 25 seconds in length, total.

In step 2, which I talk about below, we will start to retarget people who viewed 75% or more of your video.

If a prospect makes it 75% into a 20-second video, they are a good candidate to be shown an offer, compared to someone who clicked away after just five seconds.

With shorter videos of between four and eight seconds you’re unable to segment and must show everyone your offer, which will compromise your relevance score and increase your costs in step 2.

After setting up your video views campaign and launching your ad, you’ll then need to create a custom audience around people who watched your video.

To do this, go to the Audiences section in your Ads Manager and click on Create Audience > Custom Audience.

From the list, select Engagement:

Next, you’ll be asked what type of custom audience you would like to create. As you’ll be wanting to retarget people who watched your video, select Video.

Facebook will give you the option to retarget anyone who has watched between three and ten seconds of your video or anyone who has watched 25%, 50%, 75%, or 95% or more of your video.

Personally, I like to go with 75% or more as I feel anyone who isn’t interested in what I’m selling will stop watching the video at around the 8-10 second mark.

You can retarget people who only watched 50% of your videos and see success, but I like to go with 75% or more as they are a higher-quality prospect and I’ll get a better ROI on my ads in step 2.

When choosing how long to keep this audience, between the 7-14-day window is fine. Anything longer than that and they will have forgotten about your product.

Give it a few days for your video to be served to your custom audience and the number of video views to build up and then go to step 2.

Step 2: Hitting them with the offer

After consuming your awesome low-budget video, the next step is to ask the prospect to make a decision. If your video did its job, the prospect is aware of your business and product and they are ready to make a decision.

It’s here where you should set up your second campaign. I suggest using any of the following:

• Conversions
• Website clicks
• Lead generation (if you want emails)

Only use the conversion objective if your Pixel has fired over 1000 conversions in the past and your e-commerce store receives at least 20 orders per day. If this is not the case, then use the website clicks objective.

Facebook cannot optimize for conversions if your store does not meet the criteria above.

Tailor your advert to be a follow-up message from your video. For example, if your video was selling printed t-shirts, make sure your offer contains an image of the t-shirt and tie it in with an offer or voucher code.

Make your offer clean and use a call to action.

Here’s an advert I don’t like from Lifestyle Juicery Thailand. I don’t like it as there is no call to action, there is a weak message, and there is no offer:

I like this advert from BetterHelp more as there’s a call to action (sign up) and their message is stronger:

Here’s another advert from FlySpiceJet who clearly state their offer with a call to action:

Always insert an offer in step 2  as you are targeting new prospects who are probably still unsure about your business.

By giving them an offer or voucher code, you lower the barrier for them to try your business.

Troubleshooting and scaling advice

The best thing about this two-step funnel is that it’s easy to set up, troubleshoot, and scale.

Here are a few tips to troubleshoot and scale when you create your own two-step funnel:

Troubleshooting – Keep a close eye on how many people get to 75% or more of your video. You can do this by going into the advert set section and choosing Video Engagement.

If very few people are making it past 50% of your video, then your video isn’t good enough or you’re targeting the wrong audience. You should aim to keep your relevance score above 6 and test two or three different thumbnails and text copies to see which performs best (use long and short copy).

The same applies for your offer: use a number of different copies and even test the offer objective, which is a new feature for website clicks and conversion campaigns.

Scaling tips – When using the video views objective, don’t narrow your audience down too much. Ideally, you want the audience size to be around 500k-1 million.

Don’t make the mistake of targeting 100k or less because you will not be able to scale your campaign. Within a week or two you’ll have reached your entire audience.

You can only scale this funnel at the top by showing your video to new markets or by increasing your budget.

If your funnel is working well, you can start targeting new audiences in new locations or try translating them for markets overseas.

You can also create similar videos for other products that you offer and then start retargeting people who watched one video to watch the other, and so on.

Your turn

This two-step funnel is the easiest way to reach thousands of targeted prospects on Facebook and turn them into customers.

There are dozens of stock video sites where you can buy videos for as little as $29 and use overlay text to promote your product or service if you cannot produce your own videos.

A few sites I like are:

• Big Stock Photo
• Shutterstock
• iStockPhoto

You will need to test your audience targeting and ad creatives to get this funnel to work. Don’t think it’s as simple as uploading a video and expecting people to hand over their money for your products.

This is the basic blueprint used by businesses of all sizes to reach audiences and turn prospects into customers.

The next time you see a sponsored video in your Facebook feed, watch it until the end and see what message it serves you next in that business’ funnel.

Are you using this two-step method to grow your store?