Successfully running an e-commerce business in today’s date and age requires just as much skill and effort as running a brick-and-mortar business. And with the competition increasing day by day, especially from the bigger players in the market, you need every tool in your arsenal if you want to put your business on the map.
Having a multifaceted Facebook marketing and advertising strategy (along with a great product of course) might be your key to achieving success for your e-commerce company. What’s more is that Facebook ads for e-commerce are good for more than just driving traffic to your site, they can be used at any stage of your sales funnel.
That is why we’ve put together this article where we share with you the best strategies and examples to create Facebook ads for e-commerce businesses in 2023. And if you stick around till the end, we also show you just how you can create compelling e-commerce Facebook ads within minutes using InVideo’s ad maker.
Here are the strategies we will cover:
1. Focus on making video ads
2. Use thumb-stopping images for your still ads
3. Show social proof in your ads
4. Convey your brand’s key message
5. Design mobile-first ads
6. Run Giveaway Ads
7. Focus on retargeting campaigns
8. Use Dynamic Product Ads
9. Leverage Facebook’s Custom Audiences to your advantage
10. Use Interests and Lookalike Audiences to find new customers
11. Optimize your analytics with Facebook Pixel and Conversions API
12. Make your life easier with Facebook Automated Rules
13. BONUS: How to make a stunning e-commerce ad within minutes using InVideo
Let’s get started!
Strategy #1: Focus on making compelling video ads
The average engagement rate for content on Facebook is just 0.18%, but for video posts, it goes up to 0.26%. It’s clear that Facebook is prioritizing video content, and that means it would be most beneficial to focus on using videos while running Facebook ads for e-commerce businesses. Videos are more likely to make your audience feel connected with the content, which in turn will help them engage with your ad better.
This is a short ad for clothing brand Folk’s Spring 2022 collection – and spring is the message it’s trying to convey with the simple, dreamy cinematography of a man riding his cycle through the countryside. The music, too, adds the feel of a lazy spring afternoon. These elements really set the tone for the kind of feeling the brand wants to bring out in the customer.
It’s okay if you can’t create a high-quality video from scratch – you don’t need to. You can work on a simple yet effective idea that your customers will relate to and will draw them in to give you clicks and conversions. You’ll need to have an effective script and storyboard: if you articulate these two building blocks of your video well, the execution of your ad idea will be a lot smoother. After that, you’ll need to either film the shots or use stock footage that you can turn into a stunning video with minimal effort using InVideo’s Ad Maker!
Pro-Tip: Visually, short looping ads can be quite eye-catching. These video ads are short (under 15 seconds), so they don’t need to hold the customer’s attention for too long. Such videos are fun, consistently watchable, and they’ll make sure that the audience remembers your e-commerce brand. Here’s a template from InVideo that you can use to replicate such a catchy, looping video style in your own e-commerce Facebook ad. Check out this example below to learn more!
Pure Pet Food’s 5-second ad is a perfect example of how you can make a short ad that’s to the point and rewatchable. They begin with a great visual of their pet food and the tagline ‘Everything your dog needs in one tasty dish’. They have a straightforward CTA that says ‘Try today with 50% off’ – which prompts the viewer to at least check out such a compelling offer.
Strategy #2: Use thumb-stopping images for your still ads
If you are using still images in your Facebook ads for e-commerce, you need to make sure that they are eye-catching and super high-quality. You want to wow your audience and display your product or service in the most attractive manner possible. While videos help personalize your brand, images can help you capture attention by putting your best foot forward.
Laneige is a Korean beauty brand whose aesthetics have really caught the cosmetic industry’s eye – and this Facebook ad example explains why! With this bright and peppy ad displaying some of their lip products, Laneige really makes sure that they use a simple yet stunning image that reels customers into taking action.
Incorporating pictures of people (especially happy people) is also important – you are, at the end of the day, trying to connect with a human at the other end of the screen. Apart from that, you need to make sure that your pictures are bright and full of color if you want them to be eye-catching. You can go for a minimalist look if that’s the tone of your brand, but remember that your ad should look sharp and clean instead of dull.
You can add text to your image, but a good thing to keep in mind would be to limit the text to just about 20% of your entire image space. Ensure that your image text engages your readers. It has to be concise, clear, and catchy. Here are two key things you need to do for that:
1) Use CTA words that trigger clicks: Using strong and powerful words creates a sense of urgency in your clients, which pushes them to act faster and provides a path with the least resistance to them. Some examples for this would be phrases like ‘limited time only’, ‘don’t miss out’, ‘last chance’, ‘offer expires’, and ‘one day only’.
2) Embed Facebook CTAs: Facebook lets you embed different calls to action into your ad that can directly link to your ad objective – whether it be to your website, a sign-up, download, or make a direct purchase. You need to choose the CTA that is relevant to your brand and the goal of your ad campaign.
A great example of an ad that includes both of these things is the luxury street footwear brand Flipped’s simple picture ad. The ad mentions ‘Limited stocks only’ and then offers a 22% off sale. They embed a CTA link to their e-commerce store with the phrase ‘Shop Now’. In doing this, Flipped optimized their ad to be extremely to the point – displaying only the most crucial information and creating both a sense of urgency and an incentive to buy during their sale.
Strategy #3: Show social proof in your ads
Social proof is everything when running Facebook ads for e-commerce. When you put up an ad that includes real-life customers talking about how they’ve benefitted from your product, it makes all the difference. First, it features real people – something that makes your ad more authentic and more attractive on Facebook. Second, since word of mouth is such an important strategy, hearing from other customers is crucial to making your audience trust your brand.
Testimonial and product review ads are an excellent way to convince a skeptical audience to consider buying your product or service. This is also the reason influencer advertising is so popular – people put their trust in the influencers that they follow, and they are likely to buy something that is recommended to them by someone they trust. But you don’t need a famous person to endorse your product – just having your best customers talk about how your product has made a difference to them is more than enough.
Glossier has taken the social proof strategy to another level by getting a credible dermatologist and skincare expert to review their After Baume product. They display the product and the testimonial with great camera angles that show the product in use as well as the happy customer. Watching a trusted expert review a product and express their satisfaction with it is a great way to make your e-commerce brand seem reliable.
Creating testimonial ads isn’t difficult either. If you want to create something like Glossier’s ad, you will need some of your customers to provide you with a video review of your product. You can then turn that into a compelling video ad using a template like this one from InVideo. Alternatively, if your customers aren’t comfortable in front of the camera and can only give in written reviews, you can use this template to turn those into a great testimonial ad.
Strategy #4: Convey your brand’s key message
Facebook is a social networking platform before it’s an advertising platform. That means that you need to lean into the ‘people marketing’ aspect of Facebook and appeal to customers with your brand’s story. As an e-commerce brand, you don’t have a retail store around which you can build a community. To leverage your brand’s key message, you need to have an ad that tells a good story that people can connect with. Adding a personal touch to your advertising is crucial in building relationships with future customers.
One way to do this is through a good video ad that tells your brand’s story or relays the main objective of your business. A good example among Facebook e-commerce ads is Nike’s ‘Greatness is never done’ campaign. As a high-profile sports brand, Nike has always created ad campaigns that inspire their audience to buy their products on their own journey to greatness. This is a simple ad with a message that sparks curiosity, and it ends with a CTA that prompts viewers to download and check out the Nike App.
Since you’re able to employ your customer base’s demographic information through Facebook, you’ll get a good idea of the kind of person your average customer is. Use that to your advantage and create an ad that shows off the kind of persona someone can achieve by being your customer. By showing the impact that using your product can have on your audience’s daily life, you’re making your audiences interested in a lifestyle and a personality they want, not just your product.
This vlog-style Glossier ad is a great example of this point. The ad is emotional and evokes a certain kind of ‘dreamy’ lifestyle, and it also tells the story of the kind of customer who benefits from their product. It also manages to showcase the product perfectly while displaying the customer’s story. They display their Eau de parfum, Glossier You, in use, and show a loving relationship with the ad campaign ‘The Better With You Duo’.
Another way to create a story-based ad is to show the different use cases or benefits of your product or service. This way, you’ll be able to target and catch the interest of people with a variety of problems. Solving your customer’s problems is the best way for them to be convinced that they should purchase your product: it creates a need for them that can be fulfilled by your product or service.
Dance sneaker brand Fuego’s cool video ad is the perfect example of this. Their ad is 30 seconds long, with attention-grabbing visuals and a catchy beat. They manage to showcase their product really well and also show the different ways that it can be used for both dancing and everyday life.
Pro-Tip: For story-based ads, you will need to pay a lot of attention to your scripting and storyboarding in order to be able to convey your message exactly as you want. Once that part is taken care of, you can go ahead and use InVideo’s Ad Maker along with the huge collection of stock assets to create a stunning ad that helps you get better conversions. Here’s a template you can use to make a similar, simple video ad that conveys your brand message.
Strategy #5: Design mobile-first ads
During a recent social experiment, AdEspresso found that mobile ad placements outperformed desktop by over 45%. This means that the best and most successful Facebook ads for e-commerce are designed with mobile use in mind. This means you need to use vertical images and videos that are formatted for mobile. You should also put important information at the beginning of your ad copy since text cuts off earlier on mobile. Another thing to keep in mind is to optimize your landing pages for the mobile experience too.
Here’s an example of a mobile-friendly ad by H&M. Its aspect ratio is vertical, and it’s a 6-second video full of dance and bright colors – something that makes the ad eye-catching to viewers who are just scrolling through Facebook on their phone. Since H&M is promoting their new color pop-inspired activewear collection, they add the tagline ‘Get shaped by the beat’ – a line that fits both with the dance and the clothing line.
The last thing you can do is use clips shot on your mobile instead of using a professional camera – this makes your video look more authentic and blend in with the Facebook feed. What’s more, it also helps you to cut down on the high cost of professionally shot videos. These work best for Stories Ads, and they resemble user-generated content very strongly, increasing their level of personalization.
To make a simple vlog-style product ad like this one with minimal effort, you can check out InVideo’s template Library which has 5000+ pre-made templates to help you make stunning professional videos with ease. Here’s a template that we think would work really well for this style of ad!
Strategy #6: Run Giveaway Ads
One of the best ways to get an ad to perform well is to make sure that your audience engages with it heavily. And giveaways are an excellent way to promote your brand more. They help you to grow your network, boost your brand exposure, build an audience, drive site traffic, and strengthen your brand’s relationship with your customers. You must choose giveaway prizes that are relevant to reel in your community and target audiences. Additionally, you’ll need to set your objectives for the giveaway – this will enable you to decide what action you need your audience to take to enter the giveaway.
A great example of a giveaway ad is the luxury lingerie brand Sevigne ad. They are to the point in their ad copy as well as in their accompanying creative, which has the word ‘WIN’ in big bold letters – something that’s bound to get viewers interested.
And if you want to create a similar simple animated ad for your product, InVideo’s got just the template for you. All you need to do is go over to the InVideo Ad Maker and start editing!
You can do even more to raise engagement when running Facebook ads for e-commerce. Things like building referral programs, promoting your own content more, hosting contests and giveaways for your audience, and having offers for your products or services are all good tactics for this.
Strategy #7: Focus on abandoned carts and retargeting campaigns
Often, customers abandon their carts before checkout and purchase. The average cart abandonment rate across all e-commerce industries is 69.89%. That means that your product interested someone enough to visit your website, browse, and make a choice, but not purchase it. There can be lots of reasons why someone abandoned their cart before making a purchase, and most of them may be subjective to the consumers’ personal lives. Regardless, that’s a huge loss for e-commerce brands.
In that case, you can re-target these customers via Facebook ads in a way that they come back and complete the purchase. A great strategy to do this is by re-targeting them with an ad that announces a discount on their in-cart items, making it more tempting for them to buy.
Here’s an example of an ad by Camera Ready Cosmetics offering a small discount with the caption ‘You deserve this’ – indicating that the customer is already familiar with the brand. The ad provides a promo code for the customer to use the discount. The image of the ad itself focuses on two important points: the 15% discount, and the fact that it’s only for two days. They display some of their best-selling products and attach a CTA that says ‘Shop Now’. Such a strategy is likely to give interested customers the final push into making a purchase and getting you that conversion!
Even if you can’t offer a discount, retargeting customers with different Facebook ads for e-commerce is likely to bring them back to your website to make a purchase. Website visitors who are retargeted are 43% more likely to convert!
Strategy #8: Use Dynamic Product Ads
Dynamic Product Ads are another feature that Facebook offers that you can use in your retargeting campaigns. Using this feature shows tailored ads to customers that have visited your site. Dynamic ads enable you to automatically promote your entire product catalog across Facebook without having to create thousands of individual ads. For e-commerce brands that have a large inventory of products, this is an incredibly helpful and efficient way to target many different customers who are all shopping for products completely different from each other.
All you have to do for this is upload your product catalog and relevant product information to Facebook Business Manager, and use Custom Audiences and modify it to report on the buying behavior of your customers. Then you will be able to create a dynamic template to display Facebook ads for e-commerce to customers who have viewed specific products on your website already.
Here’s an example of a multi-product ad – this is the format in which dynamic ads are displayed too. If your customer looking at any shoes from Borjan Shoes on their website, they would show up again on Facebook like this to prompt the buyer to go back and buy them.
To understand how you can use Facebook ads to your advantage, check out this comprehensive guide.
Strategy #9: Leverage Facebook’s Custom Audiences to your advantage
Facebook Custom Audiences is an ad targeting option for e-commerce Facebook ads that allows you to find your existing audiences among people who are on Facebook. This is essentially a list of people who already know about or have engaged with your business in some way or the other. Retaining customers and getting repeat customers is the most efficient way to generate consistent sales, and for an e-commerce brand, Facebook’s Custom Audiences acts as the bridge to connect with those customers.
You can create different types of Custom Audience Lists on Facebook through your website data, app activity data, using your customer lists and databases, and through Facebook’s engagement insights. Doing this will help you to target customers that have an interest in your brand and have already viewed your website, products, or services.
Something you can do is target your Custom Audience lists with Facebook ads for e-commerce that offer discounts – since they already know about your brand and product, they already have interest in what you are offering. An additional discount can become an incentive that closes the deal without too much pushy marketing, instead of letting an interested customer go.
Here’s an example of the children’s clothing brand Engine targeting parents with young children with the tagline ‘Shop for your tiny ones from Engine’, followed by a flat discount of 50% and 70% to increase the incentive for parents to shop. The ad ends with the line ‘start their fashion journey with a bang’ – appealing to parents who are looking for nice clothes for their children.
Strategy #10: Use Interests and Lookalike Audiences to find new customers
You can do two different things to find new customers that would be as interested in your brand as your already existing customer base. The crux of this is that you’ll need to target new people who share similar characteristics to your existing customers. If you target an audience that is not fully interested in your business, they won’t be very receptive to your e-commerce Facebook advertising, no matter how good the content of your ad is.
Using the Interests field on Facebook, you can make sure that you are targeting the niche that is relevant for your business. Make sure to select a narrow interest, and nothing too broad. With multiple different specific, niche interests, you’ll be able to make sure you target customers that are invested followers of what you are trying to sell.
The Lookalike Audiences feature that Facebook offers is even better: they use their data and the algorithm to find new people who have qualities and interests similar to your existing customers. One tip that Facebook offers is to make your audience from only your best customers instead of your entire customer pool – you may get better results doing this, especially when efficient digital marketing is key for running Facebook ads for e-commerce.
Strategy #11: Optimize your analytics with Facebook Pixel and Conversions API
Facebook offers many tools for e-commerce brands to optimize their analytics. Two of them are Facebook Pixel and Conversions API.
The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code for your website that helps Facebook gather data on the customer activity on your website. Through Facebook Pixel, you can reach customers who take any kind of action after seeing your ad on Facebook. Over time, the algorithm gets better at delivering your ads to people who are more likely to take certain actions.
The Conversions API is a similar tool, but it’s made to take your brand’s marketing data into account along with Facebook’s systems that help optimize ad targeting and decrease costs per action across Meta technologies.
Both of these tools require some setup and specialization but optimizing your analytics is the best way to make sure your ad runs efficiently. The key with Facebook ads for e-commerce is to give your ads enough time to start learning and automating a lot of the market analysis for you.
For a better understanding of how to use Facebook Pixel and master retargeting, check out this comprehensive video:
Strategy #12: Make your life easier with Facebook Automated Rules
Following the previous strategy, Facebook’s Automated Rules is another advanced tool you can use to let your ads essentially run efficiently by themselves. You need to create rules for your ads, but these can help you manage multiple ads at the same time. Through Automated Rules, Facebook automatically checks your campaigns and ads and updates or notifies you of any changes. This can cut down on the time you need to manage your ads.
You can create rules like automatically pausing underperforming Facebook ads for e-commerce, increasing the budget on well-performing ad sets, and decreasing your budget on poorly performing ads. Creating these rules takes a certain amount of time, but they can save you both time and money on the actual running of the ads. That being said, you still need to monitor the overall performance of your ads to make sure that they are meeting your marketing goals.
Here’s a video that explains this concept more in depth along with several other Facebook ads strategies that you might find useful for your e-commerce business:
Now that you know the different strategies that will help you create effective Facebook ads for your e-commerce business, it’s time to learn how to make an ad that will engage your audience and help you drive conversions. Keep reading for a bonus short tutorial that will teach you how to quickly and easily make professional-looking Instagram ads to level up your brand’s marketing strategy!
BONUS: How to make a stunning e-commerce ad within minutes using InVideo
For this tutorial on how to make a Facebook video ad, we’ll be using this template to make sample Instagram ads. InVideo’s free templates are fully customizable, so you can play around with and change every element of the video: photos, text, colors, and more. Here’s how to make your own Instagram ad in 6 easy steps!
Step 1: Open the ad maker and choose your template
Once you have opened InVideo’s Ad Maker page, you need to click on ‘Make a Video’. You’ll be asked to select an aspect ratio of your choice. Then, a blank video canvas will open up with template options that you can choose from.
Once you have found and previewed the template you are going to use, you need to click on the template and click ‘Use this template’. The template will then load onto your blank video canvas.
If you are not using a template, here’s a guide you can follow to edit your footage into videos on a blank canvas.
Step 2: Change the videos and images
Before you change the videos and images in the template, you’ll need to upload all your media. Do this by clicking on Uploads on the Left Panel, and then click Upload Media to add the files you need for your video.
Once your media is uploaded, simply drag and drop your media of choice into the pre-existing media on the canvas of the template. Click on the Replace option in the pop-up and your media has now been added to the template! You can do the same thing with the Video/Image tab on the left panel, which has lots of free stock videos and images for you to use! In this tutorial, we’ll be using a stock video for our sample Instagram ad.
Step 3: Change the text and logo
To edit the placeholder text in this template, simply click on the text box on the canvas and type in your own text. For more help, check out this tutorial to learn more about how to add and edit text on your video.
Then, to add your brand’s logo just click on the Upload Logo part of the video canvas, and it will redirect you directly to upload your logo into the video.
Keep repeating Steps 2 and 3 until you’ve changed the media, text, and logos on every scene of your Instagram ad template.
Step 4: Change the video color palette
You can change the color palette of the video by clicking on the Colors tab in the left menu panel. You can select from the given color palettes or make your own in the My Palettes section based on your brand color palette.
Once you click Apply, you can see that it changes on the template of your testimonial video. Make this change for every scene of your Instagram ad.
Step 5: Change the music or audio
If you want you can change the music on your template, begin by deleting the current track that comes with the template, and then add new music from InVideo’s stock library. To delete the video, hover over the audio track and on Edit, and then click on Delete.
To add the new audio file, simply go to Music to access InVideo’s free library of royalty-free music and sound effects! Select one that you’d like to add to your video and then just hover over the song of your choice and click on the + sign to add it to your video.
Step 6: Export and download or share your newly made customer testimonial video!
Once your Instagram ad seems complete, you can preview the entire video to check for any errors or edits. If everything’s okay, you can go to Download & Share on the top right corner of the screen and click Export. Your video will soon be ready for you to download!
After clicking on Export, your video will start to render. Once that’s done, you can just click on Download to save the video to your device or directly Share Video to your social media platforms from here! And with that, you’re all done!
Summing up
A great Facebook ad is all about connecting with your audience well – addressing their pain points and positioning your product or service as the solution. An effective ad will be one that grabs attention, showcase the utility of the product or service, and is remembered by the audience long after they’ve seen it.
This list of strategies we’ve shared should help you get closer to the goal of creating such ads. But remember, ads are not the only way to generate leads and grow your business. If you want to learn more about how you can use social media to level up your e-commerce brand, check out this comprehensive guide.
And if you prefer learning via videos, you definitely should check out our YouTube channel where we share daily video creation tips and tricks, the latest video trends and ideas, and help you make more money as a video creator.
Get started with video and start creating Ads right away!
This post was written by Yashvi and edited by Adete from Team InVideo
