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Looking for new ways to drive more conversions for your business? Of course—always!

Keeping an eye out for new ways to drive conversions, probably.

To market effectively, it’s important to ease into relationships and build them over time, and sales funnels can help us do this. In this guide, I’m going to show you how to create a conversion-driven Facebook sales funnel in just five steps so that you can build better relationships with your prospects and start getting better results.

1. Match your campaigns to your audiences

People go to Facebook to peruse, share, and engage with their friends and family members— they are most likely not looking to shop. As advertisers and business owners, we want to drive high volumes of conversions quickly. That’s not always the obtainable reality, especially when it comes to targeting colder audiences. We have to start with an introductory point, then nurture these prospective customers by moving them down the funnel.

As you begin strategizing, break your audiences apart by classifying them as cold, warm, and hot. Cold audiences have low buying intent, as they may not be familiar with your brand and have not had any interactions with you yet. Familiarity and trust need to first be established. As you have more touch points with these users, they will become warmer as they move down your sales funnel towards conversion.

Facebook does a nice job visualizing the funnel for us by offering a breakout of three main groups of campaign objectives and their sub-groups in Ads Manager:

• Awareness

• Consideration

• Conversion

Use these campaign objective segments to help you assess where your audiences are in the sales funnel and what campaign type may be most appropriate in terms of objective and costs.

One reason we advise against testing conversion goal campaigns with cold audiences is that they are expensive and unlikely to convert. Awareness campaigns are the lowest cost—as you move down the list above, campaigns tend to get more expensive, given the value and intent of the prospect.

2. Rethink conversion campaigns

In addition to conversion campaigns being higher in cost, there is an algorithmic explanation as to why we typically advise against starting off with these campaigns to clients.

When selecting a campaign objective, choose one that you can easily accomplish in order to please Facebook’s algorithm. Provide the system with enough data to optimize and to find success with. One highly important factor that some aren’t aware of is that Facebook recommends that you acquire 50 goal completions per campaign per week for optimal campaign objective results. Before, it was set to 50 goal completions per ad set per week, but with the shift in account structure and enforcement of Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) coming this fall, this too, has changed to the campaign level.

If you are able to accomplish this goal completion amount, the system will then optimize more effectively since it has more data to work with and will also reward you with lower costs. For example, if you were to target a cold audience with a conversion campaign and you aren’t able to hit those 50 conversions per week, then you will find yourself unnecessarily paying more and Facebook will not be sure what kind of people it needs to serve your ads to for maximum conversions. In this scenario, begin with an awareness or traffic campaigns for colder audiences and work your way down the funnel.

3. Audit your content

Now that we better understand how to segment our audiences in relation to campaign objectives through the funnel, let’s talk content.

What content do you have and need to fill the funnel? Do a content audit to see what you have that would resonate with the various audience segments. For colder audiences, use or develop content that would make for effective introductory content to your brand for your awareness campaigns. What we’ve seen work well in the past for awareness campaigns is a brief brand story video.

As users get warmer, test out a traffic campaign to drive people to your website. This could be either to your blog to share some educational, entertaining, informative, and helpful content or to a lead generation landing page with some type of collateral on it, such as an ebook download. If you can get users to your site sooner to tag them with the Facebook Pixel, you can then have more users for your remarketing campaign targeting buckets. While you’re at it, don’t be shy and add in some lead generation or shopping opportunities here as we’ve often seen success in driving conversions through traffic campaigns and for a lower cost than conversion campaigns.

Once your audience is considered hot, make the final push to complete that sale. Test pre-existing ads or develop new content here that showcases certain features of your product or service that you have not yet done so, real customer reviews, or any specials you may have running as an extra incentive to convert. If sales aren’t a part of your business strategy, worry not, as you don’t have to necessarily lower the cost of your products and services, though, it can help. Often times, free shipping will do the trick if you are able to offer that.

In today’s online shopping landscape, consumers have been conditioned by Amazon to expect free shipping and one thing we’ve seen work very well, particularly for our ecommerce clients is that if you can, offer free shipping as it will help conversion rates.

Using time sensitive or limited quantity remaining content helps entice users to make a purchase, as well.

Video content in remarketing campaigns can also be very effective in completing a conversion as they assist in leaving less room to the imagination about your products and services compared to their static image counterparts. This can help better manage expectations for your prospects, as they can easily see how your products and services work.

4. Try alternative money-saving methods

Since you’ve already reconsidered your conversion campaigns and have your content ready to go, it’s time to talk alternative strategies. Here are a few additional campaign types that you can use to save money while building relationships with your prospects.

Traffic campaigns

As aforementioned, we often use traffic campaigns instead of conversion for smaller accounts as they are able to complete the 50 events per week and at a lower cost. Conversion campaigns don’t always work well for every account, so see what works best for you in relation to your budget and goals.

With these campaigns, we send warm audiences directly to product landing pages with a strong call to action to shop. Instead of optimizing for link clicks, set your ad set to optimize for landing page views, as those users will be more likely to allow the page to fully load and they will view the content within, thus, increasing your chances to convert.

Add to cart

Do you find yourself struggling to drive purchase conversions? Take a step back and test out optimizing your conversion campaign for “add to cart” instead. Campaigns with this goal can usually result in more data for Facebook to optimize with and, ultimately, lead to more conversions.

Messenger ads

While these were lower volume for us, the costs still justified the means in acquiring lead conversions. For one of our clients, Indow Windows, we have seen success in driving conversions through Messenger ads that also came in much below our CPL goals to website visitors that have not yet converted.

With these ads, users click to send us a message and we had three canned responses that offer a free quote to acquire the lead, our FAQ page, or to directly contact us as the third and last option. With the call to action for our goal being first, naturally, users selected that and converted.

5. Use cross-funnel calls to action

Through the various phases of the Facebook funnel, your calls to action should also evolve. With top of funnel audience targeting, test using a call to action button such as “Learn More” during this introductory or awareness phase with your colder audiences.

As your audiences become warmer and they head towards the bottom of the funnel, test out other relevant calls to action that are applicable for the content and goal.

If your hot audience has not yet converted, “Shop Now” tends to be effective. This audience has had time to learn about you—perhaps they’ve done some shopping and comparing on other channels around the web, so this is your chance to get them to commit and convert through a remarketing ad on Facebook or Instagram.

All of the current available options can be viewed below.

Feed your Facebook sales funnel

Now that we’re familiar with the basics of building and utilizing a Facebook sales funnel, start feeding yours with colder relevant audiences by using cost-effective and objective-appropriate campaigns, compelling content, and compatible calls to action.

As your audiences move down the funnel, adjust your content and goals until you accomplish your ultimate goal for conversions. After all, slow and steady more often than not wins with social media advertising campaigns. Savor the relationship build with people on Facebook and enjoy the fruits of your labor as you acquire higher conversion volumes at a lower cost!