How We Doubled Our Money In 5 Days With Facebook Retargeting

How To Retarget With Facebook.

Here’s The Problem…

Those of you who have been following our greater body of work know about SamCart. SamCart is a shopping cart software that my team and I have been using and developing for about a year now.

Well, we had a problem. SamCart has been in a closed Beta for a while, and our development team has been tirelessly working to get everything ready for it’s full release (coming in just a few weeks actually).

The problem was, we were not bringing in many new customers. And as is the nature of any software, a small number of Beta users were deciding SamCart wasn’t right for them at the moment, and leaving until the full version is released.

So our monthly revenue from SamCart’s paid Beta Program was slowly dipping, we had spots available in the Beta program for more customers, and we weren’t sure how to fill them back up…

As digital marketers this is always an exciting time because we can start trying to figure out the best and cheapest way to bring excited new users into SamCart.

The Solution: Facebook Retargeting

Our first push to fill up the empty spots in SamCart came in the form of a retargeting campaign through Facebook Ads.

If you’re going to use Facebook Retargeting, you will need to create at least one Custom Audience to target your ads towards. We used a few different custom audiences. There are a bunch of different ways to create custom audiences, so we won’t cover that in a ton of detail here in this post.

But here are the exact ways we decided to make our custom audiences for these campaigns…

  • Audience #1: The complete list of subscribers on SamCart’s waiting list
  • Audience #2: All visitors that have viewed SamCart’s homepage
  • Audience #3: The complete list of current SamCart customers

It should be said that Audience #2 was not made specifically for this campaign. This audience is one that we setup a while ago, and has just slowly accumulated more and more people as SamCart.com gets more visitors.

If you don’t have this setup yet, I strongly recommend setting up a custom audience of people who have visited your website. It makes for a great group to target with Facebook Ads, and can be a really cheap source of new customers, but we’ll get to that in a second…

We should also be clear that Audience #3 was actually excluded from these ads. You never want to show your ads to people who have already bought your product, so we ensured all current customers were excluded.

We felt that this combination os these three specific audiences gave us the best chance of putting our ads in front of people who were already familiar with SamCart, and were the most ready to buy of anyone we could find. Anytime your audience already knows who you are, convincing them to listen to you is way, way, way easier.

The ad lets our past visitors know that we're still here, and we're better than ever.

The ad lets our past visitors know that we’re still here, and we’re better than ever.

So we wrote up a simple Facebook Ad (pictured on the right), letting this audience know what was going on behind the scenes at SamCart [Giving Good Content] and giving them a shot to sneak into the Beta program if they’d like to [Opportunity to Purchase].

This ad was shown to the custom audiences we made, and the results were pretty awesome. Over the course of 5 days, we blew our expectations out of the water, and with a VERY limited budget.

Keep reading below to see the exact numbers, and get a quick guide on how you can do the same thing.

The Outcome: More Customers

As we mentioned, this test was run over just a quick 5 day period, targeting our SamCart mailing list and also any traffic to our website.

At the end of the day, here’s what happened…

The Results

Impressions: 3,944

Spent: $251.15

Cost Per Click: $1.28

New Signups: 8

Cost Per Signup: $31.39

What This Means For You…

This mini-promotion spent about $250, gained 8 new paying customers, and brought in $632.00 in recurring monthly revenue. Not a bad return on investment.

Considering the product we are selling is a $79.00 monthly subscription, getting signups for only $31.39 is profitable from day one. And the potential profits from this campaign will just keep looking better and better each month. 

Because we were retargeting a tightly focused, very interested audience, we were able to get keep our advertising costs low, and achieve an extremely high conversion rate. 

Here’s How To Get Started…

If you’re ready to test out Facebook Ads for your business, even if you only have $10 or $20 to spend, click here. We made a brand new tutorial about how to use the new ‘lead ads’ on Facebook, which let you build your list cheaper than ever. 

Plus, after you opt-in, we’ll send you a bunch of awesome retargeting tips and tricks that work best with small budgets.

Let us know below if you’ve had any big retargeting wins this year, and what have you done to capitalize on them!

About The Author

Brian Moran

Brian started Get 10,000 Fans back in November 2010 after figuring out how powerful facebook marketing could be for his baseball training website, trainbaseball.com. Brian focusses on helping entrepreneurs and business owners how to attract news leads using facebook.